Maladies of Maleficence

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

In a similar vein, in the books we see Morgoth sending a plague in the First Age which affected the Edain in Hithlum (incidentally killing Túrin's first sister and also sickening him), and Sauron using something similar to clear Mordor of Gondorian vigilance. How were those plagues generated?

Biology and science would seem to have little room in the works, and to me, that's as it should be. I don't want Middle-earth being too near this world! If the plagues weren't the result of bacteria or viruses though, aren't we left with "magic" as the origin? And that should give the illnesses more of a spiritual bent, affecting the fea and the will to survive.

In a world without science, microbiology is black magic or a manifestation of divine wrath. One only has to look at our own 14th century and the Black Death to see the parallels. The Welsh referred to it as "death coming into our midst like black smoke", and in Scandinavian legends it was the black-robed hag Pesta who passes through villages leaving death in her wake, as did the White Lady of Slavic tales. There was absolutely no belief that the Black Death was caused by fleas carrying Y. pestis infesting the black rat population. The finest scientific minds blamed a misalignment of planets, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes or God's wrath -- everything but bacillium, of which they were ignorant.

The plague itself was debilitating spiritually and needed no immortal malevolence to stricken those affected. Mothers and fathers abandoned their children, doctors refused to treat patients, and priests allowed their parishioners to die without last rites. As historian Barbara Tuchman wrote "the sense of a vanishing future created a dementia of despair." The desolation of the plague caused both overwhelming hopelessness and hysteria -- whole populations literally went mad.

So did Morgoth or Sauron actually create contagions, or did it merely arise (as it does naturally) from utterly filthy conditions? I would guess Mordor was akin to an open cesspool, with the inhabitants having little or no regard for hygiene (we never hear of Orcs preening). Perhaps it was just a fortuitous breeze that blew the plague westward, or it was carried by plague rats from the east (as it happened in Europe). Such a deadly weapon would certainly have been used again and again if indeed the Dark Lords could control plague, but that wasn't the case. If one could wipe out whole populations with a bacillus, what need of a standing army of many thousands?

As Hamfast Gamgee said, "It's an ill wind as blows nobody no good". Perhaps the plague wiped out the mannish populations in Mordor, Harad and Khand as well. As Mordor was the Middle-earth equivalent of North Korea, we wouldn't receive any reliable reports from eyewitnesses within. But one can't very well aim a disease with certainty (we know that regarding mustard gas attacks in WWI), so perhaps a plague was raging in Mordor, and Sauron, with his usual cold calculations, merely catapulted a few diseased corpses into Osgilliath (a feature of medieval warfare) and it spread not only through Gondor but all the way to the Shire.