Bio-warfare In Middle-earth

[Inziladun]

I thought I would revive this old thread, because it still fascinates me.

Any thoughts as to the nature of these plagues? Illness caused by micro-organisms isn't exactly a known thing in Tolkien's Arda. How did Morgoth, and later Suaron, manage their bio-terror acts? Could the "plagues" have had a chemical origin, instead of one founded in biology? After all, we see the land around Angband and Mordor rendered sterile and void of vegetation. The Brown Lands were subjected to some sort of assault that made them utterly unusable for anything.

Gas warfare, perhaps?

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

I thought I would revive this old thread, because it still fascinates me.

Any thoughts as to the nature of these plagues? Illness caused by micro-organisms isn't exactly a known thing in Tolkien's Arda. How did Morgoth, and later Suaron, manage their bio-terror acts? Could the "plagues" have had a chemical origin, instead of one founded in biology? After all, we see the land around Angband and Mordor rendered sterile and void of vegetation. The Brown Lands were subjected to some sort of assault that made them utterly unusable for anything.

Gas warfare, perhaps?

Plagues were once considered magic or "God's Wrath". The mind of pre-Enlightenment man would consider plague spreading by the air (often in conjunction with earthquakes or volcanoes), by sight, or by touch, but knew nothing of the actual method of transmission.

But Medieval men knew enough about plague to catapult infected bodies into walled towns under siege (and thus force a surrender), just as later Europeans knew well enough what would happen if they gave blankets infected with small-pox to Native Americans. Sauron or Morgoth, although not microbiologists or epidemiologists would have, being immortal and all, seen countless iterations of disease over many centuries, and would discover an effective method of transmission -- whether that be along trade routes (infected clothing, fabric, blankets), or merely through warfare, which was always an effective means of transmitting disease (hence syphilis was called the 'French Disease' in Italy, the French referred to it as the 'Neapolitan Disease', the Persians called it the 'Turkish Disease', and the Indians called it the 'Portuguese Disease' -- only the Spanish didn't blame another country ).

So, although Tolkien inferred the pestilence was airborne from the enemy, I'd prefer to consider that plague wasn't Dark Lord conjured, but Dark Lord administered.

P.S. Mordor and its environs were filthy by all accounts, and bad sanitary conditions were (and still are) the primary source of plagues and pandemics. So, Mordor could well have been a wonderful incubator for any number of infectious diseases.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Any thoughts as to the nature of these plagues? Illness caused by micro-organisms isn't exactly a known thing in Tolkien's Arda. How did Morgoth, and later Suaron, manage their bio-terror acts? Could the "plagues" have had a chemical origin, instead of one founded in biology? After all, we see the land around Angband and Mordor rendered sterile and void of vegetation. The Brown Lands were subjected to some sort of assault that made them utterly unusable for anything.

The image of the "dark winds out of the East" has interested me for some time. This suggests, unless it is meant to convey a primitive understanding of disease, that it was spread atmospherically rather than by people or animals. It caused me to think of radioactive fallout which would spread through the atmosphere after a large nuclear detonation. A chemical poison seems quite possible, but it would have to be extremely potent to be effective when mixed with the atmosphere at large.

[Galadriel55]

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.

[Zigûr]

I should have specified that I didn't actually mean radiation, just a poison which might spread through the atmosphere in a comparable way.

Concerning Sauron not using a plague again later, it seems to me that it could be argued that the reason he didn't may have been because he had already done so; his long term plan extended over thousands of years and the plague "stage" of it might be seen as a component which had its specific time and place of execution. Now swift and decisive military force was in order.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I should have specified that I didn't actually mean radiation, just a poison which might spread through the atmosphere in a comparable way.

Oh, ok, I see. Makes sense. But you would still face the problem of the poison spreading to your own people. Supply them all with antidotes? Or have so many that Sauron just doesn't care to lose a few?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Oh, ok, I see. Makes sense. But you would still face the problem of the poison spreading to your own people. Supply them all with antidotes? Or have so many that Sauron just doesn't care to lose a few?

Yes it isn't that convincing unless he just kept it away from his own people somehow (but that would be a very steady weather pattern). I like your suggestions about the pathetic fallacy as well as what has been said by Morth (and myself ) about medieval and ancient understandings of how disease worked.

Perhaps it was simply a disease which arose in Rhûn (where would Sauron have been in the Third Age without Rhûn to hide him and provide him with regular waves of Gondor-attackers?) and which Sauron encouraged to spread West, and perhaps the "dark wind" was a bit of weather he stirred up to increase a sense of doom and despair to motivate people to lose hope.

Or perhaps it was a spiritual malady like the Black Breath, far vaster in scale but not automatically deadly untreated as the Breath would be. What I mean is it seems some survived the Plague or did not become ill, while it appears that if one was afflicted with the Black Breath it seems that death was certain unless Aragorn turned up with athelas in hand.

[Leaf]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Plagues were once considered magic or "God's Wrath".[...]

Maybe that's what "happend" in this case as well. I think there's the possibility that those plagues might have been natural phenomena that were wrongly associated with Morgoth/Sauron by the people of the West. All we get is their (reasonably biased) point of view which turned into lore and, at some point, was written down by gondorian scribes as history.¹ It's entirely reasonable to suspect that, due to the existing threat and dire circumstances, all sorts of disastrous events were mystified and (re)interpreted as of evil and unnatural origin.

There's, of course, no way of proving that this might be the case, but I think that this thought is interesting nonetheless.

Edit:

1: You can find a way more detailed description of this process in the Note on the Shire records in the prologue of the Lord of the Rings. This text explains how the appendices became part of the recorded history.