Middle-earth Battles Ranked

SECTION: Why Tolkien Almost Never Counted His Armies

In most stories, Tolkien tells us who stood, and who fell. He gives us names. He tells us what the ground was called afterwards, and whether grass ever grew there again. But he almost never gives us the numbers.

In his late essay on the disaster at the Gladden Fields, Isildur rides north out of Osgiliath with his three sons and "his Guard of two hundred knights and soldiers, stern men of Arnor and war-hardened." Bowmen, "no more than twenty, it is said; for no such need had been expected." That's about as precise as Tolkien ever gets about a fighting force.

Then the orcs come down out of the trees on the thirtieth day. The precision stops there.

"In the dimmed light their number could only be guessed, but the Dúnedain were plainly many times, even to ten times, outnumbered."

Could only be guessed. That's a familiar shape across all three ages for Tolkien. He counts his own side and estimates the enemy.

The Pelennor is the case that matters most, because it's the battle most of us picture when we picture Middle-earth at war. Tolkien doesn't tell us how big Sauron's army is there. He says nothing about it. Instead he gives us a sentence that shuts the question down altogether.

"No few had fallen, renowned or nameless, captain or soldier; for it was a great battle and the full count of it no tale has told."

Nobody ever took that tally, and Tolkien says so in the middle of his biggest battle.

Which makes all the figures that get quoted for that field worth a second look. Two hundred thousand orcs. Eighteen thousand Southrons. Tolkien didn't write anything about that. The eighteen thousand is based on a comparison: the text says only that the Rohirrim "at their onset were thrice outnumbered by the Haradrim alone." So when you hear that, somebody just multiplied six thousand Rohirrim by three and published the answer.

There is one real five-figure number in the War of the Ring, and it's a strange one. Merry, in the wreckage of Isengard, had this to say about what came out through the gate on the second of March:

"of all sorts together, there must have been ten thousand at the very least... They took an hour to pass out of the gates."

That one is actually Tolkien's. But it's a hobbit's eyeball estimate of an army walking out of a gate, and that army split at the Fords of Isen and fought a separate battle before any of it reached Helm's Deep.

Further back, the record gets thinner. In the whole First Age — six great battles, four centuries of siege, three Elvish kingdoms destroyed — Tolkien gives us exactly one army size. Just one. Turgon comes out of hiding at the Unnumbered Tears "with an army ten thousand strong, with bright mail and long swords and spears like a forest." Every other force in that Age feels like just a fraction of that. Every other First Age army we hear about is described the same way Turgon's isn't — not a number. But a comparison that tells you it was either almost wiped out, or completely overwhelming relative to what it faced. None of them get a digit — just a sense of proportion.

And at the top of the scale, where the figures ought to be largest, Tolkien gives us nothing. When he writes about Morgoth's strength in the last war of the First Age, he writes only that it "had become great beyond count, so that Anfauglith could not contain it."

Tolkien could have put a figure there and chose not to. The register he writes battles in doesn't deal in empirical precision. It deals in names, weather, grief, and consequence.

So a ranking is still possible, just not by headcount, because the headcounts were never written. We'll need to pick a different vector — how long the fighting lasted, what was actually won, who was there to see it, what the survivors called it afterwards.

Every one of these categories, gets us a different ranked order.

SECTION: Nineteen Dead at the Battle of Bywater

Let's start at the bottom. For some reason, the bottom is where Tolkien is happy to provide specifics.

By the time Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin rode back into the Shire, Saruman — broken at Isengard, going by "Sharkey" now — had already gotten there first. His men had spent months running the Shire as an occupied country, and the hobbits had gone quiet and compliant under it. Merry and Pippin weren't having that. They raised the Shire in open revolt, and the ruffians' last stand came at Bywater.

On the third of November, in the year thirty nineteen of the Third Age, a few hundred hobbits fought a gang of ruffians in a lane at Bywater blocked at both ends with farm carts. It was over in an afternoon, and it produced the most precise casualty return in the entire legendarium.

"Nearly seventy of the ruffians lay dead on the field, and a dozen were prisoners. Nineteen hobbits were killed, and some thirty were wounded."

That's four hard figures for a scuffle in a country lane. This, from the same author who wouldn't give us any numbers related to the Pelennor, seven months earlier and hundreds of miles south.

But Tolkien tells us why the Shire counted.

"though it happily cost very few lives, it has a chapter to itself in the Red Book, and the names of all those who took part were made into a Roll, and learned by heart by Shire-historians."

A Roll. A list of names. Learned by heart. The Shire never needed a casualty list before, so the one time it got one, it kept every name and made children memorize them. Nineteen dead is almost trivial compared to the Pelennor but it is a catastrophe against Hobbiton.

Now, the Shire's other battle. Greenfields, up in the Northfarthing, in the year twenty-seven forty-seven of the Third Age — eleven forty-seven by the Shire's own calendar. Tolkien's timeline deflates it in the entry itself.

"Bandobras Took defeats an Orc-band in the Northfarthing."

An orc-band. That's the scale Tolkien's own chronology puts on the Shire's one famous war.

Bandobras Took, called Bullroarer, was four foot five and large enough to ride a horse, which for a hobbit was the remarkable part. He was the Old Took's great-grand-uncle, and he charged the goblins of Mount Gram and knocked their king Golfimbul's head off with a wooden club.

"It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment."

That's how the Shire remembers its first war. As a golf joke.

There is a superlative buried in all this, and you could say it is a ranking claim. The line says:

"the only battle ever fought in the Shire."

That belonged to Greenfields, and only up to the third of November, thirty nineteen. What Tolkien wrote about Bywater was this:

"the last battle fought in the Shire, and the only battle since the Greenfields"

So Bywater closes the run, it doesn't stand alone in it. After that one afternoon, the Shire had exactly two battles in its recorded history, and one of them is a punchline.

Another small detail involves our friend Frodo. He was on the field and never drew a weapon. His whole job that day was "to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons."

The seventy ruffians went into an old sand-pit beside the road, and the hobbits called it the Battle Pit afterwards. One hillside grave under a great stone, a sand-pit, a Roll of names, and a chapter of its own. And so this pattern seems to run through all the lore: the smaller the fight, the more carefully it got written down.

SECTION: Four Hundred Years: The Siege of Angband

So let's try to think about a ranking using a different category. Not how many, but how long.

If we rank the major battles by duration, the table turns almost completely over, because the ones everybody knows are the shortest events in the book.

The longest military operation in the legendarium is the Siege of Angband. We've done an episode on this and we'll probably do another.

After the Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle, in year sixty of the First Age, Fingolfin's Noldor set up camp in front of Morgoth's fortress and decided to stay a while. They were still there almost four hundred years later in four fifty-five. Tolkien's phrase for it is "wellnigh four hundred years of the Sun."

Four centuries. That's the better part of the entire history of the kingdom of Rohan.

What started it was a win that the Elves took as a warning.

In The Dagor Aglareb Morgoth sent orc armies pouring out of Angband, testing the Noldor's defenses, and the Elves crushed them — drove them back and destroyed nearly all of them. A clean, total victory, hence "Glorious." But the warning was in how far the orcs had gotten before being stopped.

"A victory it was, and yet a warning; and the princes took heed of it, and thereafter drew closer their leaguer, and strengthened and ordered their watch."

So this was a blockade. But the blockade was never closed. The Iron Mountains at Morgoth's back were "impassable to the Noldor, because of their snow and ice," so for four hundred years the blockade had a gap in it that everybody knew about and nobody could plug. Calling that a battle may be a bit of a stretch. It was a border, held under arms, for longer than most real civilizations have lasted.

Second on the clock is the siege of Barad-dûr.

"They laid siege to it for seven years" — from thirty-four thirty-four of the Second Age to thirty-four forty-one. Seven years camped in front of that tower, in that air, on that ground. Anárion is killed in the sixth year, Gil-galad and Elendil at the end of the seventh. Oropher of the Greenwood and Amdír of Lórien had already fallen on the plain at Dagorlad before the siege began, and Thranduil came home from that war with barely a third of the army he'd marched out with. Elrond stood all seven years, and so did Círdan.

Third on the clock is the one hardly anybody puts on a list of battles at all. The Dwarves fought the orcs of the Misty Mountains for six years, from twenty-seven ninety-three to twenty-seven ninety-nine, working their way along the whole range hold by hold, "from Gundabad to the Gladden." Most of that war happened underground, in tunnels the Dwarves had to clear one at a time, and it only surfaces into a battle we can name on the last day of it. But that battle, the Battle of Nanduhirion, is the one that opens with Azog beheading Thror. It ends with Dáin killing Azog on the steps of the East Gate of Moria.

Fourth: Minas Ithil. This is the origin story of Minas Morgul. Under siege for two years, from two thousand to two thousand and two of the Third Age, and never relieved. Built by Isildur and ended up as the Witch-king's stronghold.

Now to the better known battles.

The famous ones are a bit different. The named battles of the First Age come with stated lengths, and they're short. The Battle-under-Stars lasted ten days. The Unnumbered Tears lasted six days, and the name doesn't attach until day four, because it took that long for the disaster to become obvious. Gondolin fell in a single night, during a midsummer festival.

The battles from the War of the Ring are shorter still. The Pelennor is one day, dawn to dusk on the fifteenth of March. The fighting at Dale is three. Isengard is drowned in a single night by trees. Bywater takes an afternoon.

And then there's Utumno.

The siege of Utumno happened back in the Years of the Trees, which are counted in the Valar's own years rather than in years of the Sun, so it can't be dropped into this table at all. However long it ran, the people it was fought for didn't know it was happening.

"the Quendi knew nothing of the great Battle of the Powers, save that the Earth shook and groaned beneath them, and the waters were moved, and in the north there were lights as of mighty fires."

A whole war for the freedom of the Elves, and the Elves it freed only experienced it as weather.

So the clock gives us a real scoreboard and it's an absurd one. First place goes to a border-watch nobody narrates, and the Pelennor is a rounding error.

SECTION: Azanulbizar, and What Victory Cost the Dwarves

What if we rank by the stakes instead? The consequence of the battle. What did winning actually buy? Rank the fighting that way, and Middle-earth's most complete victories might be its emptiest.

The clearest case is Azanulbizar, and it begins with a corpse and a bag of coins.

Thrór, old and half-wandering, walks into Moria alone. Azog kills him, beheads him, and brands his own name across the forehead. Then he sends the old Dwarf's companion out with a message: "if his family wish to know who is now king here, the name is written on his face. I wrote it! I killed him! I am the master!" And insult added to injury. Azog tossed out a small bag with a few coins in it.

"Here's your fee, beggar-beard, it held a few coins of little worth."

Thrór's son Thráin hears all of this and just wasn't having it.

What follows takes six years. Three go to getting the army together, because the Dwarves send word to every house of their kindred and every house comes. Then they attack every orc-hold "from Gundabad to the Gladden. Both sides were pitiless, and there was death and cruel deeds by dark and by light." It ends in twenty-seven ninety-nine, in the valley before Moria's East-gate, on a day "at the memory of which the Orcs still shudder and the Dwarves weep."

Frerin dies there, and so does Fundin. Thorin's shield is split and he picks up an oak branch to fight with, which is where the name comes from. Náin shouts a challenge at the steps, and Azog comes out and breaks his neck. Then a young Dwarf goes up the same steps.

"Right before the doors he caught Azog, and there he slew him, and hewed off his head. That was held a great feat, for Dáin was then only a stripling in the reckoning of the Dwarves."

It was a total victory. Azog dead and headless, his army broken, the field held, and the East-gate of Khazad-dûm standing open. Then, we assess the damage.

"But no feast nor song was there that night; for their dead were beyond the count of grief. Barely half of their number, it is said, could still stand or had hope of healing."

The next morning there's an argument. It starts with Thráin saying the obvious thing — "Good! We have the victory. Khazad-dûm is ours!"

He gets this as a response:

"We fought this war for vengeance, and vengeance we have taken. But it is not sweet. If this is victory, then our hands are too small to hold it."

Dáin, is blunter about the prospects of Khazad-dûm.

"Beyond the shadow it waits for you still: Durin's Bane."

He had just killed Azog in front of the Gate, and he walked down from the Gate looking like a man who just saw a ghost. He felt the darkness that lurked within, and he was scared.

The same pattern of complete ruin runs through Gondor's history. At Fornost, in nineteen seventy-five, Angmar is destroyed so thoroughly that "not a man nor an orc of that realm remained west of the Mountains" — and the northern kingdom the war was fought to save, was already gone. No king ruled in the North for more than a thousand years, and the Witch-king moved south to Minas Morgul.

At the Battle of the Camp, in nineteen forty-four, Eärnil wipes out the Wainriders and drives the survivors into the Dead Marshes. But King Ondoher and both his sons had already been killed north of the Morannon. Ondoher's line ends there. A kinsman, Eärnil, takes the crown; Eärnil's son Eärnur rides to Minas Morgul in twenty-fifty and never comes back; and Gondor is governed by Stewards for the nine hundred and sixty-nine years after that.

Elrond had a phrase for this, and three Ages to think about it:

"many defeats, and many fruitless victories."

Even his own wins were open to scrutiny.

"Sauron was diminished, but not destroyed. His Ring was lost but not unmade. The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed."

So when the stakes are high, the victories seem to carry the highest cost. There might not be a best, biggest, or greatest battle. They are all different. And they all hurt.

SECTION: Dale and Erebor — The War No Chapter Tells

Now here's something else to consider. Our sense of "how big was this battle?" is warped by whether or not someone we're already following was a witness, not by the battle's actual scale or stakes. So battles have happened in Middle-earth that we have very few details about.

March, thirty nineteen.

Most of us know what happened at the Pelennor. But the War of the Ring was fought on many fronts. Two days later, at the far end of the map, a battle began that killed two reigning kings. That fighting only gets four sentences in an appendix, with no scene, no dialogue, and no witnesses named.

"It lasted three days, but in the end both King Brand and King Dáin Ironfoot were slain, and the Easterlings had the victory. But they could not take the Gate."

Brand ruled Dale. Dáin ruled Erebor — the same Dáin who went up the steps after Azog two hundred and twenty years earlier. He was two hundred and fifty-two years old at Erebor's gate, on foot, with an axe. Gandalf, telling it afterwards, calls it a wonder.

"it was a wonder rather that in his great age he could still wield his axe as mightily as they say that he did, standing over the body of King Brand before the Gate of Erebor until the darkness fell."

Three days of fighting, two crowned heads dead, a siege afterwards, and an attack that broke the Easterlings for good. All of it in one paragraph.

The same week, Lothlórien was assaulted three separate times out of Dol Guldur. While the Rohirrim were coming over the Rammas, Galadriel's people were fighting their second battle in four days. Thranduil had "long battle under the trees and great ruin of fire" in the north of Mirkwood.

Then at the end of March, Celeborn took the army of Lórien across Anduin in boats and finished the battle. They took Dol Guldur, and Galadriel cleaned the place up.

Thranduil and Celeborn met in the middle of the forest and renamed it — Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves. Mirkwood stopped existing that day, and not much of that is written down.

Gandalf makes the argument himself, right at the end, and it's worth hearing in full:

"Yet things might have gone far otherwise and far worse. When you think of the great Battle of the Pelennor, do not forget the battles in Dale and the valour of Durin's Folk. Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador, night in Rivendell. There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now hope to return from the victory here only to ruin and ash."

The most consequential operation of the previous century has the same problem. But worse. In the late summer of twenty-nine forty-one, the White Council attacked Dol Guldur and drove Sauron out of Mirkwood, months before the Battle of Five Armies. It has no battle scene, no casualty figure, no named commanders, and no name of its own. Gandalf left the Company mid-quest to go take care of business, and this is his entire account:

"I went off as soon as the expedition against Smaug was well started, and persuaded the Council to attack Dol Guldur first, before he attacked Lórien. We did, and Sauron fled. But he was always ahead of us in his plans."

And even the description of the great battle that we do get, comes through someone who can barely see it. Bilbo watches Five Armies from a spur of the Mountain, invisible, understanding almost none of it. He spots the Eagles coming and sends his alert — and then a stone knocks him unconscious, and that is the last of the battle he sees. He has to be told afterwards who won.

So witnesses and account details make any ranking conversation less scientific. And that's what makes this whole discussion difficult. Interesting, but difficult.

SECTION: How the Elves Named and Ranked Their Own Wars

What if I told you that there's already a ranking already baked inside the books? Mostly chronological though...

Chapter twenty of the Silmarillion is called, in full, "Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad." That's a chapter title doing double duty as a scoreboard. The wars of Beleriand have an official order: the First Battle, then the Battle-under-Stars, then the Glorious Battle, then the Battle of Sudden Flame, then the Fifth, and then the Great Battle that ends the Age.

Six entries. And there seems to be some pre-requisites for making the list.

Around the year one fifty-five of the First Age, Morgoth pushed an army out through the Firth of Drengist and the people of Hithlum beat it back. Tolkien's verdict:

"This was not reckoned among the great battles, for the Orcs were not in great number, and only a part of the people of Hithlum fought there."

So there's a membership test, and Tolkien gives us the criteria: enemy strength, and what percentage of the population participated. So we know some battles won't make the cut. The Elves kept a list, and they kept things off it.

The list even got revised. For a long time the Battle-under-Stars held first place. Then Tolkien promoted a different one above it: Morgoth's assault on Thingol's Sindar, fought the same year, before the Sun had risen for the first time. Denethor of the Nandor died on Amon Ereb in that one, cut off because his people "were light-armed, and no match for the Orcs, who were shod with iron and iron-shielded and bore great spears with broad blades." His folk "took no king again," and Melian's Girdle went up around Doriath afterwards.

That battle is now first in the order. It's also the only one of the five battles of Beleriand Tolkien never gave an Elvish name to. So the one promoted to the top of the list is the one nobody named.

You could say, the names describe the consequences.

Dagor Aglareb is "the Glorious Battle" — glory built into the word. Dagor Bragollach welds "sudden" to "leaping flame" for a war that arrived as a river of fire.

And then the fifth one drops the word "battle" altogether. Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Tears Unnumbered. The Elves who lived through it stopped calling it a battle and named it after the grief instead.

Some fighting gets ranked by silence. In four fifty-six of the First Age, a year after the Sudden Flame, Fingolfin rode alone to the gates of Angband and challenged Morgoth to single combat. Three times he was beaten to his knees and three times he got up. He lost, and Morgoth "went ever halt of one foot after that day." Then Tolkien puts the duel outside the system entirely:

"The Orcs made no boast of that duel at the gate; neither do the Elves sing of it, for their sorrow is too deep."

Neither side would rank it, because neither side would speak about it.

Burial does the ranking too. The dead of the Unnumbered Tears went into one hill on the plain, and the hill got named twice, once for each grief — Haudh-en-Ndengin, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears. Then the details:

"grass came there and grew again long and green upon that hill, alone in all the desert that Morgoth made."

The grave might get a better description than the battle does.

The Dwarves at Azanulbizar had too many dead to lay in stone, so they burned them, against everything they believed about their own bodies.

"There was a great felling of trees in the valley, which remained bare ever after, and the reek of the burning was seen in Lórien."

Then the exception turned into the highest honor they had. To this day a Dwarf will say proudly of one of his ancestors, "he was a burned Dwarf", and that is enough.

SECTION: The War of Wrath: Largest Battle, Thinnest Tale

We are dancing around the ranking question quite a bit. But now we're at the top of the scale. And we can point to a ranking claim that Tolkien actually makes.

It's about the host of the Last Alliance, the army that marched on Mordor at the end of the Second Age. The familiar battle we see at the beginning of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring.

"It is said that the host that was there assembled was fairer and more splendid in arms than any that has since been seen in Middle-earth, and none greater has been mustered since the host of the Valar went against Thangorodrim."

Tolkien tells us himself that The War of the Last Alliance takes second place.

First place goes to the war that broke Thangorodrim.

Then a witness backs him up. Elrond saw both armies, and at Rivendell, thousands of years later, he describes standing in the second.

"I remember well the splendour of their banners... And yet not so many, nor so fair, as when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so."

That's the greatest army the Second Age could raise, and the one man who had stood in both of them ranks it second.

So who turned up for the first one? The Vanyar under Ingwë's banners, the Noldor who had never left Valinor under Finarfin, and the Teleri — robbed of their ships and their kin by Noldor at Alqualondë — who crewed the fleet east and then "stayed aboard their vessels, and none of them set foot upon the Hither Lands."

On the other side, Tolkien dreamt up the biggest force in history and refuses, one last time, to count it.

"There was marshalled the whole power of the Throne of Morgoth, and it had become great beyond count, so that Anfauglith could not contain it."

The description we get of the War of Wrath is almost entirely about the aftermath. Eärendil comes out of the sky and kills Ancalagon the Black "before the rising of the sun," and the dragon falls onto the towers of Thangorodrim and breaks them. Of the whole dragon-host, all are destroyed except two. Morgoth is bound with the chain Angainor, and "his iron crown they beat into a collar for his neck." That's pretty much the entire account.

And then the earth breaks. The entire northern region of western Middle-earth sink to the bottom of the sea. Swallowed by the ocean.

Sirion was no more. The biggest river in Beleriand, gone, and Beleriand with it. What survives above water is Lindon and three islands — the drowned peaks of Brethil, Dorthonion and Himring, standing out of the sea where a country used to be.

That is the largest battle in the history of Arda. And here's what we know of it: no casualty figure, no army size for either side, no date and no duration anywhere in the published Silmarillion. The forty-two years it supposedly ran are worked out from a bare chronological table, and Tolkien never wrote the story itself.

Tolkien's detailed year-by-year chronicle of the First Age stops dead at year four ninety-nine, and he never went back to it. Everything after that survives as one-line entries in a timetable. Doriath. Gondolin. The Havens. The final war. The largest event in the history of the world exists as a list, because its author ran out of road before he reached it.

And Tolkien wrote the reason into the story itself.

"Of the march of the host of the Valar to the north of Middle-earth little is said in any tale; for among them went none of those Elves who had dwelt and suffered in the Hither Lands, and who made the histories of those days."

The people who kept the records weren't there, and the people who were there didn't keep records.

Three Ages later it had reversed completely. Fewer than six thousand men reached the Black Gate at the end of the War of the Ring — and that battle we have in full, from the inside, hour by hour, with names.

So the ranking that actually holds is the one that runs backwards.

At the bottom of the scale: nineteen dead, thirty wounded, seventy bodies in a sand-pit beside a road, and every one of those names written down and learned by heart. At the top: an army too large for the plain that had to hold it, a continent on the sea floor, and no count of anything at all.

The smaller the fight, the fuller the record. The bigger the war, the emptier the page. That's not carelessness. It wasn't a mistake by Tolkien. In Tolkien's world, histories are kept by the people who came through them. The hobbits who came through Bywater went home to a Shire that had never lost nineteen of anybody, and they wrote down every name.

The ones who came through the breaking of Thangorodrim, The War of Wrath, sailed home over water standing where their country used to be, and there was nobody left on that shore to write anything at all.