Descent into Hell!!! Rarrr!...Well, sort of...

[Lush]

Thanks for the contributions, guys.

The Gollum thing is what really gets to me in all of this.

Yet only one receives his 'heavenly reward'. And this is odd, because it is the one who gives up his physical being, Gollum, who does not (as far as we know) receive a spiritual reward.

Actually I, for some reason, always envisioned that Gollum got his peace at last. Hence the fact that he falls in together with his Precious. At the point of his death he is corrupted beyond repair and it is as if the only way for him to finally end the torture is to die alongside the Ring.

This is why Mordor strikes me as a very interesting idea of Hell (or Hell-on-earth, perhaps, is more appropriate). It's certainly not a place where one can or should "abandon all hope" or anything like that in the Dante vein; and just like in the classical legends, it is still a place where one must achieve a certain task, but the idea behind it all, as it has been mentioned, is one of sacrifice. Which is not what the Greeks seemed to have had in mind at all (Odysseus sacrificing a sheep in Tiresias' honour notwithstanding ).

But what is the ultimate hell in Tolkien's creation? Is it, in fact, Mordor? Or does an ultimate, metaphysical hell even exist?