How could the Nazgul take Minas Morgul?

[Alcuin]

I’d like to follow along the same lines laid out by CaptainofDespair.

To set the background, I’d like to clearly demonstrate that the Númenórean fortresses built to guard Mordor had been deserted, abandoned, or their garrisons reduced to levels unable to defend them long before the Nazgûl launched their attack on Minas Ithil in III 2000.

RotK, “Appendix A”, “Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion”:

Atanatar Alcarin son of Hyarmendacil … loved ease and did nothing to maintain the power [of Gondor]. The waning of Gondor had already begun before he died, and was doubtless observed by its enemies. The watch upon Mordor was neglected.

Atanatar Alcarin reigned III 1149–1226.

Ibid.

...in the reign of Telemnar, ... a deadly plague came ... out of the East. The King and all his children died, and great numbers of the people of Gondor, especially those that lived in Osgiliath. Then for weariness and fewness of men the watch on the borders of Mordor ceased and the fortresses that guarded the passes were unmanned.

Later it was noted that these things happened even as the Shadow grew deep in Greenwood, and many evil things reappeared, signs of the arising of Sauron. It ... may well be that the opening of Mordor was what [Sauron] chiefly desired.

…Tarondor, … who succeeded [Telemnar], … removed the king’s house permanently to Minas Anor, for Osgiliath was now partly deserted, and began to fall into ruin. Few of those who had fled from the plague into Ithilien or to the western dales were willing to return.

Telemnar died in III 1636 after reigning only two years.

Silmarillion, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age”, says of this period that,

...the forts on the borders of Mordor were deserted, and Minas Ithil was emptied of its people; and [the Nazgûl] entered again into the Black Land secretly...

Elrond says in FotR, “Council of Elrond”, that

the watch upon the walls of Mordor slept, and dark things crept back to Gorgoroth. And on a time evil things came forth, and they took Minas Ithil and abode in it…

Essentially, the Towers of the Teeth, Durthang (at the extreme northwestern interior of Mordor), and – it would seem – Cirith Ungol were manned, if at all, by skeleton, token garrisons inadequate to the tasks assigned to them..

From RotK, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”

…was … an eastern outpost of the defenses of Ithilien, made when, after the Last Alliance, Men of Westernesse kept watch on [Mordor.] But as with Narchost and Carchost, the Towers of the Teeth, so here too vigilance … failed, and treachery … yielded up the Tower to the Lord of the Ringwraiths…

We are not told when Narchost and Carchost were retaken by the forces of Morgul, but the implication is that this took place before the Tower of Cirith Ungol was seized by the Nazgûl. RotK, “Appendix A”, “Gondor and the Heirs of Anárion” says that Narmacil II was killed in III 1856 fighting the Wainriders, and in what Tolkien appears to intend to seem a marginal note of a scribe (because it is placed in square brackets), the text reads, “At this time it is thought that the Ringwraiths re-entered Mordor.” This section of the appendix also says that, “In III 1944 King Ondoher and both his sons, Artamir and Faramir, fell in battle [with the Wainriders] north of the Morannon, and the enemy poured into Ithilien.” It might have been around this time that the Towers of the Teeth fell to Gondor’s enemies, perhaps in the guise of coming under the control of the Wainriders, which while quite a problem militarily and in terms of public morale in Gondor, would seem less threatening than if the captains of Gondor realized that the Nazgûl controlled the Towers. But exactly when capture of Narchost and Carchost took place is not mentioned in the Tale of Years (“Appendix B”), or anyplace else, including in the History of Middle-earth series, as far as I know.

I think this shows that the lesser Númenórean fortresses guarding Mordor – Narchost, Carchost, Durthang, Cirith Ungol, and probably others, were either abandoned or militarily ineffective well before III 2000. In addition, the city of Minas Ithil had been severely depopulated, so that most of the folk still in it were probably the soldiery required to man it at some low level of operation and their families; while nearby western Ithilien, from which any immediate reinforcements would normally have been drawn and a counterattack rallied in earlier days, was deserted.


Next, I would like to tackle the contention that Minas Ithil was a “walled city not a fortress.” The purpose of Minas Ithil was to control access to Ithilien and Anduin through the pass over the Ephel Dúath into Mordor. In The Silmarillion, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age”, Tolkien says that

Isildur and Anárion ... [built] strong places ... upon either [side of Osgiliath]: Minas Ithil, the Tower of the Rising Moon, eastward upon a shoulder of the Mountains of Shadow as a threat to Mordor; and to the westward Minas Anor, the Tower of the Setting Sun, at the feet of Mount Mindolluin, as a shield against the wild men of the dales.

A walled city is not “a threat to Mordor,” but a military fortress is and is intended to be a threat to one’s enemies. Unfinished Tales, “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields”, footnote 11, specifically refers to Minas Ithil as a “fortress” and states the purpose of its construction:

Isildur had sent [two of his sons] to man his fortress of Minas Ithil, lest Sauron should … seek to force a way through Cirith Dúath (later called Cirith Ungol)…

I hope that settles the question of whether Minas Ithil was a “fortress” or not.


Now, on to a plausible scenario for the attack, investment, and fall of Minas Ithil.

Sauron’s commanders had taken the city from Isildur in their initial assaults on Gondor in II 3429, and Isildur was forced to retreat. At least some of the Nazgûl must have been in the city and all along the pass during this period, and so some of them must have already been familiar with the city and its environs.

On page 181 of War of the Ring in the chapter “Journey to the Cross-roads”, there is a map labeled “Minas Morghul [sic] and the Cross-roads” showing the cross-roads where Frodo, Sam and Gollum encountered the statue of the king with the fallen head, the road to Minas Morgul, and the Straight Stair (first, steep stair) to Cirith Ungol. I believe this is the basis of Karen Wynn Fonstad’s map in Atlas of Middle-earth, “Path to Cirith Ungol”, which is easier to read. Both maps show old Minas Ithil slightly to the south of the main road, which runs along the bottom of the main pass over the maintains. (The path Frodo & Sam took with Gollum’s guidance was not the main path, but a secondary, narrower, and more treacherous one.) Fonstad reminds us that, “at one point, Frodo could see the Morgul-road in a ravine far below,” and alongside the road ran once-beautiful Ithilduin, the stream that became the polluted Morgulduin. Moreover, the city itself was about a mile from the road “as the crow flies,” but about 2 miles by the twisting road; and it was two or three miles across a ridge that concealed the city from the west unless one walked or rode up the road into the pass at least a mile or more.

With few men at the Tower of Cirith Ungol and the likelihood that the Dúnedain rarely if ever ventured into Shelob’s Lair, it would have been possible for a few of the Nazgûl with a small escort (a few dozen at the most) to slip through Torech Ungol and down the stairs north of the pass. If the Nazgûl were careful and meticulous in their planning, they should have been able first to seize the Tower of Cirith Ungol by treachery – that meant an inside job for which they could select the timing; temporarily close off the narrow western mouth of the ravine from which the pass exited; and then march a force down the road from the Mordor side large enough to block the southern side-road to Minas Ithil from the main road and construct some sort of defensive work across the mouth of the ravine to prevent reinforcements from getting through. Fonstad shows the length of the main road from the Tower of Cirith Ungol to the issue of the pass from the mountains to be about 20 or 25 miles: a distance that might be covered in one day of forced march. The length of time any small “special operations” force on the western end would have to terrorize and fight defenders from Minas Ithil and travelers from the west until the main body of the assault force arrived to hold the western entrance to the pass would then be kept to a bare minimum.

In fact, in Silmarillion, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age”, Tolkien confirms that this took place very swiftly:

in the days of Eärnil [the Nazgûl] ... came by night out of Mordor over the passes of the Mountains of Shadow, and took Minas Ithil for their abode...

All this indicates that the Ringwraiths took the defenders of Minas Ithil off-guard and by surprise. The garrison in Minas Ithil may already have been insufficient for an attack of any importance from Mordor: that, too, seems to be implied by the text. Because they could not merely escape but had to hold the city, the Minas Ithil garrison was unlikely to launch a counterattack into the valley against superior numbers, so that the Nazgûl had only to control access to the western end of the narrow pass to prevent relief from arriving from Osgiliath or Minas Anor, and they must have had sufficient forces at their command for this purpose: I estimate that would require no more than 1500-2000 soldiers, and perhaps considerably fewer even than that. (300 Spartans and 700 Thespians held the Pass of Thermopylae against the entire Persian army for three days.) Essentially, the besiegers would have to completely control the western four or five miles of the narrow road, including the approach road to Minas Ithil. Since the line of the attack was long but very narrow, depth in their position made the Nazgûl’s forces strong, particularly if they could rapidly erect barriers to improve their defenses.

Because there were no longer significant numbers of Dúnedain living near the pass or in the surrounding territory, their numbers having been severely reduced by plague and the economy of the region damaged by the severe depopulation of Osgiliath, any substantial relief force would have had to come from Minas Anor. It took Aragorn and the men he led to the Morannon in RotK over a day to march to Morgul Vale from Minas Tirith; though no doubt they could have made it in one day were they determined to do so; however, it may be that Eärnil II was not immediately prepared to respond, and if he sent out a response in size the next day, it might already have been too late: simple defenses would no doubt have been brought by Morgul army when they first came, and in the ensuing days, trenches and ditches could be dug across the road, stakes planted to prevent cavalry charges, and walls erected on the other of the trenches and ditches, so that unless the invasion was thrown back in the first few days, it would become exponentially more difficult for Gondor to dislodge them.


A word about Shelob. Shelob had apparently been in her lair since before II 1000, when Sauron began the construction of Barad-dûr. (Two Towers, “Shelob’s Lair”: “...she was there ... before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr...”) Sauron found her useful, and called her his cat, and like a cat, she didn’t care a whit about whether he liked her or not. However, she would probably permit the Nazgûl to pass through along with some orcs (or evil men), particularly if one or two were left for lunch – a fate that probably awaited many of the defenders of Minas Ithil captured at the end of the siege. In any case, the Dúnedain probably consciously avoided her and Torech Ungol, especially since they had not been able to get rid of her in the 2000 years since Minas Ithil had been built. It is likely that they did not maintain patrols to the Stairs leading to her lair, and a small group including one or two Nazgûl could slip through without being noticed by the garrison of Minas Ithil. (I am fond of the notion that a few of the Nazgûl did this to cut off access to the western end of the pass, but there is in the texts no evidence for this at all, as far as I am aware.)


By this point, there was simply no way for Gondor to affect the outcome of the siege from the East. They could not get into Mordor at all after losing control of the pass, save by scaling the mountains in very small groups. Carchost and Narchost were probably already under the control of the Nazgûl, so the Morannon was closed to the Dúnedain. The Morgul forces could resupply and reinforce themselves at their leisure from the eastern end of the pass: not that Mordor or the Morgai were particularly pleasant places, but there was Nurn to the south and east, and food and supplies could be brought by caravan across the vast interior of Mordor from southern Rhûn and Khand.

Maps of Mordor show that Gorgoroth occupied only the northwestern quadrant of that land. Nurn is clearly in the southern region with its great inland sea, but the eastern region not cut off from Nurn might also have been arable: there are two rivers flowing from the Ered Lithui and the spur of mountains extended south from them to the Sea of Núrnen. I suspect that most of the foodstuffs required by the attackers for the siege came from Nurn or from eastern Mordor, all of which would reasonably seem to be arable to some extent. It is about 175-185 miles from the north-eastern shores of the Sea of Núrnen to the Tower of Cirith Ungol, probably 10 days journey or less. If necessary, a caravan could travel about 450 miles from southern Rhûn to the Tower of Cirith Ungol, about 22-23 days travel; or about 530-560 miles from central Khand to Cirith Ungol, which might have taken around a month. By comparison, in Unfinished Tales, “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields”, Isildur hoped to march over 300 leagues from Osgiliath to Rivendell (footnote 6; that would be 900 miles, using Tolkien’s convention of 3 miles to a league, approximately the distance a soldier can march in an hour) in 40 days with his escort of “Dúnedain, tall men of great strength and endurance, … accustomed to move full-armed at eight leagues a day ‘with ease’…” (footnote 9).

The one great advantage that the Dúnedain possessed was their communication by means of the palantíri. The fact that there was a palantír in Minas Ithil must for Sauron have been one of its most attractive features: the Witch-king had failed to capture any of the palantíri of Arnor. However, even with the unquestionably valuable intelligence that the palantíri must have provided, the captains of Gondor had no means of making use of what they learned by means of a force of any significant size, because they could not get to Minas Ithil to break the siege except by the road or over the mountain ridge that cut it off from western Ithilien; and an effective attack on the Morgul forces operating within the interior of Mordor was out of the question: the Nazgûl controlled the road through the pass. It then became a matter of reducing the defenders of Minas Ithil as their food supplies ran out: two years would be about right for an important fortress in a wealthy kingdom.

Even in modern times, sieges can last for extended periods: for example, the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s lasted nearly 4 years; the Siege of Leningrad in World War II lasted almost 29 months; Gibraltar has been besieged at least 14 times since the Middle Ages: the last, called the Great Siege, began in 1799 and lasted 3½ years. I think it is reasonable to assume that Denethor would provision Minas Tirith at least as well as the British provisioned Gibraltar: Hirgon the errand-rider of Gondor told Théoden that Minas Tirith had a “very great store long prepared” against a siege of that city (RotK, “Muster of Rohan”). Gamling told Théoden that he and Erkenbrand had “great store of food, and many beasts and their fodder” at Helm’s Deep (Two Towers, “Helm’s Deep”). Minas Ithil should have been well-provisioned, too, given its importance, even if its garrison were small, a shadow of what it had been in the days of Isildur and his sons.