>>9390757Now, the tower itself; according to the books:
>"A peak and isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one, but near the summit they opened into gaping horns, their pinnacles sharp as the points of spears.... Between them was a narrow space, and there upon a floor of polished stone, written with strange signs, a man might stand five hundred feet above the plains."Another one:
>”They came now to the foot of Orthanc. It was black, and the rock gleamed as if it were wet…. On the eastern side, in the angle of two piers, there was a great door, high above the ground; and over it was a shuttered window, opening upon a balcony hedged with iron bars. Up to the threshold of the door there mounted a flight of twenty-seven broad stairs,…. This was the only entrance to the tower; but many tall windows were cut with deep embrasures in the climbing walls: far up they peered like little eyes in the sheer faces of the horns.”The main points are "black and gleaming hard," which suggests the tower was made of some kind of obsidian or other shiny black rock, "four mighty piers of many-sided stone welded into one," and the description of the 27 steps leading up to the door, and the balcony above that, and the “tall windows” that are “cut with deep embrasures” (pic #2 is what “embrasures” look like in castle walls), and most importantly: "a man might stand five hundred feet above the plain." Scholars have generally decided that this last point definitively means that Orthanc is about 500ft (152.4m) tall, with the spikes making it a little taller than that. Combine this description with Tolkien’s own sketches of Orthanc (pics #1 and #3) and you get a pretty good picture of what its supposed to look like: rough carved, almost like four towers or sections meeting in the middle before splitting at the top. The movie version is much more sleek, refined, and industrial looking.