One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor

About

“One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor” (snowclone: “One Does Not Simply X into Mordor”) is a memorable quote from the 2001 fantasy epic film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Most derivatives usually pair the original quote with photoshopped images showing either Mordor, a fictional location from The Lord of the Rings franchise, or Boromir, the character who originally says the line, in a relevant situation to the text.

Origin

Lord of the Rings

The phrase “One does not simply walk into Mordor” (no comma needed) originates from a Council of Elrond scene in Peter Jackson’s 2001 film adaption of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring^[1]. Whilst (sp) discussing how to destroy the ring, Elrond explains that the ring can only be destroyed at Mount Doom and that someone must venture into Mordor to do so. After a silence where no member volunteers, Boromir points out the difficulty of this task by saying “One does not simply walk into Mordor.

Elrond: The ring cannot be destroyed, Gimli, son of Gloin, by any craft that we here possess. The ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom. Only there can it be unmade. The ring must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. One of you must do this.

Boromir: One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than just orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.

As a Snowclone

Use of the snowclone typically involves changing “walk” to another verb related to traveling (ex: One Does Not Simply X into Mordor), while other derivatives change “Mordor” to another location that has relevance to the situation depicted in the images (ex: One Does Not Simply Walk into Y). One of the first instances of this usage in image macro form was posted in a Something Awful thread on January 16th, 2004 ^[2].

Spread

The image macro from the Something Awful thread was used in a YTMND^[7] on May 3rd, 2004. Several other pages were created with a More Cowbell mashup^[8] created in September 2005 having over 20,000 views. Image macros appeared on humor blog My[confined]Space^[9][10] twice in 2006. Boromir appeared riding a cat on I Can Has Cheezburger^[11] on February 28th, 2007.

Since then, the phrase has spread via a Tumblr tag^[3], Memebase posts^[4], Reddit^[5] and a Facebook fan page^[6], which has over 41,000 likes. Google Maps has also implemented a reminder that one cannot simply walk into Mordor on their walking directions from a Wisconson address masked as the Shire to an address masked as Mordor in Illinois.^[14]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search for the phrase started in December 2005, when a gif of the phrase was circulating the web^[12], picked up again in October 2006, which may coincide with Rick Santorum explaining the Iraq war with a Mordor analogy.^[13]

External References