An arched entranceway that led through a wall of rock at the base of the Dwimorberg, the Haunted Mountain, into the Paths of the Dead. Marked with symbols and signs, and exuding an air of dread and terror, the Door had existed throughout most of the Third Age. In the early years of Rohan, it was braved by the King's son Baldor, who never returned from the darkness. Long afterwards, during the War of the Ring, Aragorn led his followers through the Dark Door in fulfilment of an ancient prophecy; he gained the allegiance of the Dead within and returned into the light on the other side of the White Mountains.
In many earlier editions of The Lord of the Rings, the 'Door of the Dead' is referred to as the 'Gate of the Dead'. Though Tolkien corrected the original form, his amendment was not incorporated into the text of the book itself for many years.
Notes
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In a note to the essay The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor (in The Nature of Middle-earth) Tolkien describes the Paths of the Dead as having been made originally as part of a temple complex by the Men of the Mountains. This gives us little detail in terms of dates, except to say that the Paths (and presumably also their Door) would have been constructed at some point during the Second Age.
We can perhaps narrow this dating down a little, because it was later said of the Door that it was 'made by those who are Dead' (a reference to the Dead Men, from The Return of the King V 3, The Muster of Rohan). This must mean that they made the Door before Isildur's curse fell on them, but taken literally it would imply that the builders belonged to the last generation of the Men of the Mountains (because earlier generations would not have been 'those who are Dead'). Following this reasoning, the Door would have been made in the last decades of the Second Age, but the sources here are all sufficiently vague that this cannot be said with any certainty.
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- Updated 13 March 2025
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