by Stefan Ekman
WHERE DARK LORDS LIVE: LANDSCAPES OF EVIL IN TOLKIEN, DONALDSON, AND JORDAN
The worst tourist spot that a fantasy world can offer is the territory that surrounds the stronghold, or prison, of the resident Dark Lord. Such a realm reflects the evil of its ruler through highly unpleasant living conditions, being too hot, too cold, or simply too poisonous for normal life to thrive; and like the Dark Lords themselves, their lands share some general characteristics but are on the whole distinctly individual. Although a thorough exploration of the Dark Lord character is beyond the scope of this book,47 we may note how the genre presents Dark Lords as anything from evil gods and semidivine beings (the three examples in this chapter belong to this end of the scale) to “ordinary” mortals who have turned to evil,48 and other evil lords are best described as being somewhere between these extremes.49 Regardless of origin, the lords’ association with dark powers invariably turns them into the epitome of evil, frequently reduced to destructive forces with only a single motivating goal50—and they all seem to share a predilection for inhospitable dwellings.
I would like to clarify that by using the expressions landscape of evil and evil landscape, I do not mean that the landscape itself is necessarily evil. That would imply a volition that the land does not generally have; to the contrary, the land is commonly portrayed as a victim of its ruler’s evil. (Tolkien provides a clear example of this.) Rather, the land is an expression, through its physical characteristics as well as through its flora and fauna, of the evil that resides there, mainly in terms of a Dark Lord. For this reason, I have refrained from using a (possibly) less ambiguous term such as cacotopia or maletopia (bad or evil place), as such a term removes the focus from the connection between the moral nature of, in particular, the evil rulers and the landscape of their realm. Furthermore, while the fantasy genre tends to favor a realm ruled by a Dark Lord, an evil landscape may well be constructed as a prison for its denizens (as in the case of Shai’tan). Although there is a fundamental difference between a terrible place created for oneself and one intended for someone else, I have treated these types similarly, focusing primarily on how the evil place is described.
“Such Starved Ignoble Nature”: Portrayals of Evil Lands
The idea that certain types of landscapes come with a peculiar, all but built-in, moral character is so widespread in the fantasy genre that when authors avoid it, they do so with an almost palpable self-consciousness. In her section on subversions of the portal–quest fantasy, Mendlesohn cites Barbara Hambly’s novel The Magicians of Night (1992), observing how Hambly “[severs] the link between landscape and morality. The hills that are splashed with golden sunlight, covered in wild ivy and buttercups, shelter evil, not elves.”51 Mendlesohn and Hambly both recognize that portal–quest fantasy expects places of evil to be ugly and unpleasant.
The conception of what an evil landscape should look like goes far back among the genre’s taproot texts,52 including any number of dismal hells and realms of the dead. An early example is provided by the “dgel lond” (secret, mysterious, or dark land) around Grendel’s snake-infested mere in Beowulf.53 With its windswept cliffs, perilous fens, and dark woods full of wolves, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the mountains and the dark, disquieting lake near Moria’s western gate (cf. FR, II, iv). Hell (Christian or otherwise), of course, is one of our most typical evil landscapes, Dante Alighieri providing Western literature’s most influential depiction of the infernal regions. Dante’s Inferno notwithstanding, lakes of fire and smoking brimstone tend to appear as the centerpiece of the majority of Christian Hells, but John Milton has some of his fallen angels explore beyond the fiery center and the surrounding cold, where they find other doleful landscapes, places of evil “Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, / Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, / Abominable, inutterable.”54 One of the most vivid descriptions of an evil landscape in English literature occurs in Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855). Roland explains how he has never seen “Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: / For flowers—as well expect a cedar grove!”55 Plants are scarce no matter how hardy or prolific normally; even grass grows “as scant as hair / In leprosy” (st. 13:1–2). Two stanzas are worth quoting in full, as their echoes appear in the fantasy texts I discuss afterward:
No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. “See
Or shut your eyes,” said Nature peevishly,
“It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
’T is the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.” (st. 11)
Places like this, lifeless landscapes of which Nature itself is ashamed and that can (implicitly or explicitly) be redeemed by nothing less than the end of the world, can be found in fantasy’s many realms of evil. Browning took the title for his poem from King Lear (1623), and according to Tom Shippey, Edgar’s snatch of song “Child Rowland to the dark tower came” is also part of the genesis of The Lord of the Rings;56 but it is certainly Browning’s grim landscape rather than Shakespeare’s line that anticipates Mordor and its Dark Tower. Other early fantasy writers make use of similar landscapes of evil: Sir Kato’s Outer Land in Astrid Lindgren’s Mio, min Mio (1954; transl. Mio, My Son 1956) is also a dark, stony, dead realm.57 Its dreary, dim daylight reminds us of Browning’s poem and of the gloom in Dante’s Inferno, whereas the blackness of its night is more akin to the “darkness visible” in Milton’s Hell.58 The gloom of the evil landscape may, in fact, be a legacy bequeathed by the lands of the dead. The realms of Hades into which Odysseus and Æneas descend are certainly dark, at least on the outskirts; but they also offer groves and quite pleasant fields, making them appear almost cheerful compared to Childe Roland’s plain.59
It is worth noting that the landscape in Browning’s poem changes. While still nightmarish, it does not remain sterile:
Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil’s
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils. (st. 26)
This diseased landscape recalls Milton’s perverse nature and “inutterable abominations”; rather than offering an image of death, it portrays the process of dying and decay. While less common in fantasy literature, this image still anticipates a number of evil landscapes, places where putrefaction destroys natural beauty.
As Mendlesohn’s example from Hambly demonstrates, however, there is also an awareness of this traditional evil landscape among fantasy writers, and attempts have been made to vary the concept. Among the texts most explicitly conscious of the tradition is Glen Cook’s The Black Company, wherein the Dark Lord is a Dark Lady:
We sprawled on the flank of a grassy hill. The Tower rose above the horizon due south. That basaltic cube was intimidating even from ten miles away—and implausible in its setting. Emotion demanded a surround of fiery waste, or at best a land perpetually locked in winter. Instead, this country was a vast green pasture, gentle hills with small farms dotting their southern hips. Trees lined the deep, slow brooks snaking between.
Nearer the Tower the land became less pastoral, but never reflected the gloom Rebel propagandists placed around the Lady’s stronghold. No brimstone and barren, broken plains. No bizarre, evil creatures strutting over scattered human bones. No dark clouds ever rolling and grumbling in the sky.60
Cook’s narrator (a mercenary who finds himself fighting on the side of evil) cannot quite believe that this is the Evil Land, partly because Evil, he feels, is neither fertile nor pleasant. Feels, yes; but a reader well acquainted with the fantasy genre would realize that not only emotion but also tradition demands a wasted land of evil, including allusions to wintry Narnia under the White Witch as well
as to the volcanic plains around Mount Doom in Mordor. Indeed, the Mordor allusion is reinforced in the second paragraph by references to (the absence of) “brimstone and barren, broken plains” and “dark clouds ever rolling and grumbling in the sky.” Even the word gloom brings us echoes from Sauron’s realm, given that continuous gloom is, as Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans point out, a recurrent image in descriptions of Mordor.61
These images of the second paragraph are attributed to a source much more distinct than “emotion”: Rebel propaganda. The Rebels are the opposing side; that is, they would be the protagonists of a typical quest fantasy—the forces of Good fighting the Evil Lady. In Cook’s novel, they are only good by default, not because they occupy any moral high ground, something that is clear from their willingness to spread lies to vilify their enemy. By invalidating the Rebel propaganda version of the evil land, a version that fits traditional fantasy expectations nicely, Cook also calls into question the goodness of any number of “good guys” throughout especially portal–quest fantasy, suggesting that the black-and-white-ness of the form results from the victors writing the history book.62
Nevertheless, the general conception of the evil landscape in fantasy is brought to us through focal characters on the side of Good, and the various realms they describe are everything that the pastoral land of Cook’s Lady is not. The three locations explored in the section that follows, from The Lord of the Rings, the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, and the Wheel of Time, demonstrate how traditional images of landscapes of evil may be used to reflect the individual characteristics of various Dark Lords and portray evil in different ways. While any number of portal–quest fantasies could provide examples, the two latter Dark Lords and realms have been chosen for their distinct similarities and differences vis-à-vis Sauron and Mordor. Donaldson offers a quite similar landscape sprung from a different view of evil and its workings; Jordan’s fairly Tolkienesque portrayal of evil results in a (superficially) different evil landscape.
Mordor
Sauron is of the lesser order of the Ainur, the angelic beings once involved in the creation of the world who entered it as its stewards. Along with many others, he was swayed by the evil Melkor; and when his master was defeated, Sauron assumed the position of supreme evil being in Middle-earth. The dead lands of Mordor have obvious precursors in Tolkien’s earlier work, most plainly in the Desolation of Smaug in The Hobbit, a “bleak and barren” land with “neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished.”63 But even before he began writing about Mr. Baggins’s adventures, Tolkien had included a burned, desolate plain outside Morgoth’s stronghold. In The Silmarillion (1977), the plain is called Anfauglith, the Gasping Dust, “full of a choking dust, barren and lifeless”;64 but it is mentioned in a previous synopsis (“Sketch of Mythology”) from the late 1920s, as well as in the even earlier Lay of the Children of Húrin (early 1920s), under the name Dor-na-Fauglith, the Plain of Thirst.65 To what extent the landscapes surrounding the antagonists of Tolkien’s previous writing actually influenced Mordor is impossible to determine, but Sauron’s Dark Land certainly outdoes its precursors in terms of barren gloominess.
It is unclear at what point Sam and Frodo enter Sauron’s realm. The Dead Marshes, with their slimy ooze, clammy mists, and spirits of the dead visible in the treacherous pools, are an obvious contender. Gollum, however, claims not to know whether the visages of the dead are Sauron’s doing (TT, IV, ii, 614); and as the barrow wights demonstrate in The Fellowship of the Ring, old graves, no matter whose, can become the haunt of evil spirits far away from the Dark Land. Randel Helms suggests that the hobbits pass into Sauron’s realm once they have traversed the Marshes,66 but I would argue that they must walk for two more nights, through the Noman-lands and into Dagorlad, the desolation that lies before the Black Gates, before they truly experience the Dark Lord’s land.67 Dagorlad’s desolate plain is clearly related to Anfauglith and the Desolation of Smaug, and the description of it is among Tolkien’s most chilling:
Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. […] [T]he lasting monument to the dark labor of [Mordor’s] slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. (TT, IV, ii, 617)
Despite the added details, the dead land before Childe Roland’s Dark Tower is clearly recognizable, down to the need for a cleansing cataclysm in order to cure the land—by fire in Browning’s case, by flood in Tolkien’s. Sauron’s forecourt displays the Dark Lord’s complete disregard for any sanctity of life or beauty. The totality of the ecocide brings into sharp focus how the pits and forges of Isengard are indeed “only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery” of the evil that Sauron is capable of inflicting on the land itself (FR, II, ii, 254; TT, III, viii, 542). The first encounter, for the hobbits as well as the reader, with the Dark Lord’s realm illustrates the three main ways in which his evil is portrayed as affecting the land: mediated through the actions of others, as a force of decay or destruction, and through emotive language. These ways interlace with and amplify one another but are covered separately in the discussion that follows.
John Garth calls the description of Dagorlad an expression of Tolkien’s “anti-industrial animus,”68 which he also finds in Tolkien’s notes for the description of the Marshes. (“Describe the pools as they get nearer to Mordor as like green pools and rivers fouled by modern chemical works.”69) “Anti-industrial animus,” if anything, puts it mildly: Dagorlad is the most striking image of industrial environmental degradation in The Lord of the Rings.70 That the evil of Mordor lies in environmental destruction and lack of respect for the natural world is obvious from the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” (RK, VI, viii). When the hobbits return to find the Shire tyrannized and ravaged by Saruman, Sam and Frodo see how Saruman has simply done Sauron’s work, although the devastation feels much worse “because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined” (RK, VI, viii, 994). Ann Swinfen briefly notes the destruction and exploitation of nature carried out by “Sauron and his imitator Saruman” through machinery and slaves;71 and that is indeed one of the three ways in which the Dark Lord’s evil affects the land. Through minions (including “his imitator Saruman”) and other agents, such as the volcano, Mount Doom, and even weather, Sauron affects the world; and in his own realm, these agents can carry out his evil deeds unopposed and unfettered by any regard for the natural environment.
This mediated evil, clearly visible in the poisonous slag heaps and waste pits of Dagorlad, is most conspicuously expressed through the random felling of trees. That misdeed enrages the ents of Fangorn and brings Sam to tears on his return to the Shire, and it is the first sign of Sauron’s evil power in the recently conquered Ithilien. Despite the loveliness of the land, Sam and Frodo come across “trees hewn down wantonly and left to die,” which reminds them that they are in enemy territory (TT, IV, iv, 637).72 However, although industrial production and the environmental destruction associated with it might lie wholly within the purview of evil, the Dagorlad waste is not totally gratuitous. Apparently, advanced mining and chemical operations are going on in Mordor, suggested by the slag heaps with their noxious fumes, the poisoned soil, and the multicolored ooze in the pits (TT, IV, ii, 618). From the passage quoted before, the reader can tell that slave labor is used in this industry, and the origin of the slag heaps is hinted at later, when the narrator explains that Mordor’s mines and forges are found in the northern parts of the country—conveniently located close to the Black Gates and Dagorlad (RK, VI, ii, 902
).
The location is convenient because depositing these dangerous by-products outside the entrance to Mordor gives Sauron a strategic advantage. The presence of a vast, lifeless area greatly strengthens the defense of the Black Gates, preventing any invading army, such as Aragorn’s, from foraging for food, water, or firewood. As Dagorlad was the “battle plain” where Sauron was previously defeated (FR, II, ii, 236–37; see also Appx B, 1059), improving its defensive qualities makes sense.
The Dark Lord does not rely solely on a poisoned and desolate wasteland for his defense, however, nor does he rely only on agents to exert his influence on the land. The second way in which his evil affects the land is more direct: as a destructive force, an invisible energy that works on living things, perverting and ultimately killing them. This falls under what Helms refers to as the fourth internal law of Middle-earth: “[w]ill and states of mind, both evil and good, can have objective reality and physical energy.”73 He illustrates this law with the terror spread by the Ringwraiths. Sauron’s evil similarly affects people, but it also affects the very land. Like an invisible poison or ionizing radiation, it slowly destroys life in his realm without the need for any agents. When the hobbits leave Dagorlad and move south into Ithilien, it becomes clear to the reader how Sauron’s evil takes effect over time. A night’s walk away from the Black Gates, they find themselves “in a land that had only been for a few years under the dominion of the Dark Lord and was not yet fallen wholly into decay” (TT, IV, iv, 635). While not as verdant as Ithilien (which has been under Sauron’s control for an even briefer period of time), it is by no means as horrifying as Dagorlad. It is important to note how being “under the dominion of the Dark Lord” is enough to cause a land to fall into decay, but also that this process occurs over time—his evil corrupts vegetation slowly. This point is corroborated by the glens of the Morgai, on the outer edges of the Dark Land, where “Mordor was a dying land, but it was not yet dead” (RK, VI, ii, 900). What grows there is “harsh, twisted, bitter, struggling for life”—stunted, gray, withered—but apparently not even it has been under the dominion of Sauron long enough to have died.
