Gondor, Rohan, and Mordor

I was about halfway through book I of The Two Towers when an intriguing possibility burst into my mind. Within the same paragraph, in adjacent sentences, the lands of Gondor and Rohan were mentioned. My mind’s eye, or rather my eye seeing with my mind’s eye, stepping back and re-read those two sentences. Rather again, meta-read them. Focusing specifically on Gondor and Rohan – no, the words Gondor and Rohan.

No, even that’s not right. The capital-G and the capital-R demanded something of me.

I paused a moment, then “Rohan” grew larger until that lower-case-h transformed into an “m”.

That’s interesting. Something I never heard before, though, admittedly, I’m about 99 percent short of being a Tolkien scholar.

What if – now, hear me out – what if Gondor is Tolkien’s stand-in, representative, or metaphor for Greece, and Rohan is his analog, simile, or transposition for Rome?

G onder = G reece

R ohan = R ome

Not a bad insight, right? In The Lord of the Rings, Gondor is the princely kingdom, and Rohan is the more barbaric, younger rival. The analogy isn’t exact, and I really haven’t developed it more than this, but I think it’s neat, if not exactly a true proposition.

But assume it is. What then does Mordor represent?

I’ve heard it said that Mordor represents Nazi Germany. I’ve also read, in a book quoting Professor Tolkien’s letters, that such analogies should not be pursued and are false.

Let’s ignore the professor, okay, just for this off-the-record little chat between friends over some mugs of ale.

So much is made in The Lord of the Rings of the West-East dichotomy. Specifically, the “West” is good, and the “East” is evil. Traveling West, particularly from an Elvish point of view, is always better. Traveling West, you have Middle-earth, then Númenor, then the Island of Tol Eressea, then the continent of Aman, which holds the Elven realms of Eldamar, and, beyond a mountain range, Valinor, the home of the “gods,” the Valar. The further west one goes, if one is allowed to proceed, the higher in spirituality one progresses, sort of.

Anyway, this West-East bilaterality frequently brings a knee-jerk reaction in me of the Cold War. West is NATO, is good; East is the Warsaw Pact, is evil. So, might a better clue to what Mordor truly represents be the Soviet Union?

Possibly. LotR was published in 1954-55, and was written in the sixteen or seventeen years prior. My question is – and I’m a history buff not a history major – was the evils of the Soviet Union well-known in the West during the late 30s and throughout the 40s as it became during the later 50s and the decades of the 60s and 70s?

Then an even better idea came to me. On the shelf, patiently awaiting reading over the past fourteen months (haven’t gotten to it yet) is Dante’s Inferno. Modern translation, by Ciardi, but still considered decent. For those not familiar with it, Dante is walking lost through the woods when he stumbles upon the multi-leveled terrifying pit of Hell.

Might Mordor be a physical realization of the spiritual plane of Hell?

More possible, I think, than either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. It would really be neat if Dante’s pit was located somewhere in the “East,” but, alas, I read the first canto and seem not to find that clue.

Oh well. That’s my little insight, and I’m gonna stick with it, at least for a while.