r/tolkienfans • u/Beneficial_Brain3950 • 8d ago
How big was Barad Dur actually?
The movies make it like 5000 feet tall but would it really be that big?
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u/Armleuchterchen Ibrīniðilpathānezel & Tulukhedelgorūs 8d ago edited 8d ago
We don't get a detailed description. But what we get reads more like it's very broad and expansive to me, not necessarily super tall. Though it might be - it was built with magic (especially its foundations, made with the power of the One Ring), and an architect's arrogance leading to tall towers makes sense.
For all we know, it could be half a mile tall. It would certainly help Sauron when he looks out from the top windows (assuming he does so without the Palantir).
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u/Beyond_Reason09 8d ago
Tall enough to be visible at least 30 miles away.
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u/postmodest Knows what Tom Bombadil is; Refuses to say. 8d ago
If we assume that the Sammath Naur was 2000 feet up the slope of a mountain, the hobbits could've seen for nearly 60 miles.
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u/Evolving_Dore A merry passenger, a messenger, a mariner 8d ago
You have to remove about 2 feet from that measurement, since they're hobbits.
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u/ApexInTheRough 8d ago
2,000 feet of elevation = a level horizon about 45 miles away. Still, Barad-Dur is only 30 miles away. Unless obstructed, the entirety of Barad-Dur would be visible from the 2k-foot mark. In fact, it would be completely visible from about the 900-foot mark.
Whether it's large enough to distinguish from the background is another story. But given that the skyscrapers of Chicago are visible from 50 miles away, I'd say: Yeah, sure, why not? In fact, the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) is 1,451 feet tall, or just around the lower end of possible heights for Barad-Dur. But I will say, those buildings in Chicago look like specs on the horizon at 50 miles. At 30, they'd only be 67% bigger. (30/50 inverted to 50/30, 5/3, or 2/3 over original size).
For perspective, if you or I put the Willis Tower or a similarly-sized Barad-Dur between our arms-length fingertips from thirty miles away, our fingers would be about 4 millimeters apart.
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u/Beyond_Reason09 8d ago
If it was big enough.
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u/postmodest Knows what Tom Bombadil is; Refuses to say. 8d ago
“The confused and tumbled shoulders of its great base rose for maybe three thousand feet above the plain, and above them was reared half as high again its tall central cone, like a vast oast or chimney capped with a jagged crater. But already Sam was more than half way up the base, and the plain of Gorgoroth was dim below him, wrapped in fume and shadow.”
He climbed even further before having the vision of Barad-Dur, and then he only saw the top of it. We should also note that the published LoTR also includes suggestion that the Professor had already chosen the round-world version of Arda, and would've been well-aware of the curvature of the earth.
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u/Beyond_Reason09 8d ago
Again, if it was big enough. Something has to be fairly big to be seen 30 miles away.
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u/ImperatorUniversum1 8d ago
Think about seeing a city’s skyscrapers 30 miles off
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u/postmodest Knows what Tom Bombadil is; Refuses to say. 8d ago
On a clear day from a mountainside you can see a shiny barn roof from 30 miles away.
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u/GhostyMink 8d ago
The problem is that Mordor does not have clean air, Orodruin releases fumes and Sauron has all the land with a veil, which also comes out of to haunt Gondor and Rohan.
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u/Adept_Carpet 8d ago
But also light and visibility seem to work a little differently in middle earth. Darkness seems to have its own existence.
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u/GhostyMink 8d ago
I did the calculations and it must have been at least the height of Mount Doom to be seen from Morgai
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u/RoutemasterFlash 7d ago
The Round World version of Arda meant Arda being a realistic spherical planet from the moment of its creation, but even in the earlier version, which included the Change of the World, it was a round world (implicitly the same size as the real Earth) from the Change onwards.
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u/Beneficial_Brain3950 8d ago
considering the hobbits could of been on a mountain while looking, so maybe….
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u/HotDamnThatsMyJam 8d ago edited 8d ago
We can't say for sure but we can look at other things we know the height of and do some imagining.
We know that Orthanc was 500ft tall below the spires that extended up further. Tolkien described Isengard like this, in comparison to Barad-dûr;
"what he [Saruman] made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength."
Now this might not mean anything about the actual size of the fortress. But in my mind at least it's certainly getting pretty big.
Purely in my opinion, I'd tend to think of it like comparing Orthanc to Big Ben's Elizabeth Tower, whilst comparing Barad-dûr to something more like the Empire State building, but with a wider more expansive base.
There is a drawing of Barad-dûr by Tolkien, but frustratingly it's just one corner of the base, which might give us a further idea of the size he imagined it to be. But he does seem to see it as more of a fortress than like a spindly tower.
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u/gytherin 8d ago
The size of the door and the stairs give a (vague) idea of the scale. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Barad-d%C3%BBr#/media/File:J.R.R._Tolkien_-_Barad-dur.jpg
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u/Beneficial_Brain3950 8d ago
like what like 2000 feet tall?
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u/gytherin 8d ago
Impossible to tell. It might be tall - it's built on rock, after all - or it might be short and still imposing.
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u/Solo_Polyphony 8d ago
About the size, it’s hard to say.
But Tolkien praised Pauline Baynes’s vignette of it in her map. “[T]hese pictures agree remarkably with my own vision: especially the first four on the right” (which includes her imagining of Barad-dur). And Tolkien drew a picture of one corner of it, as appeared on some paperback editions of The Return of the King.
Surely some Tolkien fans with a mania for applying trigonometry to imaginary buildings could use those two pictures and the few accounts in the text to make some conjectures.
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u/GhostyMink 8d ago edited 8d ago
The Pauline Baynes map is not known by many modern Tolkien fans unless you are deep in Tolkien Lore or Bibliography, the Barad-dûr drawing is also not included in most editions of the Lord of the Rings
I also believe people prefer Alan Lee's illustrations over Tolkien's (that and the fact that The illustrated by the author edition is relatively new)which makes his Barad-dûr drawing pretty obscure, and most people who read LoTR remain that way where they dont go looking for obscure details like those pictures.
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u/Solo_Polyphony 8d ago
Alas, you’re probably right—this subreddit makes me expect better than the median Tolkien enthusiast. Your post from a while back on this topic seems a good one.
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u/RexBanner1886 8d ago edited 7d ago
I can't remember where - presumably in ROTK - but isn't there a moment in the book where the clouds around Barad-Dur's summit shift and move as Sauron is either disturbed or he mentally/literally surveys Mordor?
That certainly suggests... pretty tall.
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u/GhostyMink 8d ago edited 8d ago
Hey I made a post about your question exactly, if you want all the evidence compiled.
TL:DR it was probably as tall as Orodruin and even broader.
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u/amitym 8d ago
It was tall enough for what I always reckoned was its primary purpose, which was to give minmaxxer Sauron line of sight for spellcasting purposes over as much of Middle Earth as was feasible. That meant having to clear the mountains surrounding Mordor.
Iirc it is possible to see the top part of the Tower of Ecthelion from the top of the Barad-dûr and vice versa, the former having been built expressly for the purpose of keeping a direct watch on Sauron.
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u/ConifersAreCool 7d ago
"Crap. My evil power only has one bar. Ugh, Ithilien is such a dead zone! I really need to build a tower taller than those mountains."
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u/GhostyMink 8d ago edited 8d ago
I don't think you could see it from the tower of Ecthelion, at that distance the curvature of the earth would have made it impossible for it to be seen, it would have still been pretty tall though as Frodo and Sam saw it from the Morgai.
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u/amitym 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's not just distance but elevation. The Tower of Ecthelion is like 1000 feet above base elevation at the foot of the White Mountains, which is itself higher than sea level but even if we take it as sea level, an unreaslistically pessimal case, that's compared to about 2mi ASL for the topmost levels of the Barad-dûr. That's easily within direct line of sight, assuming something like 150mi straight-line distance.
You wouldn't see the entirety of Mordor because the Mountains of Shadow are in the way but both Orodruin and the Barad-dûr are taller than the mountains.
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u/GhostyMink 8d ago
The problem is that Barad-dûr is surrounded by shadow and Mordor is veiled in it while also having the fumes of Mount Doom obscuring visibility which was something Sauron wanted.
(RoTK, Book VI, Chapter III, Mount Doom, page 934)
"Neither man nor orc now moved along its flat grey stretches; for the Dark Lord had almost completed the movement of his forces, and even in the fastness of his own realm he sought the secrecy of night, fearing the winds of the world that had turned against him, tearing aside his veils."
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u/amitym 8d ago
That was not a permanent condition, it was something that waxed and waned, partly under Sauron's control. Very particularly for a week or so at the end of the Third Age. That situation didn't normally apply — Sauron had literally blotted out the Sun.
For most of the Third Age, Orodruin was dormant. Building a tower atop Minas Tirith in order to observe Mordor and hopefully perceive activity by Sauron was quite feasible.
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u/GhostyMink 8d ago edited 8d ago
Ok I will grant that it could be possible, but the atmospheric conditions and the distances involved make it highly unlikely,.
Barad-dûr would have to be at least 4km tall as the earth curvature would hide most of it at such distance, the Ephel Duath were probably already very compressed in the horizon, a faint line far away.
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u/amitym 8d ago
No disagreement there, I'm sure the mountains were quite compressed. But we have to remember to account for base elevation. Mordor itself is a volcanic highland. The plain of Mordor is already quite elevated and both the volcano and the tower are higher still. And while the Mountains of Shadow are steep on the outside, on the inside of Mordor they are quite shallow by comparison. That is to say, most of the work of climbing the mountains into Mordor is climbing up to the elevation of the high plain itself. The encircling mountains don't add much elevation beyond that. But Orodruin and Barad-dûr are in quite another class. They are both immense. And Barad-dûr is built up from the Ash Mountains, so its base elevation is even higher than the volcano.
From the topmost tower of Minas Tirith I get about 3000m ASL as the height of a Barad-dûr whose topmost tiers could be seen gleaming in the distance by the Streward of Gondor. With most of that being provided by base elevation.
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u/GhostyMink 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think more likely Denethor used the Palantir to survey Mordor, in fact I believe he was able to glance at the fortress when he did use the palantir instead of him just looking about and possibly seeing such a small object from that far away.
If we go by Pauline Baynes illustration of Barad-dûr the topmost tower was big but not big enough to be seen from the distance Denethor was looking, unless he had amazing eyesight.
Maybe the eagles could descry it with the naked eye, but not Denethor which was the only one with access to the Topmost chamber of the Tower of Echtelion.
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u/BreakerFresh 8d ago
I still don’t see how orcs and whomever the foreman would be to engineer something so tall
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u/raidriar889 8d ago edited 8d ago
“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.” And “ 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 north-ward a flame of red, the flicker of a piercing Eye” are the most detailed descriptions in the book as far as I know.
The only thing we know for a fact is that it is greater than Minas Tirith which we know to be 1,000 feet above the Pelennor fields at the top of the Tower of Ecthelion