Caradhras

The Redhorn

Caradhras rises at the heart of the Misty Mountains, the first and greatest of the three peaks that stood over Khazad-dûm. Its western face is a wall of dull red rock, which gave it the Sindarin name Caradhras and the Dwarvish Barazinbar, both meaning Redhorn, and its summit is a tower of snow that the sun lights before any other peak. South of it stand Celebdil the Silvertine and Fanuidhol the Cloudyhead, and between the three lies the deep cup of Dimrill Dale on the eastern side.

Over the mountain's northern shoulder ran the Redhorn Pass, called the Redhorn Gate, the road by which the Elves of Eregion and the Dwarves once passed between Eriador and the Anduin vales. It climbed from the ruined land of Hollin up a long ravine, crossed the saddle beneath the peak, and came down on the far side by the Dimrill Stair into the valley of Mirrormere. The pass was high and narrow, exposed to every wind, and dangerous long before the Dwarves left Moria. Its worst reputation came from the mountain itself, which the Dwarves believed held an ill-will of its own. Rock-falls and sudden snows seemed to strike at travellers who tried the crossing, and Gimli remembered it as a mountain that had been cruel long before Sauron returned.

Mithril

Beneath Caradhras the Dwarves found the lodes of mithril, the true-silver, which was found nowhere else in Middle-earth. Light as a feather, hard as dragon-scale and never tarnishing, it made Khazad-dûm the richest kingdom of the Dwarves and the envy of Elves and Men. The Dwarves followed the veins ever deeper and northward under the mountain, and it was in that pursuit that they broke into the prison of the Balrog. After the fall of Moria no more mithril was mined, and the shirt given to Bilbo by Thorin, later worn by Frodo, was reckoned worth more than the whole Shire.

Caradhras was already known as a hard crossing in the Second Age, when the road from Eregion to Lórien went over it. In T.A. 1980 the Dwarves delving for mithril in its roots released Durin's Bane, and after the Dwarves fled the pass was left to the orcs. In 2509 Celebrían, riding from Rivendell to Lórien, was ambushed on the pass, taken and tormented; she was rescued by her sons Elladan and Elrohir but never recovered her joy and sailed West the next year.

The most famous attempt on the Redhorn Gate was that of the Fellowship on the night of January 11 to 12, 3019. Gandalf and Aragorn preferred the pass to the road under the mountains, but as the company climbed a blizzard fell out of a clear sky, stones came down the slopes, and the drifts grew deeper than the hobbits were tall. Whether the storm was the work of the Enemy or the mountain's own malice, the company could not go on. Boromir and Aragorn forced a path back down through the snow, and the Fellowship turned instead to the West-gate of Moria. Two weeks later Gandalf's fight with the Balrog ended on the neighbouring summit of Celebdil, and the mountains were not troubled by the Balrog again.

The northernmost of the three peaks above Moria, in the central Misty Mountains south-east of Rivendell and north-west of Lothlórien. The Redhorn Pass crosses its northern shoulder from Hollin to the Dimrill Stair and Dimrill Dale.