Mordor Shouldn't Work

Summary

The video examines whether Mordor could realistically feed and supply its armies. Its conclusion is that the logistics would be daunting, but Tolkien’s descriptions of southern farmland, roads, supply convoys, food reserves, and roadside water cisterns make the system more plausible than the image of Mordor as a uniformly barren wasteland suggests.

How the analysis is framed

Tolkien describes many of Mordor’s resources and infrastructure but gives few numerical figures. The narrator uses Tolkien’s details where available and applies real-world estimates to fill the gaps.

Because the size of Sauron’s forces is uncertain, the analysis considers a range of 60,000–150,000 orcs, using 100,000 as a working estimate. It treats an orc as comparable to a person doing strenuous military work, requiring about 4,000 calories per day. This is an estimate, not a figure given by Tolkien.

Mordor’s farmland and population

The northern region familiar from Frodo and Sam’s journey is harsh, with ash, fumes, scarce water, and little vegetation. But it is not all of Mordor. Tolkien describes extensive fields worked by enslaved people around the Sea of Núrnen in southern Mordor. Aragorn later frees Mordor’s slaves and gives them land in that region.

Orcs eat food resembling bread and dried meat, and Tolkien indicates that they need food and water. The video therefore treats them as consumers of ordinary agricultural supplies.

A large standing army would make up only part of Mordor’s population. The narrator considers several possible ratios:

• If 100,000 soldiers are 20% of the population, the total population is 500,000.
• At 10%, the total is 1 million.
• At 5%, the total is 2 million.

For a population of 1 million, the video estimates that Mordor would need roughly 197,000 tons of grain per year and 1,100–2,600 square miles of cropland, accounting for medieval yields, seed, and storage losses. For 2 million people, it estimates a need for 2,100–5,000 square miles of cropland.

Based on Tolkien’s map, the Sea of Núrnen is estimated to be over 100 miles long and up to about 50 miles wide. A rough rectangular area of those dimensions would be around 5,000 square miles—and that is the lake itself, not the surrounding land. The narrator concludes that space for farming is not an obvious obstacle.

Food supply and transport

A force of 100,000 orcs would need about 400 million calories per day, equivalent to roughly 120 tons of dry cereal.

Because Núrnen’s farms are far from many northern military camps and fortresses, transport appears to be the main challenge for supplying food. Using an estimated one-ton capacity for a loaded cart and a travel speed of about 20 miles per day, the narrator estimates:

• The route from the agricultural region to the Barad-dûr area at 200–275 miles.
• The route to the Black Gate at 325–400 miles.
• About 2,000–3,000 carts on the road to supply the army’s daily food needs near Barad-dûr, or 4,000–5,000 near the Black Gate.

These estimates cover food alone. The roads would also carry weapons, building materials, and siege equipment, while draft animals would have their own feed requirements.

The narrator argues that Sauron would not need to transport each day’s food from the fields on the day it was eaten. With decades to prepare, he could build reserves near the front and replenish them gradually using roads and convoys. Tolkien’s descriptions of roads, long caravans, and permanent military camps support this possibility.

Water: the harder logistical problem

Food can be dried, stored, and carried in bulk. Water is much heavier and cannot easily be stockpiled for long journeys.

For 100,000 hard-working soldiers in hot, dry conditions, the video estimates a need of 600–1,300 tons of drinking water per day—about five to eleven times the weight of the food estimate. Even five days of water at the low end would weigh about 3,000 tons, making it unrealistic to transport all the water from southern Mordor in carts.

The video’s key discovery is that Tolkien describes cisterns along the roads. These provide water for troops crossing dry or waterless parts of Mordor, with water brought from nearby mountains. In the narrator’s view, the cisterns solve the most serious supply problem: instead of hauling all the water from Núrnen, the army can replenish its supplies along the way.

Overall conclusion

The video begins by expecting Mordor’s food or water supply to be an obvious weakness. Instead, it finds plausible answers in Tolkien’s worldbuilding: fields in the south, enough land for cultivation, roads and transport, the ability to store food near the front, and cisterns for water.

The narrator does not claim that every part of Mordor’s economy would work perfectly, but concludes that the available details make it difficult to disprove Mordor’s logistics outright. The humorous closing returns to the story’s original solution: Frodo still has to take the Ring to Mount Doom.

Speakers and sources featured

• Speaker: The video’s narrator and host, who presents the calculations and commentary.
• Primary fictional source: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings, especially the descriptions of Mordor, its armies, Núrnen’s fields, roads, and cisterns. Frodo, Sam, and Pippin are referenced as characters, but the subtitles do not establish them as separate speakers.
• Other sources of estimates: Real-world assumptions about military calorie needs, medieval crop yields and cart travel, and measurements taken from Tolkien’s map. The subtitles do not name specific external experts or publications.