Scaling the Walls of War in Middle-earth

In their Egyptian-like fashion, the Numenoreans built on a massive scale, according to Tolkien. That is, they liked to build really large things. We are provided glimpses of the large architecture in The Lord of the Rings, such as the Argonath, the two huge statues of Isildur and Anarion carved into the cliffs overlooking Anduin.

The Argonath were built by Minalcar in the 13th century of the Third Age, and they may represent the last gasp of the ancient Numenorean architectural style. Ecthelion rebuilt the White Tower of Minas Tirith in the third millennium, but was the tower really one of those massive structures?

The Egyptians built large tombs (the pyramids being the best-known examples), temples, and obelisks. The Sphinx (apparently associated with a temple) is a symbol of ancient Egypt’s power and culture. Except for the tombs, the Numenoreans did not build things for the same purposes as the Egyptians. The Dunedain of Gondor did apparently practice embalming in an effort to preserve their bodies.

Numenorean architecture is more imperial than religious. Like ancient Rome, Osgiliath sent out armies to control its empire. Great fortresses were built around Mordor, and in Calenardhon. Minas Ithil and Minas Anor were secondary cities. A few monuments decorated the countryside: Isildur’s huge black stone at Erech, the statue of the king at the crossroads in Ithilien.

The Numenoreans of Gondor carved whole mountainsides, shaping the walls of Orthanc, Minas Ithil, and Minas Anor from black stone into smooth faces. The magnitude of Numenorean craftmanship and perseverence only occasionally leaps out from the pages of The Lord of the Rings to impress the reader with visions of lost art and knowledge, of ancient populations laboring under the watchful eyes of their kings to glorify their empire.

Nearly every city mentioned in connection with Numenor’s settlements in Middle-earth is associated with military power and war: Umbar and Pelargir were great naval bases, and Ar-Pharazon landed at Umbar; Lond Daer Ened was the great middle haven of the north; Fornost Erain was the “Norbury of the Kings”, a great fortress; Minas Ithil and Minas Anor were the towers of the Moon and Sun (Isildur and Anarion). Minas Ithil was positioned to watch over or challenge the power of Mordor, and Minas Anor warded the newly founded Gondor against the wild men of the dales. Tharbad, the way crossing on the river Gwathlo, was guarded by two fortresses.

Annuminas was the tower of the sunset, but otherwise doesn’t have any military association. The city was abandoned before it could be touched by any of Arnor’s wars. Annuminas and Osgiliath were apparently built for royal administration, not the housing of armies or the guarding of territories. Osgiliath could be reached by sea-faring ships but Pelargir, the royal garth of ships, remained Gondor’s chief naval base.

Huge walls, such as the Rammas Echor of the Pelennor Fields, and the unnamed fortification north of the Barrow-downs, further denoted Numenorean territoriality. It wasn’t enough to set up boundary stones, the Numenoreans had to close off huge areas of land.

Such customs are not mentioned in “Aldarion and Erendis” and the description of Numenor, both of which were published in Unfinished Tales. One easily gets the impression that Numenor had few if any fortifications, and there were no imperial trappings such as walls and dykes across the landscape. Of course, Numenor was never threatened by war, and it was colonized by a united people. The threat of barbarism did not gather on the frontiers of the heartland. Nonetheless, Armenelos, the royal city of the Kings of Numenor, may have been crowded with massive buildings: palaces, arenas, stables, schools, granaries, and monuments. Towers may have arisen as the Numenoreans vied for prestige or knowledge of the stars.

The martial architecture of Numenorean civilization is therefore probably peculiar to Middle-earth. Slaves captured in war and transported to Numenor must have been overawed by the wonders they beheld there, but they must also have been surprised to find few if any fortifications. The only soldiers in Numenor would be Numenorean soldiers. The only navies in Numenor would be Numenorean navies.

The ability to build massive fortifications and harbors implies that Numenor did not undertake any endeavor half-heartedly. Aldarion’s problems in keeping the seasonal haven of Vinyamar operational must have impressed upon his heirs the necessity of sending enough men to do the job right. Within only a few generations of Aldarion’s first voyage to Middle-earth, Numenor began establishing permanent havens in southern Middle-earth. Those early havens may not have been as large and massive as the later cities built in the north.

Time and circumstance also had to influence the development of Numenorean culture and architecture. In the year 1200 of the Second Age, Sauron ruled Mordor but he was not yet sending armies across Middle-earth. He was building up his power, but also working to seduce the Elves into slavery. Numenor had little if any need for huge fortresses. The Numenoreans were bringing enlightenment and culture to the men of Middle-earth, though eventually those men would turn upon them.

The first Numenorean forts were built along the Gwathlo river. They were apparently set up to protect the logging industry Numenor had established in the region. As more and more trees were felled, and the forests began to recede from the riverline, the Gwathuirim began attacking and harrassing the Numenoreans. The Gwathuirim had, in fact, been attacking the Numenoreans since Aldarion’s day, but they clearly became a serious threat in the centuries after Aldarion’s time. There must have been hundreds or thousands of Gwathuirim in the raiding parties.

Perhaps they gathered from distant parts of their territories, much like the ancient Germans who raided Roman frontiers, choosing leaders for charisma and experience. The raids would not establish permanent settlements, and the raiders might as often as not have ended up starving to death, or slinking back to their homes if they could not achieve anything.

The Numenoreans began building true fortresses around the year 1800, a century after the War of the Elves and Sauron. The Gwathlo forts and some works along the Baranduin and Lhun rivers had served the Numenoreans and Eldar in the war, but Sauron began expanding his power into the east and south after the war. Were the Numenorean military expeditions led by adventurers whose ambitions had been awakened, or were they organized by the kings in response to Sauron’s growing power?

Vital trade routes and important resources such as mineral deposits and well-established agricultural regions would have to be protected. Sauron appears never to have developed a naval power in the Second Age, so the sea lanes would not require defense. But the great navies of Numenor would ensure that no such power could arise. And Numenor still required havens to provide points of access for her armies and colonists. The navies would also act as coastal raiders, venturing into regions where Sauron’s power, or indigenous peoples independent of both Sauron and Numenor, extended to the sea.

The great cities would have been connected by the sea, and roads would have been few. Sauron would have to be the road-builder. The two empires, growing century by century, would slowly entangle themselves with each other, grappling across hundreds if not thousands of miles of frontier. Numenorean fortresses would guard points of access such as valleys and river crossings, and their havens would ensure that armies could be brought in quickly. Sauron would plant fortresses on hills and mountains to dominate local populations and watch for Numenorean incursions. The lessons learned along the Gwathlo river might have prepared Numenor for a long war of raid-and-counter-raid in the south.

But because Sauron controlled most of Middle-earth, he inevitably had the advantage. Numenor could send armies wherever it needed by sea, but could never hope to supply them deep inland. Numenorean conquests in Middle-earth would have to be justified by promises of self-sufficiency. Lands which would be held only occasionally might have been only sparsely colonized by Numenoreans. Hence, any permanent Numenorean haven or colony would need to be well-defended and capable of sustaining itself against long sieges.

The practice of carving up mountainsides thus developed. Huge, massive walls which could not be easily overthrown or mounted would ensure that a city or fortress would survive a siege until relief forces came. Such fortifications would enable the Numenoreans to gradually spread out across the countryside, driving back Sauron’s armies, suppressing indigenous peoples or driving them out. If mountains were not available, the Numenoreans would have to import immense quantities of stone. Their strategy became one of rigid defense, advanced step by step, in the face of repetitive assaults.

Sauron’s strategy would have to focus on derailing Numenorean efforts to build their fortifications. If he could overrun a Numenorean position before the huge fortifications were in place, he could prevent the Numenoreans from establishing a new artery of colonization and control. The larger rivers would be the scenes of most warfare. Numenor needed them to bring their ships deeper inland, and Sauron needed to cross them, to prevent Numenorean raids from sailing up the rivers, and to ensure his allies and servants had sufficient resources to support themselves.

If a Numenorean lord or prince wished to earn glory for himself, he need only find an unconquered river region and establish Numenorean control over it. Or he could take back a Numenorean colony which had been seized by Sauron. People often wonder why the Nazgul are not mentioned in accounts of the Second Age, but if Sauron used them against the Numenoreans, they were probably most effective in the southern wars, where the Eldar could not help the Numenoreans. An important city might be harrassed by a Nazgul-led army.

The emphasis on war and conquest in the south may further explain why the northern lands became attractive to the Faithful. They weren’t just moving closer to the Eldar, they were moving farther away from the worst fighting. Gil-galad’s people were still engaged in active warfare with Sauron’s forces, but the real struggle shifted southward. Numenorean strategy seems to have turned upon threatening Sauron from the south in order to draw off some of his forces. Hence, Umbar and Pelargir were built within striking distance of Mordor.

The reliance upon defensive fortifications backed by supreme naval power may have served Numenor well, but Gondor and Arnor were presented with different challenges. Gondor, especially, established a huge land-based empire in the early Third Age. Without the threat of Sauron’s empire in the east, Gondor was able to expand into lands which Numenor had never before controlled, or had controlled only briefly under Ar-Pharazon. Even though the Easterlings began attacking Gondor in the 5th century, they most likely were not as well supplied and organized as Sauron’s armies had been in the Second Age.

Hence, as Gondor’s power grew, it did not build new fortifications in the east and south to secure that power. Where Numenor had been prudent in the Second Age, Gondor became arrogant and overconfident in the Third Age. The loss of Umbar to the rebels who fled south at the end of the Kin-strife thus not only weakened Gondor substantially, it revealed the flaw in Gondorian imperial strategy. Gondor had no nearby bases to fall back upon. The Kings of Gondor had to mount naval expeditions against a naval power. Unlike Numenor, Gondor never achieved naval supremacy. There were other Black Numenorean havens to the south of Umbar, and these could have helped to resupply Umbar on occasion.

So Umbar had to be destroyed, not retaken, near the end of the second millennium, and by this time Sauron was again powerful enough to begin wearing down Gondor’s already depleted population. The Great Plague had forced Gondor to withdraw its forces from Mordor and Tharbad. The empire was shrinking and there were no great fortresses to control points of access on the remaining frontiers. All roads into Gondor from the east and south were virtually unguarded.

Gondorian Kings must have realized they were in trouble, but did they have the ability to recapture lost lands and build grand new fortresses? Probably not. Numenor’s population was able to grow in peace and security through all the centuries of the Second Age. In the Third Age, Arnor and Gondor both suffered terrible attribution through their wars and the Great Plague. If the populations of either kingdom even managed brief recoveries, some new threat came along to further weaken them. There was no respite sufficient enough to allow them to create the surplus populations required for true imperial expansion.

Gondor’s armies had also become accustomed to marching across great expanses of land. The shift in Gondorian tactics had been effected by the War of the Last Alliance. Both Arnor and Gondor were the heartlands of (Faithful) Numenorean power. The armies did not have to be brought in from over sea. So there was only need to maintain a naval power sufficient to ward off possible attacks from Black Numenorean havens in the south. The rest of Arnor and Gondor’s resources were devoted to building up huge armies.

Arnor’s army marched south with Gil-galad’s army and other forces. Gondor’s army retook Minas Ithil and closed off Sauron’s escape passes in the south. After the war, Gondor took up the task of guarding Mordor against Sauron’s return. Gondor did become embroiled in naval wars with Umbar, but such warfare was unknown in the Second Age, or so ineffective that Numenor easily crushed all rivals on the sea. So Gondor had to supplement its naval power with land power. The wars with the Easterlings and Haradrim who lived to the east of Umbar ensured that Gondor would continue to emphasize land power as much as if not more than naval power. And that emphasis forced Gondor into a strategy of marching conquest. Gondor became spread so thinly across the countryside it could not hope to retain control over so many territories.

Gondor would have had to conquer all of Middle-earth in order to maintain its empire. But Sauron’s return prevented that from ever occurring. The slothfulness of the kings further ensured that Gondorian ambitions would diminish. The great conquerors were eventually replaced by the great defenders. But now the defenders relied upon armies instead of unassailable fortifications to hold back the enemy forces. And maneuverability became more dependent upon land access than sea access.

Gondor never fully gave up its navy, but it lost the ability to capitalize on that naval power. And it lost the ability to build fortifications which could withstand long sieges. The diminishment of Gondor’s populations also prevented the kingdom from expanding through colonization. Gondor occasionally resupplied itself with colonists from the north, and such migrations helped to preserve the kingdom’s strength but did not enlarge it.

Numenor’s advantage over Gondor and Arnor was its isolation from the rest of the world. Numenor could send out wave after wave of colonists and conquering armies and navies. Sauron might be able to beat off some attacks, but his power suffered from attrition more than Numenor’s. So, in the Third Age, Sauron reversed the tables on the Dunedain. They no longer had an isolated homeland which could produce a continuous flow of surplus population. And he pursued a strategy of gradually wearing down both kingdoms, until in the end very little remained.

The Numenorean kings seemed to understand that the ability to weather storms of attrition would ensure their eventual expansion. Having a surplus population would not be sufficient. That population had to be protected and capable of expanding on its own. Hence, the massive architectural styles arose from the need to build better defenses. The Gondorian kings relied more upon man-power than earth-power. They didn’t want to sit in their cities and defend themselves and gradually expand into new territories. Gondor’s decline was therefore almost inevitable once Sauron returned.

This article was originally published on June 10, 2001.

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