Angband: The Fortress of a Dark God

[Big Orange]

Here is my first piece of creative writing officially posted on SD.Net and I've spent several months (on and off) typing it out and polishing it off.

While not a story per se it a my fanboy speculation on what Morgoth's infamous stronghold, Angband, was actually like in the later events of The Silmarillion when humans were mainly under the rule of Morgoth and the Elves were in a stalemate against his realm. I put much thought into what made Angband so hellish, powerful, and unassailable, and why it supposedlly made Minus Tirth, Isenguard and even Mordor look like sand castles in comparison.

Here it is:


ANGBAND - THE FORTRESS OF A DARK GOD

The monolithic Thangorodrim chain rises above the wide, dismal planes of Dor Daedeloth like three shark fins, jagged and harsh against a dull red sky. Rivers of grinding ice flow down the angular faces of the three dread mountains, artificially raised by Morgoth from the ground as impregnable shields for the dense honeycombed layers of caverns, avenues, vaults, hallways, and chambers of Morgoth‘s realm, Angband, set several miles within the bowls of the earth.

Grey towers of granite block and iron frame bristle in their hundreds from the lower down slopes of the three black summits; most of the towers are actually hollow, great ventilation turrets sucking in (with the help of spinning steel fans, driven by primitive but reliable water powered motors) breathable air down into immensely deep shafts, bored 4 to 6 km down into the depths of Angband from the base of the towers. The inhabited towers that are not used as look out points for Orcs are the great roosts for the swarms of vermin Fell Beasts and entry points for the far more majestic Fire Drakes. It is rumoured that one tower is used by Sauron as his secret study, laboratory, and workshop. At the three white icy crowns of Thangorodrim, nearly 35, 000 ft above sea level, hollow iron chimneys (half the height and width as Barad-Dur) belch out dense columns of pollutant smoke from the great mines, and steaming foundries from far, far below in Angband proper, occasionally spreading out impenetrable dark clouds that blanket the sky for many leagues around, blotting out the light of Aule‘s celestial creations.

The Great Gates of Angband (ponderously moving superstructures of polished solid iron eight dozen feet thick) is set in a deep archway carved into the rock face and is half a kilometre wide at ground level; the Great Avenue leading up to the Gates is twice as wide still and goes on for eight kilometres from the threshold of the Great Gates down the full length of the violently steep edged entry canyon, which widens out up to six kilometres at the far end. There is a black chasm on either side of the Great Avenue, and the Great Avenue itself is kept clear of mountain snow and industrial ash all year round by strange horseless carriages that have cast iron ploughs mounted on their prows. The thousands of narrow arrow holes and shuttered portholes for artillery pieces of a mechanical kind carved raw into the lower walls of the reddish black canyon, in conjunction with the higher up stone battlements (two to four chariots wide) built onto carved ledges, render a good third of the Great Avenue into a lethal kill zone impassable to any Noldor host.

Of course Angband has many other smaller entrances of a secondary or secret kind scattered widely around the geographical crevices of Thangorodrim itself, and also in the dark valleys and ragged foothills of the surrounding Iron Mountains. The secondary entrances into Angband are cavernous tunnels that can accommodate the bulk of a typical Cold Drake, and are barred by square, wheeled doors of solid granite, five metres thick, and set onto iron hinges; the granite doors can be closed airtight, and secured by iron slide bolts as thick as tree trunks (the procedure to open and shut them is carried out by two or so Trolls). For military defence the doors are located some way into the tunnels (roughly 40 to 100 metres), with numerous arrow slits carved into the tunnel walls, and roof holes that can deploy boiling lead, more arrows, cast iron balls or other nasty stuff. Also the tunnel mouths are equipped with iron portcullises. The smaller secret entrances that can only accommodate normal sized humanoids are blocked by flat circular boulders that can be rolled aside from the inside with the help of bronze geared machinery. In the event of enemy infiltration, the secret passages can be permanently sealed off by collapsing the tunnel with blasting powder vessels.

The non secret secondary entrances often have semi-permanent troop encampments or even walled towns built around them (some of which have perimeters wider than Isenguard’s). The townlet compounds are mainly used as surface loading depots for the majority of ingoing stock such as plundered war spoils, raw industrial materials, food, and… prisoners. In some of the warehouses and marshalling spaces of Angband’s surface towns, the ruthless processing of human, Elven, and Dwarfen prisoners takes place under the harsh supervision of Orc soldiers; some are selected to work in the industrial farms, shifting slag heaps, lumber yards, and open quarries found around the wide flats of Dor Daedeloth or at the foot of Thangorodrim and the rest of lower regions of the Iron Mountains, while most are filed off into the hellish bowls of Angband.

The walled towns themselves are built along street grid plans, with most of the dismal rectangle buildings built out of discoloured clay bricks, and roofed by flat sheets of iron, lead, or copper riveted together. The surrounding fortified walls (ranging from 30 to 40 ft high) are strengthened with squat circular towers, all of which are also built out of clay bricks that are compacted tightly together by dense mortar. The battlements (two thirds of a chariot wide) have glass shards (from Angband’s glass works) embedded in them to deter any attempt to scale them from the outside, and also set lower down inwards of the town walls to keep would be escapees in. Deep and wide moats are dug most of the way around the walls, with wide bridges of brick, stone, and earth set on a slight slant linking the main gates to the other side; dry moats are filled with sharp wooden pikes, while the deeper flooded moats have untreated sewage from the towns drained directly into them.

The border towns, outposts, and industrial farms of Angband are fed gallons of water by an elaborate and monumental network of aqueducts built from stone, bronze, or wood. In the upper valleys of the Iron Mountains, the fresh water of mountain streams threading down from melting glaciers or up from volcanic heated springs, are artificially channelled into brick lined reservoirs further down the valleys, that in turn are connected to the aforementioned aqueduct network that supplies the prosaic agricultural farmlands mainly situated around Dor Daedeloth. Water from many surface reservoirs are channelled down 120 ft tall reddish black stone aqueducts bored directly into the vertical granite walls of Thangorodrim, into the outer areas of the mammoth subterranean pits, chambers, and vaults of the Angband mega-complex. But Angband itself is somewhat self-sufficient by having underground piped access to flooded caverns with volumes bigger than most surface lakes, but the water can be more often than not be of dubious quality with writhing cephalopods of prodigious size, and unreliable loyalty lurking in the unlit depths, with Angband‘s endlessly grinding industrial workings, boiling furnaces, and its millions of denizens demand oceans of unsullied extra water.

The aqueducts leading into Angband’s water system were deemed by Morgoth’s chief of military architectural planning, Sauron, as an obvious point of potential sabotage or illicit entry for the Noldor and their human allies, so defensive counter measures were installed; eight layers of portcullis gates (meshed gates wrought from iron, sheathed with overlapping bronze sheets riveted together, mounted into grooves, and held aloft by iron chains) are ready to slam shut in each aqueduct channel connected to Angband’s internal reservoir chambers (with water safety valves fitted into place). Meanwhile sections of the aqueduct roofs going on for approximately 50 meters out from the rocky face of Thangorodrim are fortified by sharp parapets and four to seven guard turrets (housing the workings for most of the portcullis), with the parapet avenues accessed by smaller secondary entrances leading out from the chambers excavated separately from the primary reservoir network for Angband. However cruder parapet structures can be found elsewhere in other important sections of the aqueduct system stretching out across Dor Daedeloth, with the surface reservoirs back in the Iron Mountains’ valleys encircled by defensive walls similar to the fortifications encircling the towns.

The Great Gates of Angband, the aforementioned grand entrance of Morgoth’s sprawling subterranean fortress, leads directly into the vast, vaulted Great Corridor, a monumental passage as wide as the Great Avenue, 1500 meters high, and two kilometres long, terminating at a pair of inner Great Gates approximately equal in size to the exterior Great Gates. The floor of the vaulted corridor is paved with tiles of polished black obsidian, with the walls and vaulted roof of the Great Corridor carved into the living rock by armies of imprisoned Dwarfen artisans. Of course the Great Corridor is heavily fortified, with defensive architecture designed to work against anyone or anything that somehow made it past the endless open gauntlet of the Great Avenue, and inexplicably pierced through the immensely thick iron of the Great Gates - many cohorts of Cold Drakes with iron claws, flightless Fire Drakes, elite Orcs, Trolls in full armour, and writhing Vampires, captained by minor Balrogs, permanently lurk at ready behind the sixty granite doors that regimentally line the polished granite walls of the Great Corridor, and set deep into semi-circular alcoves barred by iron portcullises.

However, like the Great Avenue, the Great Corridor has many arrow ports and portholes for artillery carved into the walls, above and between the side entrances, in addition to intimidating looking gargoyle shaped spouts that can release molten fire into deep narrow gutters (covered by bronze grills) ingrained into the obsidian tiles as a vast lattice pattern that stretches across the entire floor space of the Great Corridor. Shuttered hatchways set into the vaulted roof, far above the obsidian floor, are egress points for the swarms of Fell Beasts (mounted by Orcs) to swoop out of, either down to any attacker found within the Great Corridor or through the opened Great Greats in tight formation, taking to the open skies once out into the roofless space of the Great Avenue. The second set of Great Gates set at the end of the Great Corridor are the only gates that open inwards towards the heart of Angband, however the titanic hinges of the inner Great Gates (four times thicker than the hinges for the outer Great Gates) are located on the inside, with machinery to open or close and then secure them being operated on the inside as well, for obvious defensive reasons. The inner Great Gates at the end of the Great Corridor open up into the biggest interior space in Middle-Earth: the Great Hall, a incomprehensibly vast domed vault with an immensely deep basin floor that goes down further than the lofty roof at it’s highest, five kilometres from the curve in the vault down to the curve of the bowl, and thirteen kilometres wide.

[Big Orange]

To a modern observer, Angband’s overall architecture, outside and inside, could be interpreted as an hideously ugly (but vulgarly opulent) hybrid of Art Neouveau, Neo-Gothic, and Paleo-Brutalism. This bizarre brand of architecture was mainly fashioned by Sauron, Morgoth’s trusted right hand who dwelt within Angband from the time it was first conceived, millennia before it’s first partial destruction, and who also overseen the first hand crafted tool break into the slopes of the Iron Mountains, forming the first tunnel, and the first few foundation blocks laid down, forming the first tower. Sauron is more intimately involved with Angband’s workings than his brooding master, keeping certain secrets of Angband purely to himself.

Because fire consumes oxygen in confined spaces, the interior lighting within Angband is provided by glowing fungus that is cultivated in underground farms situated in some of Thangorodrim’s wider and more shallow water caverns that could partially be filled in with nutrient rich soil and compost for the growth of the fungus (other kinds of more edible fungus and eyeless fish are cultivated in the same caverns as alternative food stuffs for Angband). The glowing fungus is harvested by slave labour and placed into millions of glass lanterns with convex lenses that enhances the eerie blue glow of the fungus, bathing Angband’s immense interior halls and winding passages with a pale, cheerless corpse light shared by the fallen Minas Ithil innumerable millennia hence. However in the bigger interior spaces of Angband (the Great Corridor, Great Hall, and Morgoth’s Lair) the light generating fungus are bunched up into much bigger and more complicated light fixtures that are pretty much huge hooded searchlights wrought from bronze, and steel. These elegantly crafted searchlights have mirrors ranging from a diameter of 120cm up to 500cm, and strategically placed into different corners of the vast interior spaces of Angband to spread the most light in long eerie shafts of bluish false light. These infernal lighting fixtures are also found out in the cold open air of the Great Avenue, installed along the extensive battlements to illuminate the main approach to Angband’s main entrance.

The Great Hall is mostly in darkness, since it is far too vast to efficiently illuminate, with most streams of light emanating from the roofs of hundreds of interior buildings across the Great Hall’s bowl, with additional light provided by a dozen spherical lanterns of cast steel (fifty feet across) hung from the domed ceiling on titanic chains of iron. Sporadic light within the Great Hall is provided by the winged Fire Drakes wheeling their way across the Great Hall; black bat-like specks against the vastness of the Hall’s domed ceiling and it’s monstrous circular wall, often flying from one deep circular fissure in the domed ceiling to another. These circular fissures are intentionally and expertly carved - they are in reality the deep shafts leading down from the aforementioned surface towers that are either used by the flying Fire Drakes as their lairs or as oxygen intake for Angband, although the biggest circular fissure situated dead centre in the domed ceiling is the mouth of the great shaft for one of the chimney towers sticking out the central summit of Thangorodrim (long disused since the mechanical workings within the Great Hall, partly for industry and it‘s very construction, ceased many centuries ago).

Most of the crumbled, grotesque buildings (some as high as thirty stories tall) are abandoned too. The derelict edifices can be inhabited by thousands of off duty guards, who often set up indoor or rooftop encampments, although the few dozen of them that are in better repair are used as permanent barrack facilities with iron gates and draped banners, and the courtyard walls ring with the sound of routine military drills. The interior buildings of Angband are clustered together as impromptu towns, linked together by a paved stone roadway network that criss-crosses the vast bowl floor of the Great Hall. The very wide and ruler straight roads are elevated many feet off the rocky ground on clay bricks - if a road carries over pits, ridges and dips, the clay brick foundation for the road (two to thirty feet high, depending where the road is situated in the bowl) gives way to either a bridge or viaduct built of clay. The standard gauge for bowl roads is fifteen meters across, with a half-meter high edges of clay brick and fine gravel laid 30 cm deep. Every ten feet on either end of a road is a eight foot tall wooden lamppost. Ramps and stairways often branch away and down from the bowl roads, although some ramps and stairways branch upwards to the very wide and much higher viaducts (built of polished granite blocks) that connect directly to the Great Gates, and other gaping portholes that lead to the other deeper regions of Angband.

The wider underground regions of Angband, the twisted honeycomb of caverns, tunnels and shafts branching off from the Great Hall in most directions, are literally Hell on Middle-Earth. Great machines, accompanied by hulking Cold Drakes (with their claws of steel) and legions of human slaves (with their crude implements), delve out tunnels, hollow out shafts and carve out caverns for countless miles into the living rock. The mechanical delving machines, moving on their own power, are hellish contrivances of steel, iron, wood and bronze, lumbering up and down the subterranean earthworks of Angband on wide wheels with spokes as thick as bridge support girders. These industrial machines are essentially built like land battleships with wide decks for the Orcs and other assorted minions to prowl about on, with thundering pistons, spinning gears and scores of slaves churning angrily beneath deck. These earthmoving machines bear mighty drills of iron on their prows and deep shovels or circular blades bore aloft on skeletal arms far larger than any Balrog’s or Dragon’s. Depleted mineshafts and tunnels, which are (relatively) structurally sound, are often converted into barrack facilities for hapless slaves in utterly appalling conditions (these slave quarters can be ruthlessly blocked off with blasting powder in case of slave uprisings or, more often, when the necessity of said slaves has worn out).

The vast mining caverns are crisscrossed with iron support girders and buttresses often of an makeshift nature, sinewy ramp ways, bridge ways, viaducts, aqueducts, precarious hutments built into the rock, winding trestles and skeletal elevator towers. Long maggot holes with very low roofs and little artificial light often connected the slave holding areas to the seething mines and smithies, with portcullises used to enforce the herding of bedraggled columns of slaves through the network of these service tunnels (for want of a better word).

In many of the higher roofed caverns and main interior areas that could accommodate their occasionally huge size, Balrogs bestride about Angband under a permanent cloud of fury and alongside the Fire Drakes almost have the complete run of Morgoth’s realm, only showing fealty to Morgoth himself and Gothmog, their immediate leader appointed from their ranks. Balrogs range greatly in appearance and mass, with most being similar in build to a regular Troll, while some are the diameter of small buildings with broad wingspans comparable to Fire Drakes (although Balrogs can change their size and shape over a great length of time and mainly according to their standing in military rank). Balrogs reside in much deeper lairs than the Dragons and slumber within great sarcophaguses of polished black granite (occasionally for millennia on end).

Relatively few Orcs, Trolls, and human minions permanently reside within the deeper caverns and vaulted chambers of Angband, ironically enough: they are largely deployed around the perimeter of Angband, guarding the hundreds of entrances and manning the endless battlements.

At the North Eastern edge of the Great Hall, at the end of the central causeway, there is a jagged maw of an entrance, always flanked by four Balrog sentries and scores of Trolls in full war gear: the inner sanctum of Morgoth. Morgoth’s Lair is yet another vast network of cavernous chambers, but it is convoluted and multilayered, with the black gold Throne of Morgoth placed in the centre of a surprisingly small (but decadently decorated) vaulted chamber that is the final lead off of a 3 kilometre deep spiral staircase carved into living black obsidian (with the individual steps thirty metres wide, thirty metres long and half a metre high). The other larger chambers branching off from the central staircase are either storage vaults piled up to their eaves with plundered Elven and human artefacts, arcane laboratories, private armouries, devilish workshops, insular libraries, and grotesque pleasure halls (catering to every depraved whim of Morgoth and his highest ranking minions). Most of the main chambers have walls coated in black gold, with precious stones, bronze, and silver inlaid in highly elaborate patterns. Morgoth’s Lair is the dark axis from which practically all of Middle-Earth revolves around.



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I do not own the rights to The Silmarillion and copyright is officially owned by the Tolkien estate.

All criticisms and comments welcome.

[NecronLord]

I think it's actually too grand. Remember, powerful though Morgoth was, he was essentially confined up north from the arrival of the Noldor onwards; while many human groups were loyal to him, they were essentially undeveloped, and Morgoth certainly didn't have the power to simply sweep away all opposition, as this would imply. Even with early-canon things like 'dragon' tanks, and thousands of Balrogs, a pre-mechanisation (it's worth noting that the Noldor had to be forced to build those Tanks and they were designed by another elf; Morgoth and Sauron and all their balrogs weren't Da Vinchi or Stephenson esque industrial geniuses by any means.) scale and approach seems more appropriate.

It's worth, to get a picture of Morgoth in this period, remembering; he essentially ceased to be a 'god' in any meaningful sense. While the Valar were correct when saying that Fëanor could defeat the least of them, even were he three times more powerful than he was, by this time, Morgoth is much lesser than Melkor was; indeed, he was personally less powerful than Sauron became at the time of the Last Alliance. It's not so much a domain of a quasi-divine power, but rather, the fortress of an - admittedly powerful - king. If Fëanor were to fight in personal combat against the later era Morgoth, he would most likely have defeated him conclusively (though there would be... an impact... of that).

I think it wold be somewhat more interesting if approached in the manner of a conventional fortress, albeit one partly delved underground, rather than something immensely beyond what we could accomplish today.

[Big Orange]

OK, I perhaps over exaggerated what Angband actually was like as JRR Tolkien imagined it, but then again the combined nations of the Noldor and Edain at their height never could take Angband or fully contain Morgoth's forces on their own, with them having centuries to attack a partially blockaded Angband but never making any meaningful inroads.

Also I partially based my personal description of Angband according this Wikipeda article and this painting of the Siege of Angband (by John Howe) and this painting (also by Howe), but in the latter painting Angband looks more surface based and conventional in appearance, although to be fair Moria and Barad-Dur both seemed a bit beyond current engineering abilities, let alone pre-industrial engineering.

I never imagined Morgoth to be a mechanical genius or inventor at all, but it is not such a huge stretch for Sauron when his ring making skills were good enough to impress the Elves and he was related to Saruman (who made machines and had gun powder).

Morgoth/Melkor becoming far more puny and human like later on in his career was said to have occurred because he invested so much of his power into affecting Middle-Earth (like literally moving mountains). With but one occassion, no killable good guys got anywhere near his Throne deep within the heavily protected Angband.

[PainRack]

There is the question of how Luthien could had penetrated Angband if the palace was part of an interwined complex.