Nazgûl

The Nazgûl (from Black Speech 'ring', and 'wraith, spirit')introduced as Black Riders and also called Ringwraiths, Dark Riders, the Nine Riders, or simply the Nineare fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. They were nine Men who had succumbed to Sauron's power through wearing Rings of Power, which gave them immortality but reduced them to invisible wraiths, servants bound to the power of the One Ring and completely under Sauron's control.

The Lord of the Rings calls them Sauron's "most terrible servants". Their leader, known as the Witch-king of Angmar, the Lord of the Nazgûl, or the Black Captain, was Sauron's chief agent for most of the Third Age. At the end of the Third Age, their main stronghold was the city of Minas Morgul at the entrance to Sauron's realm, Mordor. They dress entirely in black. In their early forays, they ride on black horses; later they ride flying monsters, which Tolkien described as "pterodactylic". Their main weapon is terror, though in their pursuit of the Ring-bearer Frodo Baggins, their leader uses a Morgul-knife which would reduce its victim to a wraith, and they carry ordinary swords. In his final battle, the Lord of the Nazgûl attacks Éowyn with a mace. The hobbit Merry Brandybuck stabs him with an ancient enchanted Númenórean blade, allowing Éowyn to kill him with her sword.

Commentators have written that the Nazgûl serve on the ordinary level of story as dangerous opponents of the Company of the Ring; at the romantic level as the enemies of the heroic protagonists; and finally at the mythic level. Tolkien knew the Lacnunga, the Old English book of spells; it may have suggested multiple features of the Nazgûl, the Witch-King, and the Morgul-knife.

The Nazgûl appear in numerous adaptations of Tolkien's writings, including animated and live-action films and computer games.

Fictional history

Second Age

The remaining eight Ringwraiths attack the Army of the West during the Battle of the Morannon. When Frodo claims the Ring for his own in Mount Doom, Sauron, finally realizing his peril, orders the remaining eight Nazgûl to fly to intercept him. They arrive too late: Gollum seizes the Ring and falls into the Cracks of Doom, destroying the Ring. That ends Sauron's power and everything he had brought into being using it, including the Nazgûl.

Steeds

left|thumb|upright=1.25|Tolkien stated that the "fell beasts" that the Nazgûl rode, while not intended actually to be [[pterodactyls, were "obviously ... pterodactylic". In the absence of a proper name, derivative works sometimes press "fellbeast" or "fell-beast" into service.

In the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where the Lord of the Nazgûl rode one of the flying beasts against King Théoden of Rohan, his mount is described as:

Concept and creation

Development

Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings with no conception of Black Riders at all. The horseman in dark clothes in the early chapter "Three is Company" Frodo's ring, too, was simply a magic ring conferring invisibility, both in The Hobbit and early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, with no link to Sauron. However, Tolkien was at the time starting to consider the true nature of the Ring, and the idea that it had been made by the Necromancer, and drew itself or its bearer back to him. The Black Riders became Ringwraiths when the hobbit, at that time called Bingo rather than Frodo, discussed the Riders with the Elf Gildor, later in the same chapter. Over the next three years, Tolkien gradually developed the connections between the Nazgûl, the One Ring, Sauron, and all the other Rings of Power. The pieces finally all came together when Tolkien wrote "The Mirror of Galadriel", some hundreds of pages later, around the autumn of 1941.

Medieval origins

The number of the Nazgûl, nine, may be derived from medieval folklore. Edward Pettit, in Mallorn, states that nine is "the commonest 'mystic' number in Germanic lore".

Pettit further proposes that Tolkien may have made multiple uses of another Lacnunga charm, "Against a sudden stabbing pain", to derive multiple attributes of the Nazgûl. He states that Tolkien certainly knew the charm. In Henry Sweet's translation:

Pettit writes that Tolkien may have used the "loud" riders to come up with the "thundering hooves" and "piercing cry" of the Nine Riders. The supernatural beings mentioned in the charm – gods, elves, witches – may naturally have suggested the Nazgûl's magical power; in particular, the "work of a witch" may have resulted in the Witch-king of Angmar. Finally, the Morgul-knife that breaks off in the victim's body, and which Elrond has to destroy by melting, matches the "piece of iron ... in here... heat shall melt it!" Fisher notes that the word has a history in folktale and fantasy including usage by the Brothers Grimm, William Morris, and George MacDonald.

"Nazgûl" has the Black Speech roots nazg, ring, and gûl, wraith. Fisher writes that the former may well be connected, unconsciously on Tolkien's part, to Gaelic nasc, a ring. Gûl has the meaning "magic" in Tolkien's invented language of Sindarin. Fisher comments that this has an English homophone in "ghoul", a wraith, which derives from Arabic غُول‎ ḡūl, a demon that feeds on corpses. The Sindarin word is related to ñgol, wise, wisdom, and to Noldor, Fëanor's elves who became in Fisher's words "bent and twisted" by the desire for the Silmarils. as is recorded in Samuel Johnson's 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language.

Invisible, but corporeal

[[File:Nazgûl mirando el crepúsculo.jpg|thumb|A Nazgûl, depicted as a shadowy but solid body, cloaked and hooded, wearing a sword, and mounted on a horse Frodo is in danger of "fading" permanently into invisibility and the twilight world, as the Ringwraiths have done, living "in another mode of reality". She writes, too, that Merry's sword, with the special power to sever the Witch-king's "undead flesh" and in particular to overcome the "spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will",

Black Breath

The Nazgûl spread terror and despair among their enemies, and discomfit those on their own side. The Black Breath is stated to have afflicted many during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Dr Jennifer Urquart, writing in Mallorn, describes its normal course as "progressive loss of consciousness and hypothermia, leading to death". She comments that the Black Breath, contracted by "excessive proximity" to a Nazgûl, seems to be a "spiritual malady" combined with "fear, confusion, reduced levels of consciousness, hypothermia, weakness and death."

Michael and Victoria Wodzak discuss how the hobbit Merry Brandybuck can be affected by the Black Breath when the Witch-king has not noticed him, pointing out that Tolkien nowhere says that the Nazgûl breathes on him or on Éowyn. Instead Éowyn "raised her shield against the horror of her enemy's eye", and the Wodzaks comment that the Nazgûl uses his eyes "to overwhelm". In their view, the seeming inconsistency is resolved by identifying the Black Breath with his "pneuma", his evil spirit, and assuming that it is this which causes the harm all around him. Garth comments that these names "anchor him in the primal night" of Tolkien's giant spiders, the Black Breath, the fog on the Barrow-downs, and the terror of the Paths of the Dead. He adds that this fog of terror may ultimately derive from Tolkien's First World War experience "of smoke barrages, gas attacks and 'animal horror' on the Somme."

In her Tolkienesque 1961 short story "The Jewel of Arwen", the fantasy and science fiction writer Marion Zimmer Bradley provides "Translator's Notes" which assert as part of her frame story that the Nazgûl were contaminated and enslaved by a monstrous form of radioactivity which transformed "the very cells of their protoplasm".

Opposed to the Nine Walkers

thumb|center|upright=2.6|Nine Walkers vs Nine Riders: diagram of Ariel Little's analysis of the enslaved Nine Nazgûl opposed by the free [[Company of the Ring. Tolkien made the two groups match in number but sharply different in character. They hack and slash the Hobbits' beds at The Prancing Pony inn, whereas Tolkien does not identify the assailants.

thumb|upright=0.6|A Nazgûl portrayed in [[Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy]]

In the Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Return of the King, the Nazgûl are robed skeletons with white hair. They ride winged horses, although the Witch-king rides a creature more in line with the book when he confronts Éowyn. The 1981 BBC Radio serial of The Lord of the Rings has the Nazgûl chant the Ring-inscription in the Black Speech of Mordor. The 1991 Russian television play Khraniteli features a group of Nazgûl galloping through a snowy pine forest; they wear black cloaks, with glimpses of red equipment.

In The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) by Peter Jackson, the Nazgûl are almost always concealed by cloaks; they attack the inn at Bree themselves. During the siege of Minas Tirith, the Witch-king wears a distinctive helmet over his hood resembling a mask and a crown, rather than the crown worn underneath his hood in the book. Their shrieks are distorted recordings of producer and screenwriter Fran Walsh's scream.

thumb|upright=0.6|[[John Howe (illustrator)|John Howe's illustration of the Witch-king's flying steed drove the design of the monsters in Peter Jackson's films. All nine Nazgûl are shown riding winged monsters. Jackson's monsters explicitly differ from Tolkien's description in that they have teeth instead of beaks. The Nazgûl use them in battle more extensively than in the book. In the film the Witch-king's mount is largely responsible for the death of Théoden and his horse Snowmane, a departure from the book. As confirmed in the films' audio commentary, the design of the monsters was based largely on illustrations by John Howe.

The fan-made 2009 film The Hunt for Gollum features Aragorn fighting a Ringwraith on the borders of Mirkwood.

In Jackson's 2012–2014 The Hobbit film trilogy, the men who became the Nazgûl are said to have been buried and sealed within the invented High Fells of Rhudaur. In the first film, Radagast briefly encounters the Witch-king while investigating Dol Guldur, and gives the Nazgûl's Morgul dagger to Gandalf to present at the White Council as proof of their return. In the second film, at Galadriel's behest, Gandalf heads to the High Fells and finds that all the Nazgûl have left the tomb. This confirms the Necromancer's identity as Sauron, as the Nazgûl appear alongside their master in the third film in spectral forms wearing Morgul armour and fight Elrond and Saruman before being driven away by Galadriel.

Games

The Nazgûl are featured in the video game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel Middle-earth: Shadow of War. In the latter, Isildur is revealed to be one of the Nazgûl before he is killed by the game's protagonist, Talion. Talion takes Isildur's ring to prolong his life and eventually becomes Isildur's replacement until the demise of the Nazgûl in the Return of the King.

For the expansion to its real-time strategy game The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II, The Rise of the Witch-king, Electronic Arts invented the name Morgomir for one of the Nazgûl.

Influence

The fantasy novelist George R. R. Martin's 1983 The Armageddon Rag tells the tale of a rock promoter who had managed a band named the Nazgûl, and was found ritually murdered on the 10th anniversary of the band's breakup.

Fictional history

Second Age

Steeds

Concept and creation

Development

Medieval origins

Invisible, but corporeal

Black Breath

Opposed to the Nine Walkers

Games

Influence

Notes

References

Primary

Secondary

Sources