The Lord of the Rings: The Stairs of Cirith Ungol (Part One)

The Tale

After darkness falls on the Cross-roads, Gollum tugs at Frodo’s cloak, hissing with fear and impatient to get going. It is not a place to pause. They turn to the dark road to the east and leave the ring of trees, heading towards the mountains. The road rounds a great rock and then heads east again and starts to climb steeply.

Frodo and Sam trudge along. The burden of the Ring, lightened while they were in Ithilien, is getting heavier, bowing Frodo’s head as the way gets steeper. At last, when he looks up, there it is: the city of the Ringwraiths. The sight makes him cower.

Ahead, in a deep tilted valley of shadow, ‘high on a rocky seat upon the black knees of the Ephel Duath, stood the walls and tower of Minas Morgul.’ Though all is dark, it glows from within with a pale sickly corpse-light that illumines nothing. Windows gape like black eyes into the void. ‘[T]he topmost course of the tower revolved slowly, first one way and then another, a huge ghostly head leering into the night.’ Gollum silently pulls at the hobbits’ cloaks and urges them on down the road. They reluctantly follow.

The three come slowly to a white bridge passing over the stream winding through the valley towards the black mouth of the gate in the city walls.

The banks on either side are filled with pale white flowers that exude a sickening rotten smell; they are ‘beautiful and yet horrible of shape, like the demented forms in an uneasy dream.’ Carved figures stand at the head of the bridge, ‘human and bestial, but all corrupt and loathsome.’ The vapor rising off the stream beneath is deathly cold.

They are almost at the bridge when suddenly Frodo reels, mind darkening, and he stumbles toward it, as if drawn by some power. Sam and Gollum run after him and Sam grabs Frodo in his arms while Gollum whispers frantically that Master mustn’t go that way. And for once Sam agrees with him.

Frodo wrenches his gaze away from the pale city; the tower seems to fascinate him, like a snake to a bird, urging him to run forward to doom. As he pulls himself away the Ring resists him, tugging back, and for a moment his eyes go dark as he looks away from the ghastly tower.

Gollum, ‘crawling on the ground like a frightened animal’, is already fleeing into the gloom along the near bank of the stream, and Sam, guiding the stumbling Frodo, follows. They pass through a gap in the stone-wall by the waters and come to a faintly glowing path that fades winding up into darkness.

The hobbits trudge along side by side, with Gollum turning now and then to beckon them onward. His eyes gleam with a green-white light, ‘reflecting the noisome Morgul-sheen perhaps, or kindled by some answering mood within.’ As they rise above the poisonous vapors of the stream and the stench of the sickly flowers the hobbits’ heads clear, but now they are weary, limbs tired as if they had walked all night, from fighting the deadly allure of Morgul-vale.

At last, they must stop for a rest. They have climbed up to a bare lump of rock; from here their path turns up into the mountains, out of the immediate sight of the city. Frodo plunks himself down. He must rest before he attempts that climb. The Ring lies heavily on Frodo, and he is oppressed ‘as if a heavy spell was laid on his mind and body.’ Gollum grows frantic, ‘hissing behind his hand’ as if to keep the sound from unseen listeners in the air.’ This is not the best place to stop; if anyone comes to the bridge, they can see them!  Sam agrees, and Frodo wearily gets to his feet.

‘But it was too late.’

Bits and Bobs

Minas Morgul used to be Minas Ithil, the shining sister-city of Minas Anor (now Minas Tirith), but after being invested and corrupted by the Ringwraiths for centuries it has become a place of decay and delirium. Its wavering light lights nothing; its windows look into emptiness; it is the decaying skull of a city. It is the Tower of Black Sorcery (=Morgul), and as such exudes a spell-binding influence, a weariness and reluctance on those who get near to it, not unlike the ‘demonic oppression and obsession’ (steps down from full possession) of exorcism lore. It is particularly heavy on Frodo, who bears the Ring. One detail I always forget about Minas Morgul is that the top of the tower rotates.

The bridge into the Morgul-vale has figures ‘both bestial and human,’ but whether that means there are carvings of beasts and humans, or figures mingling aspects of the two, is ambiguous. For the LOTR movies, Alan Lee opted for creatures like Balrogs.

I tried to look up if a ‘stone-wall’ is any different than just a ‘stone wall’ but could find nothing.

“Noisome" has nothing to do with noise but means rather ‘having an extremely offensive smell; disagreeable; unpleasant.’ It is from the Middle English ‘noy’, a shortening of ‘annoy’. I remember seeing in an old Thor comic book the dragon Fafnir calling Thor a ‘noisome flea’, which in context obviously meant he made too much noise. This was corrected by a letter in the next issue.

Gollum’s extravagant efforts at stealth and silence show that he fears there might be unseen observers and listeners around and, considering that it is the city of the Ringwraiths, he’s probably not far wrong. Better to err on the side of caution. His terror even allows him to touch the Elven-cloaks in an effort to speed the hobbits along. Or perhaps their power is eclipsed by the dark sorcery of Morgul. 

Just before they pass out of the sight of the city, Frodo is overcome by a last blast of exhaustion, as if the spell of the tower (or is it the Ring?) is exerting a final effort. It delays them long enough for a new danger to begin.