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Old 01-04-2016, 08:00 PM   #20
Galadriel55
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Fascinating thread indeed. Lead me to delve into the depths of Wikipedia for information of all sorts of outbreaks and plagues in real world history, even though I should be doing readings (but the bubonic plague is so much more interesting!).

For myself, I try to keep my science in my textbooks, well away from my Tolkien. So when he says that the plague was brought by an evil wind, I take the point of view of medieval (and not so medieval) society and trust that the pestilence was caused by the air brought from Angband and Mordor. I did not think that these plagues were truly intentional, or at any rate not really planned out to the degree assigned in this thread, but rather as a sort of pathetic fallacy, with the weather itself exploding with the evildoers' malice on occasion. I am perfectly content with that, and I think that supernatural beings like Morgoth and Sauron deserve to retain a touch of the supernatural. If magic refers also to the deceits of the Enemy, surely such a thing as a plague can also be his magic!

But from the ideas above, I am a fan of Zigur's radioactive fallout theory. I've pictured both plagues to resemble more some lung disease - tuberculosis perhaps - but your theory really does fit the mode of transmission better. If we delve into the practicalities of the plague, though, there might be some problems. Firstly, radiation only causes severe immediate damage in high doses. Something that's carried this way and that by the atmosphere would probably be too dilute by the time it gets to Gondor to have such a result. It is more likely to act as a carcinogen and possibly teratogen. The issue with that is that it's unlikely to then be called a plague, as such, and especially unlikely to be associated with the evil wind, because cancer takes a while to develop and life expectancy may vary widely among individuals. The teratogen aspect is less likely but more fascinating, I think. But even so, Gondor's parents wouldn't discover the effects until long after the wind has passed, and I think they would have called it a curse rather than a plague. Furthermore, the danger with any biological weapon is infecting your own population. Microbes can be controlled, though, and your own population could be immune or otherwise protected from the pathogen. But as far as I know you can't protect the general population from radiation exposure, and it would have killed as many of Sauron's forces as it did of Gondor's. Sure, the wind blew Westward for a time, bringing the plague to them, but it couldn't have persisted to blow in that direction for long enough for all the radioactivity to be blown away into Gondor. Even so, it's an interesting and novel idea.

A general point to add about plagues - they are most effective in crowds. Once you decrease the population significantly enough, it seems that a natural quarantine would occur due to increased isolation, and the spread of the disease would slow. If Sauron would not be able to wipe out Gondor's population completely with a plague, and even if he just wanted to dominate it rather than destroy it, he would not be able to weaken them enough morally that their submission would be realistic. He would still have to go to war.

Why not send another plague before the War of the Ring? Perhaps because Sauron didn't intentionally send the first one either. Perhaps because he lacks the power. Perhaps an external consideration like his scheming in other countries. At the end of the day, he may just have been a wise fool - if he was fool enough to send his armies abroad rather than making them cover every inch of his borders and put guards at Mount Doom, he may not have had the wisdom or foresight to send another plague. Or he didn't anticipate the events to develop so quickly, and by the time he got them running it was too late to send a plague - he would want it to run its course and kill as many people as possible, and preferably die out too before he attacks, since no one wants to contact men known to be infected with highly contagious diseases, even in battle.
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