The dark and foreboding arch that guarded the way into the Paths of the Dead beneath the Dwimorberg, the Haunted Mountain. Those Paths were haunted by the shades of the Oathbreakers, after they were cursed by Isildur for breaking their allegiance to him. The Gate was closed to mortal Men throughout the Third Age; in all that time only one Man dared to pass it - Baldor of Rohan - and he was lost. Not until the end of that Age, as foretold in ancient prophecy, did Aragorn succeed in walking the haunted Paths and allowing the Dead to finally fulfil their broken oath.
Tolkien did not intend the form Gate of the Dead to appear in the text of The Lord of the Rings. He corrected it to Door of the Dead, but this change was not put into place until many years later, and so earlier editions of the book contain a reference to the Gate, rather than the Door, of the Dead.
Notes
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The Gate was said (in The Return of the King V 3, The Muster of Rohan) to have been 'made by those who are Dead', which seems to imply that it was the work of the Dead Men after they inhabited the Paths of the Dead. That in turn would suggest a date after II 3441, when Isildur's curse fell on the Men of the Mountains.
In other commentary, however, Tolkien suggests that the Paths of the Dead and their Gate were older than this. The Paths had at one time been an underground temple of the Men of the Mountains, only becoming the 'Paths of the Dead' after the curse fell. These comments com from a note to the essay The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor reproduced in The Nature of Middle-earth. We have no strong dating evidence for the making of this temple, but the fact that its Gate was 'made by those who are Dead' seems to imply that it would have been made relatively late in the Second Age.
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- Updated 26 August 2025
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