Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower." Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost. Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been. We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus. The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned." The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion. This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley). Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...
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