page_title: Mordor
section_title: First World War's Western Front
hierarchical_section_title: Mordor / Origins / First World War's Western Front
caption_attribution_description: IWM caption&#160;: Battle of Albert&#160;: Soldiers of the 1st Battalion, The Lancashire Fusiliers fixing bayonets prior to the attack on Beaumont Hamel. They are wearing ‘fighting order’, with the haversack in place of the pack, and with the rolled groundsheet strapped to the belt below the mess-tin which contained rations. The officer in the foreground (right) is wearing other ranks’ uniform to be less conspicuous. Comment&#160;: Trench sign indicates 'King St'
context_page_description: In J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth, Mordor is the realm and base of the evil Sauron. It lay to the east of Gondor and the great river Anduin, and to the south of Mirkwood. Mount Doom, a volcano in Mordor, was the goal of the Fellowship of the Ring in the quest to destroy the One Ring. Mordor was surrounded by three mountain ranges, to the north, the west, and the south. These both protected the land from invasion and kept those living in Mordor from escaping.
  Commentators have noted that Mordor was influenced by Tolkien's own experiences in the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War. Another forerunner that Tolkien was very familiar with is the account of the monster Grendel's unearthly landscapes in the Old English poem Beowulf. Others have observed that Tolkien depicts Mordor as specifically evil, and as a vision of industrial environmental degradation, contrasted with either the homely Shire or the beautiful elvish forest of Lothlorien.
context_section_description: The New York Times on the other hand related the grim land of Mordor to Tolkien's personal experience in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War. Jane Ciabattari, writing on the BBC culture website, calls the hobbits' struggle to take the ring to Mordor "a cracked mirror reflection of the young soldiers caught in the blasted landscape and slaughter of trench warfare on the Western Front." In one of his letters in 1960, Tolkien himself wrote that "The Dead Marshes [just north of Mordor] and the approaches to the Morannon [an entrance to Mordor] owe something to northern France after the Battle of the Somme".
caption: Tolkien stated that his trench warfare experience with his regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, on the Western Front influenced his account of the landscape around Mordor.[11]
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