In my last blog post, I started to delve into mountain worlds from fantasy, science-fiction, and horror narratives. Here I focus solely on Moria from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). It was originally written for a panel on Tolkien’s Queer Landscape: Three Papers on Middle-earth’s Heterotopias for the Mythopoeic Society’s Online MidWinter 2024 Seminar Something Mighty Queer and is replicated here with inevitable tweaks.

Heterotopias: coined by Michel Foucault, heterotopias is a compound of hetero (from the Greek heteros ‘other’) and topia (from the Greek tópos, ‘place’). They are spaces (a school, a ship, a train) in which social laws, norms, and behaviours are either rigorously adhered to or ruthlessly critiqued. The space is literally ‘other’ according to normative structures. You can read an English translation of Foucault’s work on heterotopias here.

Heterotopias can become, like Moria, an eerie microcosm that is closed off and retreats from the external world. They are transformed and rewritten into legends and myths, and their spatial realities are further removed as a direct consequence of socially (re)constructed (re)imaginings and (re)creations. In The Lord of the Rings Moria is a heterotopia that at once accentuates and disrupts the tone and trajectory of the narrative. Like Shelob’s Lair and the Paths of the Dead (both of which take place within mountain interiors – I may write about them at a later point…), Tolkien’s process of othering Moria starts before it is physically encountered. Its atmosphere is founded on fear and uneasiness in ‘The Council of Elrond’ and ‘The Ring Goes South’ when Gandalf’s mention of Moria triggers immediate feelings of “dread” as “even to the hobbits [Moria] was a legend of vague fear” (Tolkien 2007: 295; emphasis mine). The adjective “vague” pairs neatly with “legend” here to detach the reality of Moria from the Hobbits’ and readers’ preconceived notions, it is a heterotopia best encapsulated in the hesitant, hard-to-comprehend descriptions surrounding the Balrog.

Before I dig further into the black pit, it is worth returning to the word ‘eerie’ before considering its relevance to Moria. For Mark Fisher, ‘eerie’ is

constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something (2016: 61)

Once the mighty kingdom of Khazad-dûm “full of light and splendour” (Tolkien 2007: 315), the ruined body of Moria strongly signals a “failure of presence” that Fisher makes explicit, for although “a sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity is involved?” (2016: 11). The eeriness of Moria directly correlates to its ruined state. The sublime scale and depth of its “magnificent complex of underground excavations” (Tolkien 2023: 539) is only ever revealed through fragments that act as synecdoches for its undeterminable scale: “glimpses of stairs and arches, and of other passages and tunnels, sloping up, or running steeply down, or opening blankly dark on either side” (Tolkien 2007: 311). Building on Fisher, Moria’s ruins are special instances of the eerie as they not only prompt the questions ‘What happened?’ and ‘Who was involved?’ but also ‘Where am I?’ and ‘What is this?’ The collapse of the Dwarven kingdom conjures a distinctly eerie, oppressive darkness and silence that Tolkien repeatedly employs to disorientate, discomfort, and at times paralyse the Hobbits.

For instance, following Pippin’s infamous call of the void when he drops the stone into the well, he sits silently in the “pitch dark”, frozen in fear that “some unknown thing would crawl up out of the well” (313). Pippin appears stuck in an emotional liminality, simultaneously fearful of the failure of presence and absence: ‘something will appear so I must not go near the well, but there is also nothing where I imagine something should be’. This latter angle implies that Moria’s spatial darkness can be understood as a manuscript on to which the characters project and write their anxieties and fears. In the process they also rewrite Moria’s legacy in the Red Book of Westmarch. It is particularly poignant here to tangentially consider the role that art plays in (re)creating Moria. Tolkien consciously invokes Gimli’s imagined nostalgia through his song, but the binary between imagined light and physical, oppressive darkness only “makes the darkness seem heavier” for Sam (317) in a space that is already “hung [in] darkness, hollow and immense, [in which] they were oppressed by [Dwarrowdwelf’s] loneliness and vastness” (316). Art fails to bring hope or comfort; it only achieves in intensifying Moria’s eeriness for the Hobbits who are aliens to this heterotopia. Tolkien supports this notion by predominantly presenting and rewriting Moria through the Hobbits’ perspectives: “the wildest imaginings that dark rumour had ever suggested to the hobbits fell altogether short of the actual dread and wonder of Moria” (315).

This is also present in Frodo’s ambiguous experiences. Before we understand who Gollum is, Tolkien initially casts him in vagueness and uncertainty:

Frodo began to hear, or to imagine that he heard, something else: like the faint fall of soft bare feet. It was never loud enough, or near enough, for him to feel certain that he heard it; but once it had started it never stopped, while the Company was moving. But it was not an echo, for when they halted it pattered on for a little all by itself, and then grew still. (312; emphasis mine)

[…]

[Frodo] fancied that he could see two pale points of light, almost like luminous eyes. He started. His head had nodded. ‘I must have nearly fallen asleep on guard,’ he thought. ‘I was on the edge of a dream.’ (318; emphasis mine)

[..]

When he lay down he quickly went to sleep, but it seemed to him that the dream went on: he heard whispers, and saw the two pale points of light approaching, slowly. He woke and found that the others were speaking softly. (318; emphasis mine)

Nick Groom has noted that “it is in ambiguity and uncertainty that Tolkien is at his most distinctive” and this moment exemplifies such a mode (2022: 110). By attempting to reject his heightened sensual empiricism as illusions and projections in a space saturated in eeriness, Frodo only succeeds in reinforcing Moria’s “failure of absence” and the question ‘What is this?’ At this moment in the narrative Frodo’s reactions cast uncertainty over whether his experiences, like those invoked by the Ring, are the result of internal or external agency. Although he inhabits a liminality of eerie ambiguity when he posits that he “was on the edge of a dream”, Frodo inadvertently redefines Moria as eerie with its other-worldly dimensions.

As a heterotopia that has retreated from Middle-earth and entered into legend, Moria is a liminal other-world and microcosm that straddles the past, present, and future. It can be read in line with Jacques Derrida’s hauntology which would situate Moria’s ruined, decrepit body as the ideological and tangible ghost of Khazad-dûm. Like the Barrow-downs, the Dead Marshes, and the Paths of the Dead, Moria is perpetually haunted by a past that continues to acquire agency in the present. However, unlike these places but still in line with Derrida, Moria is not completely dead as it continues to be inhabited by living bodies. Additionally, Khazad-dûm is plagued by its unfulfilled future that invokes Fisher’s essay ‘Slow Cancellation of the Future’ (2014): What might Khazad-dûm have been if the Balrog had not awoken or Balin’s colony had succeeded? Moria stands out amongst Tolkien’s ruins in this way, creating unease and fear through the obscurity of who or what has made its home inside its ruined body.

It is worth closing this paper by considering Moria’s occupants and what their presentation reflects about authorial bias and the Misty Mountains more broadly. While deliberating which path to take, Gandalf ruminates that the Orcs were scattered after the Battle of the Five Armies, so Moria may only be occupied by Balin’s colony (Tolkien 2007: 296-7). However, more interesting for my discussion here is a tangential passage from The Hobbit that frames the Misty Mountain’s as the home of the weird and the eerie:

There are strange things living in the pools and lakes in the hearts of mountains: fish whose fathers swam in, goodness only knows how many years ago, and never swam out again, while their eyes grew bigger and bigger and bigger from trying to see in the blackness; also there are other things more slimy than fish. Even in the tunnels and caves the goblins have made for themselves there are other things living unbeknown to them that have sneaked in from outside to lie up in the dark. Some of these caves, too, go back in their beginnings to ages before the goblins, who only widened them and joined them up with passages, and the original owners are still there in odd corners, slinking and nosing about. (1995: 66; emphasis mine)

The passage in all its eerie majesty pre-empts Gandalf’s speculation that the Watcher in the Water “‘has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world’” (Tolkien 2007: 307), which is later reinforced through Gandalf’s memories in The Two Towers: “‘Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he’” (501). These “nameless things” by their very unidentifiable nature are coded in the Red Book as ‘Other’. Beyond the ruins of Moria and concerns of humanoid societies their resides Gollum before and during the events of The Hobbit, the Watcher in the Water, and the Balrog. I would also stress how Tolkien’s initial depiction of Gollum led to Tove Jansson’s spectacular illustration.

In line with Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection, the social structures, bias, and resulting ignorance of the Red Book’s authors repeatedly code the disparate bodies that inhabit Moria after the collapse of Khazad-dûm as Other: Frodo identifies Orcs as “ruined” and “twisted” (914), the Balrog is a mockery of the Maia and assumedly fled the War of Wrath, the Watcher’s “luminous”, “fingered” (308) tentacle invites speculations as to its biology, and Gollum’s “crooked”, “malicious” (53) use of the Ring leads to his own grandmother and community “expelling” him (54). Outcast by humanoid social structures, the seemingly infinite chthonic spaces within the Misty Mountains offers a space where coded Otherness can live in solitude. In turn the occupants of the Misty Mountains make it a diverse heterotopia that upsets the social ideals at play outside. Moria’s reclusive nature has made it into a timeless microcosm; although its ruins evince what once was, it is now in a liminal state of perpetual decay out of thought and time. Residing in legend only, the Hobbits’ experiences rewrite and intensify Moria’s eerie, other-worldly atmosphere. In the process, they code and reinforce negative social distinctions of Otherness through their encounters with the Watcher, Orcs, Gollum, and Balrog. However, it is precisely these limitations that in turn make Moria a space for rejected bodies, transforming it into a haven removed from the events and influence of the outside world.

Bibliography

Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.

Groom, Nick. 2022. Twenty-First Century Tolkien. London: Atlantic Books.

Tolkien, J. R. R. 1995. The Hobbit. London: HarperCollins.

— 2007. The Lord of the Rings. London: HarperCollins.

— 2023. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded, ed. by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins.