Siege of Barad-dûr

The Siege of Barad-dûr was the decisive military action of the War of the Last Alliance, the great confederation of Elves and Men that formed in 3430 of the Second Age to challenge Sauron's dominion over Middle-earth. After the host of Gil-galad and Elendil crossed the Misty Mountains and defeated Sauron's forces at the Battle of Dagorlad in 3434, the armies of the Alliance marched into Mordor itself and laid siege to the Dark Tower. The siege lasted for seven years, from 3434 until 3441, a grinding investment of the most formidable fortress ever built in Middle-earth. The foundations of Barad-dûr had been made with the power of the One Ring, and while the Ring endured, the Tower could not be thrown down by any ordinary assault. The siege was therefore a war of attrition, with the Alliance maintaining a close blockade while Sauron's forces sallied forth repeatedly from the gates of his stronghold. The toll on both sides was immense. Anárion, Elendil's younger son and the co-ruler of Gondor, was slain during the siege by a stone cast from Barad-dûr, a loss that would shape the succession of the Southern Kingdom for millennia. The siege reached its climax in 3441, when Sauron himself came forth from the Dark Tower to break the investment. In the final combat on the slopes of Orodruin, the Fire-mountain, Gil-galad and Elendil both perished. Elendil's sword Narsil broke beneath him as he fell. But Sauron was overthrown, his bodily form destroyed. Isildur, Elendil's son, took up the hilt-shard of his father's broken sword and cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand, claiming it for his own. With the Ring taken, Sauron's spirit fled and for long years hid in the wastes of the East, while the Dark Tower was broken and its foundations left in ruin. The victory, however, was not complete. Elrond and Círdan, who had stood with Gil-galad and Elendil in the final contest, counselled Isildur to cast the Ring into the fire of Orodruin, which was nigh at hand. Isildur refused, taking the Ring as a weregild for his father and brother. The Ring was thus not unmade, and the foundations of Barad-dûr, wrought with its power, endured beneath the ruin. The Siege of Barad-dûr therefore ended Sauron's first visible reign but left the seed of future war intact. The memory of the siege and its incomplete resolution haunted the Wise throughout the Third Age. Elrond, who had been the herald of Gil-galad and marched with his host, recalled the splendour of the banners assembled and the great princes and captains who had gathered, yet noted that the victory was fruitless: Sauron was diminished but not destroyed, his Ring lost but not unmade. The siege became the template for all later resistance against Mordor, a demonstration that Sauron could be overthrown by force of arms only temporarily, and that the Ring itself was the true key to his final defeat. The event also established the lineage of the Dúnedain in exile, for Elendil's heirs preserved the shards of Narsil and the claim to the kingship of both Arnor and Gondor, a claim that would not be fulfilled until the War of the Ring, when Aragorn son of Arathorn, the heir of Isildur, reforged the sword and led the final assault on the Black Gate.