Barad-dûr

The Tower

Barad-dûr stood in the north of Mordor on a long spur running south from the Ered Lithui, east of Mount Doom, on the far side of a wide and barren plain. It was less a tower than a mountain of towers: wall upon wall, court upon court, pinnacles and dungeons and pits of iron, the whole rising in tier after tier of black stone to a topmost keep from which the Eye of Sauron looked out across his realm. Its foundations were laid in the depths of the earth and its gates were of iron. Even from a distance it filled the view, and from the slopes of Orodruin Sam saw its immensity and understood for the first time the hopelessness of the errand.

At its summit was the Window of the Eye, the chamber from which Sauron watched, and the Tower kept the palantír of Minas Ithil, through which he spoke to Saruman in Orthanc and drove Denethor to despair. A road of stone and iron ran from the Tower's gates across the plain to the door of the Sammath Naur in the side of Mount Doom.

The Ring and the Tower

The strength of Barad-dûr was bound up with the Ring. Sauron began the fortress about S.A. 1000 and finished it six hundred years later, in the same years in which he forged the One Ring, and he put into the Tower's foundations a part of the Ring's power. For this reason the Last Alliance could throw down its walls but could not destroy its foundations while the Ring survived, and for this reason too the Tower could not outlast the Ring.

The Second Age

Sauron built Barad-dûr as the seat of his dominion after choosing Mordor, and from it he directed the war against the Elves and the conquest of the lands of Men. He left it in S.A. 3262 to go as a captive to Númenor, and returned in spirit in 3319 to take up the Ring and his rule again. In 3434 the Last Alliance of Elves and Men broke his army on Dagorlad and laid siege to the Tower. The siege lasted seven years, and among its dead was Anárion, killed by a stone cast from the walls. In 3441 Sauron came out to fight and was overthrown by Gil-galad and Elendil, both of whom died; Isildur took the Ring, and the Tower was razed to the ground. Its foundations remained.

The Third Age

For two thousand years the ruins lay under the watch of Gondor. Sauron, taking shape again in Dol Guldur, returned to Mordor in T.A. 2942 and in 2951 declared himself and began to rebuild the Dark Tower on its old foundations. It was complete by the War of the Ring, and to it were brought the palantír of Minas Ithil, the report of the Ring's finding, and the prisoner Gollum, who was tortured there in 3017 and revealed the names of Baggins and the Shire. The Orcs called it Lugbúrz, and Shagrat of Cirith Ungol sent Frodo's mithril-coat there after the hobbits' escape.

The fall

On March 25, 3019, as the Host of the West stood before the Black Gate and Sauron's whole attention was bent northward, Frodo reached the Sammath Naur. When he claimed the Ring the Eye turned and understood, and the Nazgûl were sent racing to the mountain; but Gollum took the Ring and fell with it into the fire. In that instant the Tower's towers and battlements, its walls and gates and dungeons, cracked and slid and fell into ruin, and a vast shadow rose over the place where it had been and was blown away on the west wind. Nothing of Barad-dûr was rebuilt, and in the Fourth Age its site was a heap of rubble in an empty land.

Barad-dûr stood in northern Mordor on a southern spur of the Ash Mountains, roughly thirty miles east of Mount Doom across the plain of Gorgoroth, and some sixty miles south-east of the Isenmouthe. The road from Udûn and the road from the Morgul Pass met beneath it.