The Dead Marshes

The Dead Marshes are a vast and treacherous wetland in Middle-earth, lying northwest of the Black Gate of Mordor, between the Emyn Muil and the desolation before the gate. A dreary expanse of meres, pools, and mires haunted by ghostly lights and the faces of the dead, the marshes are one of the most desolate and uncanny places crossed by Frodo and Sam on their road to Mordor, guided through them by Gollum.

The Dead Marshes take their grim name from the dead faces that seem to lie beneath the water, the bodies, or the seeming, of Elves, Men, and Orcs who fell in a great battle on that ground in ages past, now drowned in the spreading mere.

Geography

The marshes spread over a wide, low region between the hills of the Emyn Muil and the barren wastes before the Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor. They are a maze of stagnant pools, reedy meres, quaking bogs, and winding channels, with treacherous footing and few safe paths. Pale candle-like lights, the corpse-candles, flicker over the water and lure the unwary to their deaths, and in the still pools the faces of the long-dead seem to gaze up, terrible and sad. The air is foul, and the way through is known only to a few.

History

In the deeps of the Second Age, the great Battle of Dagorlad was fought on the plain before the Black Gate, when the Last Alliance of Elves and Men marched against Sauron. Many fell there, of both hosts, and over the long ages the marshes crept north and spread to cover the graves and the battlefield, so that the dead now seem to lie beneath the meres. Whether the faces in the water are true bodies preserved or some phantom of the place, none can say, but they are dreadful to look upon.

In the story

Gollum guides Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes on the way to the Black Gate, warning them not to follow the corpse-candles or to look too long at the dead faces in the water, lest they be drawn down. The crossing is one of the most haunting passages of the hobbits' journey, a place where the weight of old death and the malice of the land press hard upon them, and where Sam glimpses the faces and is filled with horror before they come at last to the edge of the desolation that guards Mordor.