This is probably the most trivial question I've ever asked here, and relates to something mentioned in passing. The passage occurs in The Two Towers, Book IV, "The Taming of Smeagol". While attempting to climb down from a mountain, Frodo and Sam are caught in a fast-moving storm caused by Sauron. Tolkien writes:
With that [Frodo] stood up and went down to the bottom of the gully again. He looked out. Clear sky was growing in the East once more. The skirts of the storm were lifting, ragged and wet, and the main battle had passed to spread its great wings over the Emyn Muil; upon which the dark thought of Sauron brooded for a while. Thence it turned, smiting the Vale of Anduin with hail and lightning, and casting its shadow upon Minas Tirith with threat of war. Then, lowering in the mountains, and gathering its great spires, it rolled on slowly over Gondor and the skirts of Rohan, until far away the Riders on the plain saw its black towers moving behind the sun, as they rode into the West. But here, over the desert and the reeking marshes the deep blue sky of evening opened once more, and a few pallid stars appeared, like small white holes in the canopy above the crescent moon.
Here are the relative positions of the cloud, Frodo, the Riders, the setting sun, and Mordor, as I understand them (obviously not to scale, but that doesn't matter). Note that the cloud never moves anywhere near the Riders - it is always east of them, and the sun is always west of them.
Unless I don't understand weather in Middle-earth, this doesn't make any sense. How can a storm cloud "move behind the sun"? Every storm cloud I have ever seen has been decidedly closer to me than to the sun. Storm clouds are in front of the sun, never behind it. What is Tolkien trying to describe here?
Answer
My reading of that line requires you to imagine the perspective of the Rohirrim. They're in the west, watching a huge, unnatural storm front move in from the east.
Assuming that it's around mid-day (or at least not first thing in the morning), the sun will have risen into the sky (from the east). But the storm front, like a wall of cloud, is now moving in from the east, seemingly chasing it across the sky.
Notice how many words in that passage are about movement. That whole paragraph is about watching the storm move, how it moves, where it moves. And, most importantly in the sentence you bolded, how it moves relative to the riders. They are riding west, but the storm clouds are closing in on them.
Until the cloud overtakes and blocks out the sun, it is "behind" the sun.
So essentially, the section that reads:
...until far away the Riders on the plain saw its black towers moving behind the sun, as they rode into the West.
could be "translated" as:
...until far away the Riders on the plain saw the black clouds swiftly overtaking the sun, as they rode into the West.
A famous example
You know the famous scene in Independence Day (and plenty of other scifi stories) where the giant spaceship slowly moves its shadow across the city?
That's what is being described here. The cloud front is "behind" the sun, moving quickly across the sky, darkening everything in its path, until it finally overtakes the sun and the world (or the viewer at least) is plunged into darkness.
Update with your sketch
Using the sketch you added to your question, I made my own notations to illustrate my interpretation.
By this moment in time, the Sun has already risen in the east and moved west across most of the sky. The clouds also started in the east and are moving west, but having only recently started, they haven't moved as far across the sky yet.
From the perspective of the Riders, the clouds seem to be chasing the sun across the sky. And because they haven't gotten as far, they seem to be "behind the sun" in the sense of one racer being "behind" another.
The clouds are chasing the sun, they're overtaking the sun. When they reach it, blot it out, and keep going, they will have passed the sun, but until they reach it, they are behind the sun.
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