First up, a warn­ing, this post CONTAINS SPOILERS.  The spoil­ers are for the epic sto­ry­line for Vol­ume 1.  If you’ve not done Vol 1 yet and want to enjoy the sto­ry­line as the game presents it to you, then stop read­ing now and go some­where else instead.

The story behind Vol­ume 1 basi­cally con­cerns itself with the threat posed to Eri­ador by Angmar, the region in the North East of the land which was the cen­tre of an ancient king­dom of evil ruled over by one of the Nazgul.  My first post for this blog dealt with the rea­sons why this region was revis­ited by Tur­bine.  I want to take a moment to exam­ine the aspects of Tolkien’s works which Tur­bine used to cre­ate their epic storyline.

The first few chap­ters of the Book tie in well with the story that play­ers will be famil­iar with from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring.  They are either just ahead of, or just behind, the Hob­bits in their jour­ney to Riven­dell.  Later, once the Ring reaches Elrond, play­ers assist the Fel­low­ship in prepa­ra­tions for their jour­ney.  Much of this is taken up with search­ing for one of the Nazgul who was unac­counted for after the ruin of the Fords of Bru­inen.  The fact that the miss­ing rider is taken straight from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring is one of the best fits to the ‘lore’ that LotRO has to offer.  I must admit that I didn’t realise that one rider was unac­counted for until I played the game.  When I got to that point in the Epic quest I went right off to check my copy of the book, just to make sure!  This kind of plot device, taken directly from the books, is gam­ing gold, and Tur­bine must have thought they were dream­ing when they dis­cov­ered this nugget.

Even­tu­ally, the epic story turns north, to Angmar.  You are sent to search for the where­abouts of a group of Dunedain who went to Angmar to inves­ti­gate rumours of grow­ing evil. The Witch-King him­self hasn’t returned to his old stomp­ing grounds, but he’s sent a Regent.  Mordirith, a Wraith, just like the Witch-King.  Angmar is being for­ti­fied again and an army is prepar­ing to move against Eriador.

You assist the Dunedain in Angmar to defeat Mordirith (lit­er­ally Black Guard), how­ever, Amarthiel, pre­vi­ously a Cham­pion of Angmar, now steps up to assume com­mand.  The remain­der of the epic quests deal with the fight against Amarthiel.

Now, this really is your last chance, SPOILERS HERE.  Don’t read any more if you want to dis­cover the twists of Vol­ume 1 for yourself.

Mordirith isn’t just any old Wraith.  He turns out to be Ear­nur, the last king of Gon­dor, who rode forth to Minas Morgul in TA 2050 to meet the chal­lenge of The Witch King, and was lost.  Here we have com­plete Tur­bine inven­tion.  There is no men­tion of Ear­nur fol­low­ing TA 2050 in Tolkien.  There is no men­tion of what hap­pens to him dur­ing the bat­tle, we are just told that he is ‘lost’.  Miss­ing pre­sumed dead?  Per­fect.  Fer­tile ground for new con­tent.  The idea that the enemy would cor­rupt Ear­nur and turn him to a Wraith is plau­si­ble, and hav­ing achieved this it is also plau­si­ble that Sauron would send his new ser­vant back to the scene of his great­est tri­umph, Eriador.

Before Ear­nur was crowned he was sent by his father, Earnil, the King of Gon­dor, to assit Arve­dui, the last King of Arnor, in Arthedain against Angmar, in TA 1973.  By the time Ear­nur had reached the north, Angmar had tri­umphed, Arve­dui was dead and Arnor had ended.  Together with the Elves who dwelt with Cir­dan, Ear­nur and the Host of Gon­dor marched to assail the Witch-King at Fornost.  Dur­ing the bat­tle of 1975 Ear­nur and the Witch-King met on the fields of Fornost, but so great was the dread which went before the Nazgul, that Earnur’s stead fled in ter­ror, and Ear­nur could not con­trol it.  It was Glo­rfindel who drove the Witch-King from Eri­ador, the very same Glo­rfindel who stands now in Riven­dell.  Think of that the next time you see him in game.

The Bat­tle of Fornost ended in vic­tory for the Dunedain.  How­ever, Ear­nur had been shamed, and he did not for­get his per­sonal defeat at the hands of the Witch-King.  The Nazgul fled from the north, and all trace of him was lost for many years.  He escaped to Mor­dor, being allowed to enter unde­tected as the watch from Gon­dor had been dimin­ished.  In TA 2000 he besieged Minas Ithil, tak­ing the city two years later.  When Ear­nur took the throne of Gon­dor in 2043 he was chal­lenged by the Witch-King.  At first, Mardil, the stew­ard, man­aged to dis­suade the young King from accept­ing, but when the chal­lenge was renewed 7 years later, Earnur’s pride defeated him, and he rode out to Minas Ithil (now renamed Minas Morgul).  There he was cap­tured, and as Tur­bine would have us believe, became Mordirith.

Tur­bine actu­ally inserted some of their own his­tory into the Bat­tle of Fornost.  Amarthiel, a female cham­pion, fought for Angmar, but was defeated.  Fol­low­ing the bat­tle she was taken hostage and given into the keep­ing of the elf Laer­dan.  This was kept so secret that the pris­oner was for­got­ten and it was thought that Amarthiel had died.

Through the epic quests we dis­cover that Amarthiel is in fact Narmeleth, Laerdan’s daugh­ter.  At first we are led to believe that Amarthiel pos­sessed the body of Narmeleth, but we dis­cover that the Elf was seduced by Sauron as Annatar (Tur­bine uses the name of Antheron, as the name Annatar is never explic­itly men­tioned in The Lord of the Rings) back in the Sec­ond Age.  Sauron cor­rupted Narmeleth, she forged a lesser ring of power, Nar­chuil, in Ere­gion, and became Amarthiel.

Once Mordirith is defeated, Amarthiel moves quickly to direct the war in Eri­ador.  She has acquired a Palan­tir, and attempts to use this to dis­cover the loca­tion of her lost ring.  The palan­tir is assumed to be the chielf stone of the south, which was housed in the ancient cap­i­tal of Gon­dor, Osgiliath.  This stone was lost when the city was destroyed by fire in TA 1437.  Tolkien makes no fur­ther men­tion of it.  Tur­bine hint that this stone was recov­ered by Sauron, but this is one place when I feel that the game pushes the lore too far.  The impli­ca­tion is that the stone of Osgiliath was used by Angmar to com­mu­ni­cate with Sauron, who had the stone cap­tured from Minas Ithil.  This is sim­ply not pos­si­ble as the Ithil-Stone was not cap­tured until 2002, and was in fact cap­tured by the Witch-King him­self, after he had fled from the north.  Tolkien specif­i­cally men­tions the cap­ture of the Ithil-Stone as a cru­cial event in the War.  Hav­ing Sauron cap­ture another palan­tir, and a greater one at that, almost 600 years ear­lier, just does not sit com­fort­ably with me.  The con­cept is fur­ther weak­ened when you con­sider that Osgiliath was in fact destroyed, not by assault from Sauron, but by fire started by Eldacar, the King, dur­ing civil war.  The palan­tir, it is sup­posed, was housed in a tower on the bridge over Anduin, and when the city burned the bridge was destroyed and the palan­tir lost in the river.  It is not totally beyond the realm of pos­si­bil­ity that a ser­vant of Sauron recov­ered the palan­tir, but it does seem unlikely.  Another prob­lem with recov­ery of the stone is that the chief palan­tiri, those of Osgiliath and Amon Sul, were very likely much larger than the other stones and would not have been able to have been car­ried by one per­son, which makes you won­der how you man­age to do it in the epic quest.  This is a rare exam­ple of Tur­bine unsuc­cess­fully forc­ing a plot ele­ment of the main story of The Lord of the Rings on their games.

The story of Narmeleth and Ear­nur was cre­ated by Tur­bine to mir­ror the main story of The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien’s story cen­tres around a cor­rupted enemy (Sauron), the quest to dis­cover and destroy his ring, and his cor­rupted min­ions (The Nazgul).  The game takes all of the ele­ments of this tale and uses them in slighlty dif­fer­ent ways.  The cor­rupted enemy is Ear­nur (Mordirith), the ring which much be found and destroyed is Nar­chuil and the cor­rupted ser­vant is Narmeleth.  In Tolkien’s world, evil does not sim­ply come into exis­tence by itself.  Evil is the result of cor­rup­tion.  Sauron was orig­i­nally good, as were all things.  They were cor­rupted by Melkor (Mor­goth), the ‘Satan’ of Tolkien’s world.  I’m not going to talk about Melkor in detail here, suf­fice to say that he was one of the Valar, Tolkien’s Angels, and he rebelled against Eru (essen­tially God).  The result of this rebel­lion is all of the strife and con­flict seen in Middle-Earth and beyond.  Sauron, the Bal­rogs, the Drag­ons, Orcs, Trolls and all of the other ene­mies in the world, came from this ini­tial fall from grace.  The theme of cor­rup­tion is con­tin­ued in the ene­mies seen in the game.  Just as Tolkien was at pains to explain the ori­gin of his evil char­ac­ters, so Tur­bine have also gone to great lengths to flesh out the back sto­ries of the ‘big bad­dies’.  The quest for a ring, and a war against a cor­rupted Dark Lord and his cor­rupted ser­vants, is of course, a design ploy by Tur­bine to make play­ers feel like they’re involved in a plot which will be famil­iar to them.  We all want to per­son­ally help Frodo to destroy the ring, but we can’t.  This is a very fair com­pro­mise.  We get to destroy another ring, and defeat another enemy.  The main fight is still to come.

Related posts

• Turbine and the ‘Lore’. (7)
• Turbine and the ‘Lore’: Part 2. Game Mechanics (9)
• Building Middle-Earth: The Shire (6)
• Building Middle-earth: Ered Luin (3)
• Why LotRO?: Story, Lore and Those Less Fanatic (2)