Nazgûl

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nazgûl did not exist when J. R. R. Tolkien sat down to write The Lord of the Rings. The figure in dark clothes riding through the early chapter "Three is Company" was, at that stage, Gandalf. In 1938, Tolkien described his decision to transform that figure into a Black Rider as "an unpremeditated turn." What began as a single spontaneous choice grew, over the next three years, into nine of the most feared figures in all of fantasy literature. The connections between those riders, the One Ring, and Sauron himself did not come together immediately. Tolkien forged them when he wrote "The Mirror of Galadriel," hundreds of pages in, around the autumn of 1941. The Lord of the Rings gives them their title in a single phrase: Sauron's "most terrible servants." Their name is drawn from the Black Speech of Mordor. Nine men fell into Sauron's power. What happened to those men, and what an Old English book of spells contributed to their making, reaches further than most readers realize.

• 2. The Cost of Immortality

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  Three of the nine men were lords of Númenor, the once-powerful island realm; the others were kings from across Middle-earth. Sauron gave each a Ring of Power. Each ring was linked to the One Ring, into which Sauron had poured much of his own power. The corrupting influence greatly extended their lives. But immortality did not mean vitality. The rings gradually enslaved their bearers to Sauron's will. Each of the nine faded from substance into wraith-hood, invisible and bound. Their senses changed with their bodies. They had a sharp sense of smell. Their sight worked differently from that of living men: shapes in the world cast only shadows in their minds, and daylight weakened those shadows. In darkness, they could perceive things hidden from ordinary sight. That is when they were most to be feared. When all nine gathered together, the terror they radiated grew stronger. Sauron paid one price for this power: the Ringwraiths could not travel in secret. Their very presence announced itself. After the first overthrow of Sauron, late in the Second Age, the Last Alliance of Elves and Men scattered them. But their survival was guaranteed by the One Ring itself: as long as it endured, so would they.

• 3. The Witch-king of Angmar

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  After driving the Lord of the Nazgûl from the North, the Elf-lord Glorfindel delivered a prophecy. This enemy, Glorfindel declared, would not fall "by the hand of man." That defeat came during a Third Age campaign against Arnor. The Witch-king destroyed all three of Arnor's successor kingdoms: Rhudaur, Cardolan, and Arthedain. Tolkien speculated, in notes prepared for translators, that the Witch-king was himself of Númenórean descent. His kingdom had its capital at Carn Dûm. His second-in-command, named in Unfinished Tales, was Khamûl, called "the Black Easterling" and "the Shadow of the East." After his defeat by Glorfindel, the Witch-king escaped south and returned to Mordor. There he gathered the other eight Ringwraiths and prepared for Sauron's return. Under his direction, the Nazgûl besieged and captured Minas Ithil, the Gondorian fortress in the Ephel Duath. They acquired its palantír for Sauron, and the city became Minas Morgul, the Nazgûl's stronghold. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the Witch-king carried a mace. He threw back his hood to reveal a crown on an invisible head. Two figures stood nearby: Éowyn, niece of King Théoden of Rohan, and the hobbit Merry Brandybuck. Merry drove an enchanted blade of Númenórean make into the Witch-king's body. Éowyn drove her sword between his crown and mantle. A woman and a hobbit together fulfilled Glorfindel's ancient prophecy. Command of Mordor's remaining forces fell to Gothmog, the "lieutenant of Morgul," whose race Tolkien left unspecified.

• 4. Terror as Weapon

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  Dr. Jennifer Urquart, writing in Mallorn, defines the Black Breath's normal course. She describes it as "progressive loss of consciousness and hypothermia, leading to death." She characterizes it as a "spiritual malady" combined with physical symptoms: fear, confusion, reduced consciousness, and weakness. It was contracted, she writes, by "excessive proximity" to a Nazgûl. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, it afflicted many. Aragorn used the herb athelas to heal those stricken. Scholars Judy Ann Ford and Robin Anne Reid note that this act confirmed Aragorn, to the people of Gondor, as the true King. The Morgul-knife operated on a related principle. At Weathertop, the Witch-king drove one into Frodo Baggins's shoulder, breaking off a shard in the hobbit's flesh. The fragment would, if left, have turned Frodo into a wraith. Elrond had to destroy it by melting. Michael and Victoria Wodzak raise a puzzle: Tolkien never states that the Witch-king breathed on either Merry or Éowyn. Instead, Éowyn is described as raising "her shield against the horror of her enemy's eye." The Wodzaks conclude that the Black Breath was the Witch-king's pneuma, his evil spirit, which radiated outward without physical contact. John Garth, Tolkien's biographer, traces this imagery to a direct precedent. He cites Tolkien's First World War experience "of smoke barrages, gas attacks and 'animal horror' on the Somme" as a likely source.

• 5. The Fell Beasts

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  The soldier Beregond of Gondor called the Nazgûl's flying mounts "Hell Hawks." In a letter, Tolkien referred to them as "Nazgûl-birds." Neither name appears in the text of The Lord of the Rings. Within the book, they are known only as "fell beasts," a term Tolkien also applies to other creatures, even once to the wizard Gandalf. Tolkien's description of the creature ridden at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is graphic. It was "a winged creature," he wrote, "naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear." Its "vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers; and it stank." He stated that he "did not intend the steed of the Witch-king to be what is now called a 'pterodactyl.'" Yet he acknowledged that "obviously it is pterodactylic." The creature might be, Tolkien mused, "a last survivor of older geological eras." Because the beasts go unnamed in the text, derivative works press "fellbeast" or "fell-beast" into service. The medievalist Marjorie Burns draws a comparison to Sleipnir, "Odin's eight-legged otherworldly horse" from the Poetic Eddas. She observes that Gandalf's horse Shadowfax resembles Sleipnir in his miraculous speed, almost seeming to fly. The Nazgûl's mount actually flies, but Burns calls it a "negative image" of Odin's steed. She notes that both Odin and the Nazgûl share the power to cause blindness.

• 6. An Old English Inheritance

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  Edward Pettit, writing in Mallorn, states that nine is "the commonest 'mystic' number in Germanic lore." He points to the Lacnunga, an Old English book of spells, as a probable source for several features of the Nazgûl. Tolkien, Pettit states, certainly knew this text. The Lacnunga's "Nine Herbs Charm" offers a cure against "nine fugitives from glory," "nine poisons," and "nine flying diseases." Pettit proposes that a second charm, titled "Against a Sudden Stabbing Pain," provided multiple attributes of the Nine Riders. Henry Sweet's translation of that charm describes riders who were "loud... when they rode over the hill" and "resolute when they rode over the land." Pettit connects those riders to the thundering hooves and piercing cry of Tolkien's Nine. The charm also mentions the "work of a witch," which Pettit suggests may have contributed to the figure of the Witch-king of Angmar. The same charm invokes gods, elves, and witches as sources of supernatural harm; this grouping may have shaped the Nazgûl's aura of power drawn from multiple planes. Pettit identifies the charm's most striking textual parallel in a single couplet: "If a piece of iron is in here... heat shall melt it!" The Lacnunga's imagery of iron, wound, and fire matches an episode in Tolkien's text almost exactly.

• 7. Words Bent and Twisted

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  Jason Fisher opens his analysis of Tolkien's naming choices with Edmund Wilson's dismissal. Wilson had called The Lord of the Rings "a philological curiosity." For Fisher, this is not an insult but a compliment. Tolkien was a philologist. Fisher traces "wraith," meaning spectre in modern English, through a history of folktale usage. The Brothers Grimm, William Morris, and George MacDonald had all used the word. "Wraith" connects to English "writhe" and to Old English wrīþan, meaning to bend or twist. Fisher links it further to Gothic wraiqs, meaning curved or crooked, and Gothic wraks, meaning a persecutor. A cousin is English "wreath," from Old English wrida, meaning a band wound around something, which is to say a ring. Old Saxon wred means cruel. All of these words, Fisher writes, stem from the Indo-European root *wreit, meaning to turn, bend, or wind. The Black Speech word nazg, meaning ring, may unconsciously connect to Gaelic nasc, also meaning a ring. The word gûl means wraith in Black Speech. Its English homophone "ghoul" derives from the Arabic ḡūl, a demon that feeds on corpses. In Tolkien's invented language Sindarin, gûl carries the additional meaning of "magic." Fisher also finds a link between the Sindarin root ñgol, meaning wisdom, and the Noldor. These were Fëanor's elves, who became, in Fisher's words, "bent and twisted" by desire for the Silmarils. The only named Ringwraith apart from the Witch-king is Khamûl. Fisher connects his name to Welsh kam, meaning crooked, and kamy, meaning to bend. That root appears in Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Fisher speculates that Tolkien may have absorbed it through Lancashire dialect forms like caimt, meaning crooked or bad-tempered. Tolkien had served with the Lancashire Fusiliers in the First World War.

• 8. Nine Against Nine

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  At the Council of Elrond, Elrond makes a formal announcement. He declares: "The Company of the Ring shall be Nine; and the Nine Walkers shall be set against the Nine Riders that are evil." The Inklings scholar Ariel Little examines that opposition closely. He describes the Nazgûl as "homogeneous, discordant, intensely individualistic," bound together not by fellowship but by Sauron's power. Gandalf's account of their condition, from "The Shadow of the Past," is stark. "Mortal Men, proud and great," Gandalf explains, "fell under the dominion of the One." They became, in his words, "Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants." Little writes that they had lost their identities as humans. Beneath their black clothing, Tolkien calls them "nothingness." The evil characters throughout The Lord of the Rings, Little notes, are marked by infighting, "hate-filled discord," and what he calls an "anti-community." Against this, the Company of the Ring stands as its inverse. Little describes the Company as "diverse, bound by friendship, relying on each other's strengths." Frodo calls Aragorn, viewed initially with suspicion, "dear to me." The friendship between the Dwarf Gimli and the Elf Legolas astonished even the other members of the Company. The Christian commentator Ralph C. Wood writes that "the greatness of the Nine Walkers lies in the modesty of both their abilities and accomplishments." Rebecca Munro observes that in the Company, "no one acts alone without dependence on the deeds of others." Tom Shippey reads the Nazgûl as functioning at multiple stylistic levels. At the simplest, they are story elements, dangerous opponents. At the romantic level, they are the adversaries of heroic protagonists. At the mythic scale, the Lord of the Nazgûl deploys "words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone." Yvette Kisor argues that the Nazgûl never lose physical substance despite their invisibility. They need real mounts to travel and can wield real swords. When Frodo, wearing the One Ring, entered the twilight world, the Nazgûl appeared to him solid, not shadowy. Steve Walker describes Tolkien's approach as a "gradual incarnation of bodiless presence." Each new detail adds to what Walker calls an "increasingly infernal vision." That vision extended well beyond Tolkien's pages. George R. R. Martin's 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag features a rock band named the Nazgûl. Their promoter is found ritually murdered on the tenth anniversary of the band's breakup.