The Watcher in the Water

The lake at the gate

The western door of Moria opened onto a narrow valley, and in the old days the Sirannon, the Gate-stream, ran down that valley past the door. When Gandalf led the Fellowship there on January 13, T.A. 3019, they found the stream nearly dry and the valley below the cliff filled by a still, dark lake. The water had been dammed, and the pool had crept up to the very threshold of the door, leaving only a narrow way along its northern edge. Gandalf did not know the lake; it had not been there when he last came that way. The water was foul and unmoving, and the whole Company disliked it.

Óin

The pool was already deadly before the Fellowship came. In the Chamber of Mazarbul, in the record left by Balin's colony, they read that after Balin's death in T.A. 2994 the Dwarves had been besieged, and that Óin, who had gone to seek a way out by the West-gate, had been taken by the Watcher in the Water. The record adds that the pool had risen to the wall. So the creature had held the door for at least twenty-five years, and the survivors of the colony knew it well enough to have a name for it.

The attack on the Fellowship

While Gandalf worked at the riddle of the door, Boromir threw a stone into the lake, and Frodo begged him not to disturb it. Ripples spread and did not stop. When the door at last opened and the Company turned to go in, an arm came out of the water: long, pale green, luminous, and wet, with fingers at its end. It took Frodo by the ankle and pulled him toward the lake. Sam slashed at it with his knife and it let go, but twenty more arms came rippling across the water after it. The Fellowship ran into the gate, and the arms seized the doors and slammed them shut with a crash, and tore up the holly trees on the threshold and piled boulders against the entrance from outside. The way back was closed. Bill the pony, left on the shore, bolted along the lake in terror and was seen no more that winter.

Gandalf, in the dark inside, said only that the thing had crept, or been driven, out of the dark waters under the mountains, and that there were older and fouler creatures than Orcs in the deep places of the world. He noticed also that of all the Company it had gone for Frodo, the Ring-bearer, first.

What it was

The nature of the Watcher is never explained. The text describes arms, not tentacles, and never shows the body they belong to; the nearest thing to a description is Gandalf's guess about where it came from. It is not said to be a servant of Sauron or of the Balrog, and Gandalf's later remark, made after his fight with the Balrog in the roots of the mountains, that nameless things older than Sauron gnaw the world far beneath Moria, is not connected to the Watcher in the text, though readers have often made the link. The damming of the stream might mean that something built the lake, or the Watcher itself may have been the cause, or the Orcs of Moria may have done it; the tale does not say. This entry places it among the nameless things for want of any better category, and the reader should treat that classification as a convenience rather than a fact.

Afterwards

Nothing more is told of the Watcher. When Moria was reopened in the Fourth Age, the tale does not mention the lake or its inhabitant. The last that is seen of it is the pile of stone and the closed doors behind the Fellowship as they turned toward the dark.

Unknown. It sealed the West-gate behind the Fellowship and is not mentioned again.