Witch-king of Angmar

No personal name survives for the chief of the Nine. In the annals of Gondor and Arnor he appears only under titles, and the works of Tolkien never disclose what he was called in the days when he was still counted among living Men. The style by which he is best known, the Witch-king, joins a word for sorcery with the plain fact of kingship, and it was attached to him in the North because he ruled the realm of Angmar; the fuller form, Witch-king of Angmar, is a formula of the Dúnedain chroniclers rather than a name he gave himself. Elsewhere he is the Lord of the Nazgûl or chief of the Ringwraiths, a rank rather than a designation, and after Minas Ithil passed into shadow he is styled the Lord of Morgul. The Rohirrim and the men of the City, who met him in the field, spoke of him more simply as the Black Captain.

The collective name of his order, Nazgûl, belongs to the Black Speech devised by Sauron, and its first element is the word for ring that also stands in the inscription of the One, spoken aloud at the Council of Elrond; the Westron rendering, Ringwraith, translates the same idea for readers of the Red Book. The second element recurs in the Sindarin name Minas Morgul, which Gondor understood as a tower of sorcery, so that the wraith-lord's two chief titles turn upon the same association of ring-craft and dark art. The name Angmar itself is nowhere glossed by Tolkien, though the element ang, iron, is well attested in Sindarin naming.

By kind he was a Man, and mortal by nature; the later tradition holds that the Nine Rings came into the hands of kings, warriors and sorcerers of old, three of them lords of Númenórean blood, though which of the Nine each was is not recorded. Those who accepted the rings gained seeming length of days and a power that answered their ambition, and were undone by it: they faded out of the visible world into the realm of shadow, seen only by the bearer of the Ruling Ring, and their wills were bound to the will that governed the Nine. In this condition they were called the Úlairi in Elvish reckoning. The greatest of them was accordingly not a spirit of another order but a man whose kingship had been prolonged past its natural term and emptied of its own purpose.

The chronicles place the first appearance of the Ringwraiths in the Second Age, about the year 2251, when the wearers of the Nine had at last passed wholly under the dominion of the Ruling Ring. Nothing is recorded of their chief before that date, and the annals of the age name none of them individually; they act throughout as instruments of Sauron's will and are counted among his chief servants. When Sauron assailed Gondor in 3429 and took Minas Ithil, and again in the war of the Last Alliance that ended with his overthrow in 3441, the Nine are not separately named in the record, but with the passing of their master's power they went out of the reckoning of the western lands for more than a thousand years. Their return was not perceived until it had already taken shape as a kingdom.

About the year 1300 of the Third Age a power arose in the north of the Ettenmoors, and the realm it governed was called Angmar. Arnor had already broken apart in 861 into Arthedain, Cardolan and Rhudaur, and the new adversary set himself to finish the division. Rhudaur fell first, passing into the hands of men hostile to the Dúnedain and subject to Angmar; then in 1409 a great assault came out of the north, the watchtower on Amon Sûl was thrown down and its king, Arveleg the First, was slain, and Cardolan was laid waste. In 1636 the Great Plague swept Eriador and emptied what remained of Cardolan, and evil spirits sent out of Angmar and Rhudaur took up their lodging in the deserted mounds of the Barrow-downs. Arthedain alone endured, and endured for three centuries more, but the war was one of attrition against a besieger who did not age.

In 1980 he came to Mordor and gathered the other eight there, and for a generation the Nine prepared. In 2000 they issued from the passes and laid siege to Minas Ithil, the eastern fortress of Gondor above the Morgul Vale; the city fell in 2002 and its palantír was taken, and thereafter it was named Minas Morgul and served as their seat. Forty years later Eärnur, who had fled from him at Fornost, was crowned King of Gondor, and a challenge to single combat came from Minas Morgul; the Steward Mardil restrained the king from answering it. When the challenge was renewed in 2050, taunting him with his old flight, Eärnur rode to the gates of Morgul with a small company and was never heard of again. No king ruled in Gondor for the next nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and the Stewards governed in the name of a line that had no heir.

The long quiet that followed ended with the hunt for the Ring. In the autumn of 3018 the Nine rode north out of Mordor as horsemen in black, crossed the Fords of Isen on the eighteenth of September and reached Sarn Ford four days later, forcing the Rangers who held it; four of them entered the Shire before dawn on the twenty-third. Their chief led the pursuit through Bree-land to the dell beneath Weathertop, where on the sixth of October he wounded Frodo Baggins in the shoulder with a knife whose splintered point was meant to work slowly and bring the bearer under his mastery. The hunt failed at the Ford of Bruinen a fortnight later, when the river rose against the riders and swept their horses away; unhorsed and scattered, the Nine were compelled to return to their master, and the Ring went on to Rivendell.

In the ordering of Sauron's servants the chief of the Nine stood first, and his office was that of a lieutenant rather than of an independent lord. He held authority wherever his master's designs required a commander in the field: as king in the North, whose true nature was not understood by the Dúnedain until long afterwards; as master of the fortress above the Morgul Vale, from which the Nine kept watch on the western passes; and in the last war as captain of the whole assault upon Gondor, with the levies of Harad and the orc-host of Minas Morgul under his hand and a lesser officer, Gothmog, to hold the field in his absence. His standing rested on the will he served rather than on any following of his own, and the annals attribute to him no purpose that was not Sauron's.

The weapon proper to him and to his order was dread. Men and beasts within reach of the Nazgûl lost heart and purpose before any blow was struck, and horses would not bear their riders towards them; those who endured the nearness of the wraiths fell into the sickness the leeches of Minas Tirith called the Black Breath, a cold and darkening of the mind that the healers of Gondor could not cure by their own craft. To this was joined an art of sorcery, from which both the northern kingdom and the tower of Morgul took their names; at the breaking of the City's gate he spoke words of power, and the timber and iron gave way under them. Gandalf reckoned that his strength waxed as his master's did, so that the captain who came against Minas Tirith was more formidable than the one who had ridden into Eriador the year before.

The limits were as plain as the powers. Being bound to a ring that Sauron held, he had no existence apart from that mastery, and every advantage he possessed was borrowed. Fire and running water both told against the Nine: torches drove them back from the dell beneath Weathertop, and the flood of the Bruinen unhorsed them, though Gandalf judged that the river had only scattered them and sent them home, since wraiths are not destroyed by such means. They hunted most surely at night, and their perception of the living world was oblique, working by scent and by the shadows that living shapes cast in their minds rather than by sight. Against a foe who did not fear him he was reduced to the strength of arm and steel, as the field before the City showed.

Every other tie he had was subordinate to the one that held him. His attachment to Sauron was not the bond of a vassal who might have withdrawn it, since the ring he had accepted was governed by another, and the annals show no scene of counsel between them: instructions arrive, and are carried out. Of family there is nothing at all. No wife, no child, no house is named for him, and this absence tells against the kings he made war upon, whose importance in the chronicles is inseparable from descent. His enmities, accordingly, were with lines rather than with individual men. In Eriador he simply outlasted the heirs of Isildur, and in Gondor the succession of Anárion ended in the king who took up his challenge, so that in both realms his adversary was a dynasty and his method was patience.

Within his own order the relations are almost invisible, for the Nine generally act as a single body and speak with one voice, and the Red Book distinguishes only their captain. The later papers name one other: Khamûl, an Easterling, reckoned second among them, who held Dol Guldur as Sauron's lieutenant there and took a share of the search in the Vale of Anduin while his chief worked westward. That the leadership of the hunt fell to the Witch-king is credited to his long acquaintance with Eriador rather than to any preference between them. Nowhere is there rivalry, friendship or disagreement among the Nine; they are colleagues in the sense that instruments in one hand are colleagues.

The figure was not present in Tolkien's first conception of the story. In the opening chapters written for the sequel to The Hobbit the pursuer on the road out of Hobbiton is simply a rider in black, with no order behind him and no captain marked out from his fellows, and his nature was so far unsettled that Tolkien noted the possibility that the rider might prove to be Gandalf — a thought he set down and did not follow. Christopher Tolkien's commentary on these papers shows how much of what later defines the character was accumulated by revision rather than planned: the number of the wraiths, the name of their order in the Black Speech, the northern kingdom and the fortress above the Morgul Vale all belong to later strata of the work. The episode beneath Weathertop was likewise rewritten more than once before the attacker, the knife and the manner of the wound settled into the form the published book gives them.

In Peter Jackson's three films the Lord of the Nazgûl is present from the pursuit through the Shire onward, though he is not named or explained until the last part; in The Return of the King he was performed by Lawrence Makoare, with his speech supplied by Andy Serkis, an arrangement that separates body and voice in a way the earlier films had not required. The chief departures are structural. Nothing of Angmar, of the northern war or of the flight of Eärnur is given, so the character arrives without the centuries of history the appendices supply, and the foretelling that he would not fall by a man's hand is attached to Éowyn's stroke alone rather than to an older prophecy, since Glorfindel does not appear in the films at all. The meeting at the broken gate of Minas Tirith was cut from the theatrical release and restored in the extended version, where the encounter ends with Gandalf's staff shattered — an outcome with no counterpart in the book, and one that reverses the balance Tolkien leaves undecided. The later Hobbit trilogy, drawing on appendix material for its Dol Guldur scenes, goes further and invents a tomb in the High Fells from which he is roused, an episode without any source in Tolkien.

The older adaptations treat him more sparingly. Ralph Bakshi's animated film includes the attack in the dell beneath Weathertop, but since it breaks off after Helm's Deep it never reaches Minas Morgul or the Pelennor, and the wraiths' captain remains an unexplained pursuer throughout. The Rankin/Bass television film of 1980 takes up the closing part of the story in about ninety minutes and compresses the siege of Gondor heavily, so that the figure who commands it is given little beyond his appearance at the City. The BBC Radio dramatisation of 1981, running to twenty-six half-hour parts, has room for more of the chronicle and is generally reckoned the closest of the older versions to the text; having no images to work with, it conveys him wholly through voice and through the reactions of those near him.