How Did Gandalf Sneak Into Dol Guldur?

Q: How Did Gandalf Sneak Into Dol Guldur?

ANSWER: If J.R.R. Tolkien ever wrote this adventure it has not yet come to light, so far as I know. But we do know a few things about Gandalf’s visits to Dol Guldur. Gandalf speaks of Dol Guldur in a few places in The Lord of the Rings, such as during the debate in Hollin over whether to enter Moria:

‘We do not know what he expects,’ said Boromir. ‘He may watch all roads, likely and unlikely. In that case to enter Moria would be to walk into a trap, hardly better than knocking at the gates of the Dark Tower itself. The name of Moria is black.’

‘You speak of what you do not know, when you liken Moria to the stronghold of Sauron,’ answered Gandalf. `I alone of you have ever been in the dungeons of the Dark Lord, and only in his older and lesser dwelling in Dol Guldur. Those who pass the gates of Barad-dûr do not return….’

Gandalf, of course, provides no detail about what the fortress was like. Haldir, the march-warden of Lothlorien, also speaks of Dol Guldur (to Frodo):

Frodo looked and saw, still at some distance, a hill of many mighty trees, or a city of green towers: which it was he could not tell. Out of it, it seemed to him that the power and light came that held all the land in sway. He longed suddenly to fly like a bird to rest in the green city. Then he looked eastward and saw all the land of Lórien running down to the pale gleam of Anduin, the Great River. He lifted his eyes across the river and all the light went out, and he was back again in the world he knew. Beyond the river the land appeared flat and empty, formless and vague, until far away it rose again like a wall, dark and drear. The sun that lay on Lothlórien had no power to enlighten the shadow of that distant height.

‘There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood,’ said Haldir. ‘It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither. In the midst upon a stony height stands Dol Guldur, where long the hidden Enemy had his dwelling. We fear that now it is inhabited again, and with power sevenfold. A black cloud lies often over it of late. In this high place you may see the two powers that are opposed one to another; and ever they strive now in thought, but whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not been discovered. Not yet.’ He turned and climbed swiftly down, and they followed him.

Dol Guldur had previously been called Amon Lanc, “bald hill”, by the Elves. According to one text published in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth Oropher, father of Thranduil, had settled there early in the Second Age and established a kingdom among the Silvan Elves. But Oropher moved his seat northward away from Amon Lanc.

In “Appendix B: The Tale of Years”, published in The Return of the King, Tolkien only mentioned Dol Guldur a few times:

1050	Hyarmendacil conquers the Harad. Gondor reaches the height of its power. About this time a shadow falls on Greenwood, and men begin to call it Mirkwood. The Periannath are first mentioned in records, with the coming of the Harfoots to Eriador.
c. 1100	The Wise (the Istari and the chief Eldar) discover that an evil power has made a stronghold at Dol Guldur. It is thought to be one of the Nazgûl.
2060	The power of Dol Guldur grows. The Wise fear that it may be Sauron taking shape again.
2063	Gandalf goes to Dol Guldur. Sauron retreats and hides in the East. The Watchful Peace begins. The Nazgûl remain quiet in Minas Morgul.
2460	The Watchful Peace ends. Sauron returns with increased strength to Dol Guldur.
2845	Thráin the Dwarf is imprisoned in Dol Guldur; the last of the Seven Rings is taken from him.
2850	Gandalf again enters Dol Guldur, and discovers that its master is indeed Sauron. who is gathering all the Rings and seeking for news of the One, and of Isildur’s Heir. He finds Thráin and receives the key of Erebor. Thráin dies in Dol Guldur.
2851	The White Council meets. Gandalf urges an attack on Dol Guldur. Saruman overrules him. Saruman begins to search near the Gladden Fields.
2941	Thorin Oakenshield and Gandalf visit Bilbo in the Shire. Bilbo meets Sméagol-Gollum and finds the Ring. The White Council meets; Saruman agrees to an attack on Dol Guldur, since he now wishes to prevent Sauron from searching the River. Sauron having made his plans abandons Dol Guldur. The Battle of the Five Armies in Dale. Death of Thorin II. Bard of Esgaroth slays Smaug. Dáin of the Iron Hills becomes King under the Mountain (Dáin II).
2951	Sauron declares himself openly and gathers power in Mordor. He begins the rebuilding of Barad-dûr. Gollum turns towards Mordor. Sauron sends three of the Nazgûl to reoccupy Dol Guldur. Elrond reveals to ‘Estel’ his true name and ancestry, and delivers to him the shards of Narsil. Arwen, newly returned from Lórien, meets Aragorn in the woods of Imladris. Aragorn goes out into the Wild.
3019	Battle under the trees in Mirkwood; Thranduil repels the forces of Dol Guldur. Three assaults on Lórien. After the fall of the Dark Tower and the passing of Sauron the Shadow was lifted from the hearts of all who opposed him, but fear and despair fell upon his servants and allies. Three times Lórien had been assailed from Dol Guldur, but besides the valour of the elven people of that land the power that dwelt there was too great for any to overcome, unless Sauron had come there himself. Though grievous harm was done to the fair woods on the borders, the assaults were driven back; and when the Shadow passed, Celeborn came forth and led the host of Lórien over Anduin in many boats. They took Dol Guldur, and Galadriel threw down its walls and laid bare its pits, and the forest was cleansed.

Tolkien did mention a few differences between Sauron’s fortress on Dol Guldur and Barad-dur. In his disclosure of the history of the Rings of Power at the council in Rivendell (Third Age year 3018) Elrond says:

`Fruitless did I call the victory of the Last Alliance? Not wholly so, yet it did not achieve its end. Sauron was diminished, but not destroyed. His Ring was lost but not unmade. The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed; for they were made with the power of the Ring, and while it remains they will endure….

Sauron began building Barad-dur Circa Second Age year 1000:

c. 1000	Sauron, alarmed by the growing power of the Númenoreans, chooses Mordor as a land to make into a stronghold. He begins the building of Barad-dûr.
c. 1600	Sauron forges the One Ring in Orodruin. He completes the Barad-dûr. Celebrimbor perceives the designs of Sauron.

The Barad-dur’s “foundations” could have been laid by Sauron before he conferred most of his strength to the One Ring, or he could have reinforced those foundations with the One Ring after he put it on. Either way, it took about 600 years for Sauron to build Barad-dur in the Second Age. In the Third Age he began rebuilding Barad-dur in 2951. Frodo first beheld the fortress while wearing the One Ring and sitting upon the High Seat at Amon Hen: “…Then at last his gaze was held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron….” We are provided with some details about Barad-dûr’s appearance much later in the story, after Frodo and Sam reach Mount Doom, beginning with:

The path was not put there for the purposes of Sam. He did not know it, but he was looking at Sauron’s Road from Barad-dûr to the Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire. Out from the Dark Tower’s huge western gate it came over a deep abyss by a vast bridge of iron, and then passing into the plain it ran for a league between two smoking chasms, and so reached a long sloping causeway that led up on to the Mountain’s eastern side. Thence, turning and encircling all its wide girth from south to north, it climbed at last, high in the upper cone, but still far from the reeking summit, to a dark entrance that gazed back east straight to the Window of the Eye in Sauron’s shadow-mantled fortress. Often blocked or destroyed by the tumults of the Mountain’s furnaces, always that road was repaired and cleaned again by the labours of countless orcs.

And:

So foot by foot, like small grey insects, they crept up the slope. They came to the path and found that it was broad, paved with broken rubble and beaten ash. Frodo clambered on to it, and then moved as if by some compulsion he turned slowly to face the East. Far off the shadows of Sauron hung; but torn by some gust of wind out of the world, or else moved by some great disquiet within, the mantling clouds swirled, and for a moment drew aside; and then he saw, rising black, blacker and darker than the vast shades amid which it stood, the cruel pinnacles and iron crown of the topmost tower of Barad-dûr. One moment only it stared out, but as from some great window immeasurably high there stabbed northward a flame of red, the flicker of a piercing Eye; and then the shadows were furled again and the terrible vision was removed. The Eye was not turned to them: it was gazing north to where the Captains of the West stood at bay, and thither all its malice was now bent, as the Power moved to strike its deadly blow; but Frodo at that dreadful glimpse fell as one stricken mortally. His hand sought the chain about his neck.

And when the Ring’s power is released and Sauron is defeated:

A brief vision he had of swirling cloud, and in the midst of it towers and battlements, tall as hills, founded upon a mighty mountain-throne above immeasurable pits; great courts and dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, and gaping gates of steel and adamant: and then all passed. Towers fell and mountains slid; walls crumbled and melted, crashing down; vast spires of smoke and spouting steams went billowing up, up, until they toppled like an overwhelming wave, and its wild crest curled and came foaming down upon the land….

These brief descriptions imply an immensity that Dol Guldur, supposedly, cannot match. But Sauron’s second construction of Barad-dûr lasted far fewer years than his first construction of it; so one might reasonably ask if the fortress was not yet fully rebuilt or, if its foundations could not be destroyed in the Second Age, whether much of it had survived despite Isildur’s attempts to destroy it at the beginning of the Third Age.

What we can be sure of, however, is that Dol Guldur did not crumble when the One Ring was destroyed. Hence, Dol Guldur was not built with the power of the One Ring. Furthermore, Galadriel — despite being deprived of the power of Nenya, the Ring she had long borne in secrecy — was able to cast down the walls and pits of Dol Guldur. Although that passage implies she wielded great power (much like Luthien was able to destroy Sauron’s fortress on Tol Sirion in the First Age), I think it also implies that Dol Guldur was a more typical fortress.

And then there is the fact that Dol Guldur was positioned deep inside Mirkwood’s southern eaves. The approach to Barad-dûr had to be made across open lands that were watched from many points. Gandalf would have been able to use the forest to hide from Sauron’s servants; or he could have disguised himself much as Frodo and Sam did to slip past the majority of guards. At the very least he would not have had to seek a pass over high, unscalable mountains.

So reaching Dol Guldur itself would have been a much easier (though still perilous) task for Gandalf. Southern Mirkwood was probably crossed by many paths and/or roads; the narrative says the Dagorlad was criss-crossed by the highways used by Sauron’s soldiers, and one such highway apparently led north from the Morannon. Even in the 2800s of the Third Age there may have been traffic between Minas Morgul and Dol Guldur, and perhaps between Mordor itself and Dol Guldur. And for centuries Easterling tribes had dwelt along the eastern shores of Anduin, or at least had campaigned there. The Balchoth are said at one point to have dwelt close to southern Mirkwood and the Undeeps, having slain or driven away all the Northmen who once lived in that region.

What we can be sure of is that Dol Guldur’s garrison would need to be resupplied and that Sauron would have maintained contact with his subjects across Middle-earth by all means possible. We know of examples from The Lord of the Rings where small groups of Orcs or individual messengers (such as Nazgul) passed back and forth between Mordor and other lands. So while it seems mundane to propose it, Gandalf probably just merged in with traffic flowing to Dol Guldur.

In notes published in The Peoples of Middle-earth Christopher Tolkien documents some of the narrative description his father experimented with in documenting Gandalf’s visits to Dol Guldur. In one scenario the Sorcerer (Necromancer/Sauron) became aware of Gandalf before Gandalf could find and study him inside Dol Guldur, and so the Sorcerer fled. In the second scenario, when Gandalf finally discovered his identity, he was much more powerful — and perhaps had become careless because he was by this time gathering what remained of the Great Rings of power.

Gandalf found Thrain in a pit or cell in Dol Guldur’s dungeons. Thrain died soon after Gandalf found him, but Gandalf surmised that Thrain had been cast aside after Sauron took the Ring from him. It may thus be Sauron’s preoccuption with finding the One Ring itself that led him to overlook Gandalf’s presence. Sauron more-or-less let his guard down.

So the challenge for Gandalf was really not to slip past Sauron’s servants; rather, he needed to evade Sauron’s own awareness. He failed on his first attempt to determine who the Necromancer really was (according to The Peoples of Middle-earth Sauron fled as soon as he realized who Gandalf was), but on his second attempt he was aided by Sauron’s preoccupation. It was a similar preoccupation, in fact, which Gandalf and Aragorn used to distract Sauron’s awareness from Frodo’s journey into Mordor. Hence, Sauron only became aware of the Ring’s presence after Frodo claimed it for himself.

See also:

• What is the History of Dol Guldur?
• How Much Did Tolkien Write About Gandalf’s Journey to Dol Guldur?

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