Gorbag

A captain of the Morgul-orcs

Gorbag commanded a patrol out of Minas Morgul, the city of the Ringwraiths, and so served the Witch-king directly rather than the garrison-captains of Mordor. He was a large Orc, cunning and talkative, with a contempt for the Uruks of the Tower and a private, well-founded suspicion that the war was not going as well as the higher-ups claimed. On the night of 13 March T.A. 3019, after the Morgul host had marched west, he brought his company up the pass of Cirith Ungol and met Shagrat, the captain of the Tower, at the mouth of Shelob's tunnel. Between them lay Frodo, stung by Shelob and wrapped in her cords, and the spider herself was nowhere to be seen.

The talk in the pass

Sam, invisible with the Ring on his finger, followed the two captains up the pass and heard everything. Gorbag reasoned it out more quickly than Shagrat: somebody had cut the spider's cords, somebody had wounded Shelob and driven her off, and that somebody was still loose, a great Elf-warrior by the look of the sword-work. He was uneasy about it and said so. He also had opinions about their masters. He remembered the old days before the Great Siege, guessed that the Nazgûl had bungled something at the river, and proposed to Shagrat that when the war was over the two of them should slip away with a few trusted lads to somewhere with good loot and no big bosses. It was the nearest thing to independent thought recorded of any Orc.

On the way up he also revealed what their orders were: the prisoner was to be kept safe and whole, every rag and trinket accounted for, and sent to Lugbúrz untouched. Shagrat's Uruks, he pointed out, were merely the Tower's guard; the prisoner had been found on Morgul ground. This was the seed of the quarrel.

The fight in the Tower

In the Tower the Orcs stripped Frodo of his belongings, and among them was the coat of mithril mail that Bilbo had given him. Gorbag wanted it. Shagrat cited his orders. Gorbag's Morgul-orcs and Shagrat's garrison fell on each other, and by the time Sam climbed the stair the courtyard and passages were carpeted with the dead of both companies. Gorbag himself lay wounded near the top, and when Shagrat came down carrying the bundle of Frodo's things he rose and went for him with a knife. Shagrat, though his own arm was crippled, stabbed him twice and trampled him. Gorbag's death cleared the way for Sam, who found the Tower nearly empty of living Orcs and Frodo alive above.

Legacy

Gorbag mattered because of what his greed did. His quarrel with Shagrat killed almost every Orc in the Tower of Cirith Ungol and left the pass into Mordor unguarded at the one moment when the Ring-bearer needed it to be, and the two hobbits walked out of the fortress the next morning past his body. Sauron's servants had held the Ring and its bearer for a night and lost both to their own nature.

Stabbed to death by Shagrat in the Tower of Cirith Ungol during the fight over Frodo's mithril-coat, on the night of 14 March T.A. 3019.