The Last King of Gondor

Westnovote posted this on April 22nd, 2009.
Tagged as , , , , , , , .
Categorized as Lore.
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1553

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.

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9 Responses to 'The Last King of Gondor'

  1. unwize says:

    Great sum­mary!

    There was a dis­cus­sion on the EU servers last year about the how the Osgiliath stone couldn’t be the one involved due to it being too large, which only left the stone that was lost in the Bay of Forochel.

    One of the devs made a rare visit to men­tion that because the size of the Osgiliath stone is only men­tioned in Unfin­ished Tales, and not Lord of the Rings, there license doesn’t allow them to make ref­er­ence to it being of a larger size.

    I get the impres­sion that it was sim­ply a detail they over­looked until too late, or they’d prob­a­bly have reworked the story so that it didn’t con­tra­dict the lore in Unfin­ished Tales with­out actu­ally mak­ing ref­er­ence to it.

  2. Thorn says:

    The source mate­r­ial they could use didn’t con­tra­dict them in the size of the Stone, so they ran with what­ever fit their ideas best.

    We have sim­i­lar instances where there was mate­r­ial out­side their license that they couldn’t use so they amde their own ver­sion, such as the dis­cus­sion between Gan­dalf and Thorin in the Dwarf pro­logue or even the name of Sauron in the guise of the Gift­bringer Annatar/Antheron.

    It is a bit jar­ring, but for me does not ruin the sus­pen­sion of disbelief.

  3. wickedpt says:

    Exce­lent!

    One thing, where did you find that pic­ture of Amarthiel? Its wonderful…

  4. Westnovote says:

    Found the pic­tures here — http://​www​.mas​sively​.com/​p​h​o​t​o​s​/​l​o​r​d​-​o​f​-​t​h​e​-​r​i​n​g​s​-​o​n​l​i​n​e​-​b​o​o​k​-​1​2​-​g​a​l​l​e​ry/
    I think the Amarthiel image is con­cept art by Tur­bine. I agree with you, they are won­der­ful. I always liked the use of the mask on the in-game Amarthiel, but these pic­tures are actu­ally quite scary.

    @Thorn — I’ve not rolled a Dwarf char­ac­ter. What is the dis­cus­sion between Gan­dalf and Thorin about?

  5. Bravsirrobin says:

    Excel­lent post! I think that over­all Tur­bine has done an excel­lent job weav­ing their con­structed con­tent with the book lore in a believ­able fash­ion. Some­times, they have to take a lit­tle cre­ative license so that we will have a game to play :)

    Another minor lore blip: Gol­lum was stuck in Moria when the Fel­low­ship unknow­ingly stum­bled upon him, so there is no chance he would have been in the Troll­shaws for the instanced quest. Am I com­plain­ing? Not really, there prob­a­bly won’t be too many oppor­tu­ni­ties for us to inter­act with him in-game so I appre­ci­ate that lit­tle interlude.

  6. […] this excel­lent post at Mmeow today spurred me to write today’s entry.  Since I began play­ing LOTRO, I’ve often […]

  7. Jaxom92 says:

    This is a really excel­lent sum­mary and while there are numer­ous tech­ni­cal­i­ties that have been over­looked in var­i­ous places, espe­cially later in the story, the over­all feel­ing of the epic adven­ture is one that reflects that of the orig­i­nal work.

    I must say the sum­mary also helped me a great deal to coa­lesce the epic quests in my mind. I did them over such a wide space of time that I had for­got­ten details and was really only expe­ri­enc­ing the sur­face adven­ture and not the greater impact.

  8. Thorn says:

    West­novote, the dis­cus­sion between Gan­dalf and Thorin is about need­ing a bur­glar for the party of Dwarves, of course. But it devi­ates a bit from the dis­cus­sion chron­i­cled in Tolkien’s notes.

  9. Excel­lent! If I could write like this I would be well chuffed. The more I read arti­cles of such qual­ity as this (which is rare), the more I think there might be a future for the Web. Keep it up, as it were.

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