I found this chart comparing real skyscrapers to Barad Dur. I don’t remember ever seeing any concrete measurements for Barad Dur, not that Middle Earth used the metric system or something. Where was this stated that Barad Dur was this tall?
Looks to me like they’re basing it off the scale of the model used in the films, which would get you a pretty accurate reading of how tall it was meant to be in the films.
Now, whether the scale model that they created had anything to do with the way it was described in the books? That I don’t know. I don’t recall there being many specific descriptions of any place in Mordor that would leave someone able to create a detailed “accurate” scale drawing of a building or place, but it’s been over a year since I’ve read it last.
ETA - it’s also half built into a rock outcropping, which begs the question of where the building starts measuring, instead of the rock they built it into. I call that cheating to count the whole thing.
From the LOTR Wiki:
The Dark Tower was described as existing on a massive scale so large it was almost surreal, although Tolkien does not provide much detail beyond its size and immense strength. Since it had a “topmost tower” (the location of the Window of the Eye, from which the Eye of Sauron gazed out over Middle-earth), it presumably had multiple towers. It is otherwise described as dark and surrounded in shadow, so that it could not be clearly seen. It was known to have giant caverns or “Pits” under the immense structure which could have been prisons.
In the Lord of the Rings movies by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and his design team built a nine foot high miniature bigature of Barad-dûr for use in the film. Using the size scale for the model implemented for the films, the Dark Tower is depicted as being over 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) tall.
Without elevators, how long would it take to get to the top?
Did Sauron and Sauruman have all seeing eye line of sight communication?
According to this, it’s around 300 miles.
If we assume that Isengard is 10% the size of Barad Dur and that Middle Earth is the same size as regular Earth, and the bases are at the same elevation, a quick back of an envelope calculation would give us a height of around 12,000ft.
One solid reference point we have is Orthanc; the platform at its top was 500 feet above the surrounding plain. Orthanc was “only a little copy, a child’s model…” of Barad-Dur. It seems fair to assume, then, that Barad-Dur is substantially taller than Orthanc. We probably shouldn’t take that too literally, though.
I think the best guess we can manage would probably come from the description of Orodruin in relation to the Tower.
“The confused and tumbled shoulders of its great base rose for maybe three thousand feet above the plain, and above them was reared half as high again its tall central cone…”
So, we know Mount Doom rose 4500 feet from the plain, and that the 1500-foot central cone was described as starting 3000 feet up.
Sauron’s Road “climbed at last, high in the upper cone, but still far from the reeking summit, to a dark entrance…”
“High in the upper cone” suggests that it’s over half way up the cone, but if it’s still far from the summit, it can’t be much over that. The halfway point would be 750 feet up the cone; if we take the entrance to be at the 1000-foot point, it would fit the description pretty well. That puts the entrance at 4000 feet.
The entrance “gazed back east straight to the Window of the Eye in Sauron’s shadow-mantled fortress.”
If we take that “straight” literally, the Window of the Eye was level with the entrance to the Chambers of Fire, which would certainly suit Sauron’s design aesthetic. According to the Encyclopedia of Arda, the Window of the Eye is an opening in the tallest tower of Barad-dur. I think we can take it as being close to the highest point on the tower.
So, based on all of that, we could argue that Barad-dur rises roughly 4000 feet from the plain, though its base is surrounded by pits and its foundations–reinforced by the power of the Ring–may be rather mountain-like themselves. Going back to Orthanc, that would put it at a 1:8 scale, which is indeed a “model” scale, though a fairly large model.
But the view from the observation deck, while depressing, is fabulous. And the restaurant on the next floor down sells freshly cooked meals, not microwaved fare like some other observation-deck diners.
And the Orc tour guides aren’t as surly as the ones at Orthanc.
From the cookbook “How to serve Man”, no doubt.
The embarrassing part is that it’s eight hundred years after their opening and they still haven’t rented out the available office space in the mid-levels.
Well, their efforts were cut somewhat short by the tower’s destruction.
Speaking of which, you sheeple don’t really think that Barad-dur was destroyed by a group of renegade halflings, do you? It was obviously orchestrated by Sauron himself. Only a fool would believe the cover story about two hobbits causing the tower to collapse by throwing a ring into a lava pit miles away.
And besides, the blast pattern is entirely inconsistent with what my calculations predict for a Ring of Power-based explosion. You can trust me on this, I spent two whole months in a magic jeweler’s program in Gondor.