Utumno

The first stronghold

When Melkor returned to Arda during the Spring of the world, while the Valar rested on Almaren, he did not come openly. He went to the far north, where the light of the Lamp Illuin was dim and cold, and there he delved a vast fortress under the earth, Utumno. Its halls and pits went deep beneath the mountains he raised about it, and from it a blight spread across the north: the forests sickened, the beasts became monsters, and the cold of the place reached south into Middle-earth. Spirits who had been drawn to Melkor in the beginning gathered to him there, chief among them the Balrogs, and Sauron, once a Maia of Aulë, became his lieutenant. From Utumno Melkor went out and cast down the two Lamps, breaking the first shape of the world, and after the Valar withdrew to Aman he ruled Middle-earth unchallenged from it for a long age. As an outer defence against attack from the West he later built Angband nearer the coast and gave it to Sauron.

The Elves and the Orcs

When the Elves awoke at Cuiviénen, Melkor knew of it before the Valar did. He sent shadows and evil spirits to haunt the hills about the water, and a dark hunter on horseback to take those who strayed; the Elves who vanished were, the Eldar afterwards believed, carried to the pits of Utumno and there tormented and bred into the Orcs, a mockery of the Children of Ilúvatar that was held to be the vilest of all Melkor's deeds. Whether this account is the whole truth the Elvish loremasters themselves were unsure, but it was the tradition that the Noldor brought to Beleriand.

The War of the Powers

When Oromë found the Elves and brought news of them to Valinor, the Valar resolved that the Elves must be made safe before they could be summoned west. They marched out of Aman in full strength, the only time before the War of Wrath that they went to war in their own persons, and Melkor's servants were driven back across the north-west of Middle-earth in a battle whose ruin was remembered in the shape of the lands ever after. The Valar then laid siege to Utumno, and the assault was long and terrible; the earth was shaken, the seas broke into the land, and the Elves at Cuiviénen felt the ground tremble though they saw nothing. In the end the gates were broken and the vaults unroofed. Tulkas went down into the deepest pit, wrestled with Melkor and threw him, and Melkor was bound with the chain Angainor that Aulë had made and carried to Aman, where he was sentenced to three ages in the Halls of Mandos.

The Valar did not find everything. They searched the pits of Utumno and destroyed what they found, but Sauron and the Balrogs escaped or lay hidden, and the outer fortress of Angband was not thoroughly explored. This was the seed of all the wars of the First Age: when Melkor returned to Middle-earth after the Darkening of Valinor, the Balrogs came out of Angband to meet him and he rebuilt his power there rather than in the ruins of Utumno. Utumno itself was never re-occupied, and its name survived only in Sindarin as Udûn, which the Elves used both for the old fortress and, in the Third Age, for the northern vale of Mordor behind the Black Gate, and which Gandalf invoked when he named the Balrog of Moria a flame of Udûn on the bridge of Khazad-dûm.

Utumno lay in the far north of the original Middle-earth, under mountains Melkor raised in the north-east, beyond the reach of the Lamp's light. Angband stood well to the west of it, under the Iron Mountains near the coast facing Aman. After the wars of the Valar the north of the world was so changed that the site of Utumno could no longer be identified.