LotR -- Book 4 - Chapter 08 - The Stairs of Cirith Ungol

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Your post, Formendacil, has helped shape a distinction for me between Minas Morgul and Mordor.

Minas Morgul's evil is eerie. It is hair-raised-on-the-nape-of-the-neck evil. All living things, or those things that normally are associated with life, such as (especially) flowers and water, as well as roads and towers, are here associated with corruption, decay, and undeadness.

Mordor is a destroyed land. Life is gone. It's a blasted, wasted desert. The feeling associated with this is not the thrill of the unnatural undead, but of drought and despair; the absence of life.

You've given me the germ of another idea...

If Mordor is a destroyed land, is Imlad Morgul a land in the process of being destroyed? In Mordor, evil is a given thing, it has totally taken over, to the point that is taken for granted.

Is the more active feeling of evil that I associate with Minas Morgul perhaps a sign that evil there has to be more active, because it has not yet totally subdued the land? Mordor seems to have been a less-than-attractive land even before Sauron set up shop, and he's had an age and a half to make it evil, whereas the Witchking has only been in Minas Morgul for a millennium or so. And perhaps there is more inherent resistance to evil in the "bones" of old Minas Ithil. We know that the land remembers the Elves long after they leave. Could a similar thing happen with the Numenorians?