Daniel Etherington

When I saw  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and the scenes involving Moria, one thing that struck me was – if Moria was such a major kingdom for the dwarves, how come the door was so small? I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and the Silmarillion, but my Tolkien knowledge was still a bit patchy. Serious fans could probably have told me straight away. That’s because the Fellowship entered through the West-gate, aka the Doors of Durin, aka the Hollin Gate. And that wasn’t the main, original gate. The dwarves began constructing Moria from the east, from Dimrill Dale, which is adjacent to Lothlorien. The first, main entrance to Moria is therefore the East-gate, or Dimrill Gate.

One of the reasons I got into playing the excellent MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online was because I wanted to see more of Moria than is seen in the films. So one exciting thing was reaching the First Hall – the oldest area of Moria the dwarves mined – and exiting Moria through the Dimrill Gate for the first time. Now that’s a proper door, and you could actually imagine it accommodating the necessary trade traffic etc to support a vast underground kingdom like Moria, or Khazad-dûm as it was originally known, the Dwarrodelf.

Screengrabs from games never really get across the atmosphere of a place, but the artists of Turbine, the developers of the game, have done incredibly work. Although Peter Jackson and his team created some of the best, most epic cinema ever with the films, and artists over the years have visualised Middle-earth with great skill and imagination (notably the estimable Alan Lee, who was a major influence on Jackson’s vision for the films), one thing I’m enjoying about the game is just how comprehensively it can create a detailed, populated Middle-earth and hopefully will continue to do so all the way to Minas Tirith and on into (*ulp*) Mordor.