The architecture of Isengard: from fortress to industrial scar

Tolkien's Isengard occupies a peculiar place in the geography of Middle-earth. It is both an ancient stronghold and a wound, a place where stone and machinery collide with terrible consequences. For Australian readers who have grown up with paperback copies of The Lord of the Rings, the valley of Nan Curunír has long served as one of the most troubling images in the legendarium. Walk into Readings bookshop in Carlton on a winter arvo and you will find the novel shelved under fantasy, but ask the regulars in the Tolkien section and they will tell you that Isengard is not really fantasy at all. It is prophecy.

This essay traces the architecture of Isengard across three distinct phases: the Númenórean fortress left to moulder in the care of the Istari, the industrial compound raised by Saruman during the War of the Ring, and the flooded, humbled valley that emerges after the defeat of the White Wizard. Along the way it considers why Tolkien, a man shaped by the industrial Black Country of his childhood, was so attentive to what a stronghold becomes when its warden turns from stone to steel.

The origins of Nan Curunír

Long before Saruman sets foot in the valley, Isengard is known by its Elvish name Nan Curunír, the Wizard's Vale. In the late Third Age it is a single, vast, circular depression roughly carved into the foothills north of the White Mountains, ringed by a long stone wall that runs around its entire circumference. The wall, broken only at one point where the River Isen flows out, is not so much a fortification as a perimeter — a way of marking off a piece of the world that has been set aside for a particular purpose. Tolkien is careful to describe it as austere rather than beautiful, a place of grey stone and thin grass, hemmed in by the peaks of the Misty Mountains to the north and the long arm of the Thrihyrne to the south.

Australian readers who know the Warrumbungles in New South Wales will recognise the feeling. That range of ancient volcanic remnants rises out of the dry inland like a fortress that was never finished, its dykes and trachyte pinnacles suggesting the bones of some unfinished attempt at a wall. The Pilliga forest further north, with its scrubby eucalypts and sandstone escarpments, offers a different but equally resonant parallel: a thin-skinned country that reveals the moment human industry has touched it. Tolkien's Nan Curunír belongs to a kind of place that Australians understand instinctively — a vast, quiet, often harsh interior that looks empty until you realise how carefully the emptiness has been curated.

Orthanc: the pillar that will not fall

At the centre of the ring stands Orthanc, the tower that gives the fortress its older name of Orthanc-stone. It is described as rising in four principal shafts welded together, black and polished like glass, with a smoothness that no craftsman of Middle-earth in the later ages can replicate. Orthanc is a relic of the lost West, built by the Númenóreans in the days of their pride and preserved almost intact through millennia of neglect. Its interior, Tolkien tells us, contains many chambers and a single deep pit running down beneath the foundations, a well or a dungeon of unspecified purpose. The tower is unbreakable by any means available within the narrative, and it is from its peak that the palantír of Isengard looks out over the world.

Orthanc functions in the text as a kind of fixed point. While the rest of Isengard is mutable — a wall can be raised, a valley can be flooded, a forest can be felled — the tower endures. Even when Treebeard stands at the gate and the Ents have reduced every other element of Saruman's compound to rubble, Orthanc remains. Tolkien's choice to make his one truly indestructible building the seat of the wizard's betrayal has a moral weight that the prose only glancingly acknowledges. It is the eternal structure that survives the temporary evil, a useful emblem for any reader who has watched a colonial administration abandon a building long after the ideology that produced it has been exposed.

The furnaces and the wheels

The most disturbing passages of The Two Towers take place inside the transformed Isengard. Saruman's war effort involves the digging of great pits and the construction of stone roadways that lead down into them. From these pits rise smoke and steam and the clang of iron, and from the road network issues a constant stream of wagons carrying ore and timber. At the heart of the industrial complex is a single vast furnace fed by an underground river, and around it are arranged a host of smaller forges, bellows, and engines. The effect, as Pippin and Merry observe from the vantage of a captive orc, is of a place that has been turned inside out: a pastoral valley inverted into a foundry.

This image of inverted pastoral is one of the most powerful in Tolkien's writing, and it draws on the smouldering childhood memory of the King's Heath gasholders and the Lifford smelting works that the author would have known in the late nineteenth-century Birmingham he grew up in. Australian readers familiar with the ruins of the old steelworks at Port Kembla will recognise the specific desolation of an industrial scar — a place where the land has been told to perform an unnatural function, and has performed it. Tolkien, who was sceptical of the motor car and suspicious of most machines that moved on their own, transposes that suspicion into a mythology. Isengard becomes the place where the machine is allowed to think it can rival the tree.

Fangorn and the wound on the world

No account of Isengard's architecture can ignore the surrounding forest. The Wizard's Vale borders Fangorn, the ancient wood of the Ents, and the two exist for most of the Third Age in a kind of wary equilibrium. Trees give way to grass, grass gives way to stone, and the boundary is honoured by all parties. The Ents, slow but not stupid, understand that the wall is there to keep the world in order as much as to keep them out. It is Saruman who breaks the bargain. The machinery of the pits requires timber in vast quantities, and the machinery of war requires it again. The result is the systematic denudation of the western edge of Fangorn, an act of clearing that Tolkien describes with the deliberate vocabulary of colonial exploitation.

The comparison between the deforestation of Fangorn and the clearing of inland Australian forest is hard to miss. The Pilliga, that long stretch of dry woodland and scrub that runs across the north-west of New South Wales, has been cut, grazed, and re-cut in patterns that Australian readers will recognise as both ancient and ongoing. Tolkien's Ents are not a simple allegory, but the passion of their lament has a force that the modern environmentalist can lean on. Treebeard's anger at the felling of his people is the anger of a continent that has had enough.

Element	Númenórean fortress	Industrial compound	Post-war garden
Orthanc	Relic of the West, sealed and silent	Intact, palantír in use, hub of the war effort	Empty, watched over by Ents and Huorns
Ring wall	Curtain of plain grey stone	Reinforced, gates widened for ore and timber	Demolished, its stones scattered across the valley
Valley floor	Pasture, stream, thin grass	Pits, furnaces, ore-roads, blast-pits	Shallow lake, mud, the bones of machines
Border with Fangorn	Honoured boundary, ancient truce	Cleared for timber, fire and axe	Replanted with saplings from the seed-house of the Ents
Inhabitants	None, a vacant care of the Istari	Orcs, Dunlendings, half-breeds, Wolves	Ents, Huorns, the King and his Wardens

The flooding of the Ring

The destruction of the industrial Isengard comes in two stages, the second of which is the flooding. After the Ents reduce the wall and the pits and the furnaces, Treebeard directs his Huorns to dam the River Isen upstream of the Orthanc rock. The released waters pour into the valley and fill the quarries and the chambers, leaving Orthanc standing as a black island in a shallow new sea. The image is extraordinary: a wizard's stronghold, the very emblem of deliberate will, drowned under a foot or two of brackish water. Saruman, marooned on the top of the tower, is left with his palantír and his pride and nothing else.

Tolkien's Catholic sensibility reads the flood as something close to a baptism, though a fierce and unforgiving one. The valley is cleansed not by fire but by water, and the water is not holy so much as it is the consequence of the Ents' patient engineering. For Australian readers, the scene carries a particular charge because the continent itself is shaped by long droughts followed by sudden inland floods, the kind of event that re-draws the map of the outback in a single wet season. The flooding of Isengard feels like a poetic version of those floods, the ones that fill the lake systems of the inland and remind even the most confident irrigator that water is older than industry.

Isengard and the Shire: the two poles of Tolkien's moral geography

The contrast that finally organises the whole of Tolkien's architectural thought is the one between Isengard and the Shire. The Shire, in the Prologue and the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, is described as a country of small fields and tidy hedges, of inns with good beer and gentlemen who never travelled more than a day's ride from home. It is, in a sense, an anti-fortress. There are no walls around Hobbiton, no watchtowers on the Brandywine, no central keep to which the local population can be summoned in time of war. The Shire is the architecture of trust, and Isengard is the architecture of suspicion.

The Scouring of the Shire, that difficult fourth ending that Tolkien worried over for much of his life, makes the polarity explicit. Saruman, freed from Orthanc and given a final chance, does to the Shire what he had already done to the Wizard's Vale. The machinery arrives, the hedges are pulled up, the trees are felled, and the hobbits are forced to labour in the new mills. It is a small-scale repetition of the larger disaster, and it is included in the narrative partly because Tolkien understood that the danger of Isengard is not confined to Isengard. The passage is uncomfortably close to the recent experience of any Australian country town that has watched its mill close and its main street hollowed out by the next freight corridor.

After the war, the Shire is restored, and so, in a modest way, is Isengard itself. Treebeard explains to Merry and Pippin that he will set a watch on the tower, that Orthanc will be allowed to stand empty until such time as the King returns, and that the valley will be replanted with saplings from the seed-house of the Ents. The final image is not of the dismantled tower but of the rebuilding forest, the slow green work that will take a generation and a half. It is a patient kind of architecture, the kind that Tolkien believed in as a counter to the patient kind of destruction. Readers who wish to follow the broader argument will find a continuing series of literary essays on the vheissu site, which carries the work in full.