Dead Marshes

The fens

East of the cliffs of the Emyn Muil the land fell into a wide, reeking wetland of pools, reed-beds and quaking mud, stretching for many miles towards the plain of Dagorlad and the mountains of Mordor. There were no roads, and the ground would swallow a traveller who stepped off the hidden causeways of firmer earth that wound among the meres. Mist lay on the water, and at night small lights flickered over the pools and lured the unwary in.

The dead

What made the Marshes horrible was the sight beneath the surface. In the deepest pools, if one looked down, faces could be seen lying under the water: Men, Elves and Orcs, some fair and some grim, all dead, and their weapons rotting with them. These were the fallen of the Battle of Dagorlad at the end of the Second Age, buried where they fell on the plain, over whose graves the marshes had crept in the long centuries since. Gollum explained to the hobbits that the faces could not be touched; whoever tried to reach them would join them.

In S.A. 3434 the host of the Last Alliance defeated Sauron's armies on Dagorlad, and the dead of both sides were buried on the plain. The marshes to the west spread eastward over the graves through the Third Age, and by the time of the War of the Ring they had become a place shunned by all except Gollum, who crossed them alone in his years of wandering and found the paths through. On March 1 and 2, 3019 he led Frodo and Sam through the fens, two days of stumbling from firm patch to firm patch. Sam fell and saw the faces, and Frodo was nearly drawn to them by the candle-lights before Gollum pulled him on. On the second night a Nazgûl flew overhead, and Gollum crouched in terror; on March 4 they came out of the marshes onto the slag-heaps before the Morannon. The Host of the West skirted the Marshes on its march to the Black Gate three weeks later.

The Dead Marshes lay between the eastern Emyn Muil and the Battle Plain of Dagorlad, north of the marshy Nindalf and south of the empty lands below Mirkwood. Their eastern edge gave onto the desolation before the Morannon.