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Originally Posted by Pitchwife
Yes, Barad-dûr definitely was a dark satanic mill, more deserving of the title than anything Blake saw in his lifetime. Similar to your description, I imagine the tower itself as the mere pinnacle of a military-industrial iceberg - much of it probably sobterranean, as in Isengard after Saruman changed it (or built into the mountain side). The passage from The Road to Isengard which you quote says that Saruman's New and Improved Isengard was "only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of [...] Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower", and I think we can infer a lot, mutatis mutandis, about the latter from the description of the former a little further up in the text...
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I always inferred that Barad-dur was an industrial approximation of Angband, with Thangorodrim, one of the three monstrous peaks Morgoth raised to tower over the warren-like subterranean superstructure, being Sauron's influence. But whereas Morgoth the Vala could raise peaks from the tortured earth, Sauron the Maia could only erect a Babel-like approximation of stone built on the backs of slave labor. Thus the greater works of the 1st Age are mirrored in miniature by the latter works, such as Thranduil's demesne recalling Menegroth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pitchwife
I also agree that the idea that Sauron recieving reports or issuing an order by an Orc is absurd. Gorbag describes dealing with a Nazgûl as a harrowing experience; Sauron's own presence would probably have reduced any mere Orc to a gibbering wreck.
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Hence, the Mouth a Sauron, a mortal lieutenant of Barad-dur, "was crueler than any orc". One needs a good deal of chutzpah to treat with Sauron.
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Originally Posted by Pitchwife
As for the sparse population of Middle-earth, I think we ought to remember that we only see the north-west in the book, and that after centuries of war, civil-war and general decline. No doubt Eriador was more densely populated while the North Kingdom flourished. Tharbad, on the fords of the Gwathló, was once a city.
I think the author of the essay you quote is generally right that Tolkien's work in general harks back to an age where towns and cities were fewer and wilderness more widespread, but I'd still maintain that the state of Eriador and Rhovanion at the end of the Third Age, with vast spaces of unpopulated wilderness interspersed with rare pockets of settlements, was untypical.
Rhûn and Harad, where Sauron held sway, are another matter entirely. We know from Tolkien's Notes on motives in the Silmarillion (Myths Transformed section in HoME vol. 10: Morgoth's Ring) that Sauron had no problem with life as such, as long as he could order and control it. We also know that his armies drawn from these countries vastly outnumbered the forces of the West. I therefore assume that his policy in the territories he controlled, rather than aiming at depopulation, would on the contrary have engineered population growth in a precisely planned, supervised fashion, breeding masses of soldiers and slaves according to his requirements. About the means of implementing such a policy I don't care to speculate, but I doubt they involved something as romantic as Mother's Crosses.
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That the East may well have had a far greater population than the West is evident in the cyclical migration of tribes forced from east to west either by overpopulation, lack of resources or thirst for conquest like the Easterlings and Edain in the 1st Age, and in the 3rd Age the Wainriders, the Balchoth, the Variags, and even the Éothéod.