Nazgûl

In the ordering of Sauron's service the Nine stood first, and the ground of their obedience is stated plainly: the Rings that had bound them were not left in their own keeping but had been gathered back into their master's hand, so that nothing stood between his will and theirs. What they did, therefore, they did as instruments rather than as allies. They commanded armies and held fortresses when he required it, they went out as emissaries when a message needed to carry terror with it, and their standing errand was search — for the Ring, and for whatever bore it. The tradition preserved in the later compilation agrees with the tale itself on this point: they were the most dreadful of all his servants, darkness travelled with them, and their voices were counted among the worst of the terrors they brought.

Their strongest weapon was not the sword. Where they came, courage failed and the mind was overtaken by cold and by dread out of proportion to what the eye could see; those they touched closely fell into the sickness that the healers of Gondor called the Black Breath, a chill and a darkening of the spirit that could end in death, and against which ordinary skill availed nothing without the herb athelas in a healer's hands. They also possessed a knife made for their own kind of victory: the point broken off in Frodo's shoulder worked inward, and had it reached the heart he would have become a wraith of lesser sort, permanently under their mastery. Because they no longer belonged to the visible world, they saw what was hidden in it, and anyone who put on the Ring passed out of the sight of ordinary company and into theirs entirely.

Against this stood real limits. Their bodily force was slight compared with the fear that preceded them, and at the hollow beneath Weathertop they gave way before burning brands and a defender who did not break; open resistance of will, likewise, could hold them at a distance, and one of the Firstborn seen in his own power was something they were unwilling to face. Common steel troubled them little: the stroke that undid their chief on the Pelennor was delivered with a blade taken from a barrow, forged long before in Arnor by smiths whose work was directed against Angmar itself, and the narrative treats the choice of weapon as the reason the blow told. Beyond all this lay the plainest limit of all, that their existence was not their own; whatever they achieved was achieved on the strength lent them, and their end was fixed by the same hand that had made them.

Every bond the Nine had ran upward to a single point. Their tie to Sauron was not loyalty of the kind that can be given or withdrawn but possession, and it shaped everything else about them: they had no counsel of their own to offer him, no faction, and no recorded quarrel. Among themselves the relation was rank rather than fellowship. The chief commanded and the rest obeyed, and when they moved in companies of four or five one of them held the others together as an officer holds a troop; Khamûl, second to the Witch-king, is the only one shown in that middle position, set over Dol Guldur and later leading the party that crossed into the Shire. The later notes distinguish them by capacity rather than by character — one keener than his fellows at sensing what he sought, and correspondingly more confused when the sun was up — which is nearly all that is said of them as individuals. No source describes anything passing between them that could be called speech among equals.

Downward, their dealings were with subordinates and with allies of convenience. The garrison of their own city and the host that came out of it obeyed a lieutenant of Morgul who bore the name Gothmog, and their errands could be carried by orc-captains and by messengers who feared them; but nothing in these arrangements resembles trust. The one negotiation on record, the exchange with Isengard during the search, was conducted between a master's servants and a wizard whose own designs ran counter to theirs, and it yielded what they wanted only because the party holding the knowledge could not keep it.

Their opponents define them more sharply. Gandalf stood against them twice, once beset upon Weathertop and once alone before the broken Gate, and the encounters are set out as a contest of authority rather than of arms. Aragorn drove them from a fire in the wilderness with brands, and Frodo, whom they hunted as an object and not as a person, was preserved by the very people the Nine had no measure for: hobbits, whose obscurity was the reason the search went astray in the first place, and who twice proved able to resist what stronger men could not.

The name Nazgûl belongs to the Black Speech, the tongue that Sauron devised in the Dark Years for his servants, and its first element is the same word for 'ring' that stands in the fiery inscription of the Ruling Ring; the compound is rendered into the Common Speech as Ringwraith. Appendix E fixes its sound: the û is a long u, the g never softened, the stress on the first syllable. Beside this proper name a cluster of descriptive titles was in use, most of them coined by those who suffered them rather than by the wraiths themselves. In Gondor and among the Wise they were the Nine, or the Nine Servants of Sauron; in the north-west, where they were known chiefly by their black cloaks and black horses, they were the Black Riders or the Nine Riders, and in the last years of the War the Fell Riders.

They were not a separate kind but Men, and their history begins with the distribution of the Rings of Power. Nine of those rings came into the hands of mortals, and mortals proved the readiest of all peoples to be caught by them: what the Nine gave was length of days without renewal, mastery over others, and a slow subjection of the will to the One Ring and to the hand that held it. In the end the wearers passed out of the visible world altogether, so that only their garments, arms and horses gave them shape to ordinary sight, and they endured as spirits bound to Sauron's purpose rather than as living men. The Tale of Years places their first appearance in the Second Age, long before the making of their later stronghold, and their strength was always a borrowed strength, waxing and waning with their master's.

The later writings add an Elvish name, Úlairi, and a little detail about who these Men had been: kings, warriors and sorcerers of the elder days, among them three lords of Númenórean blood. Only two are individually distinguished. The greatest and chief of them was the Witch-king, afterwards styled the Lord of Morgul; the second in rank is named Khamûl, an Easterling, called the Shadow of the East. Of the remaining six nothing is recorded, neither name nor kindred, and the sources are equally silent on how far any memory of their former selves survived the fading.

The Tale of Years sets the first appearance of the Nazgûl in the year 2251 of the Second Age, long after the Rings of Power had been forged and dispersed; the entry marks the moment at which the nine wearers had passed out of ordinary sight and could be reckoned as a force in Sauron's service rather than as men. Of their part in the remaining twelve hundred years of that Age the chronicles say almost nothing, neither in the drowning of Númenor nor in the long war that followed. They vanish from the record with their master: when Sauron was overthrown at the end of the Age in 3441 and the One Ring passed out of his keeping, the Nine passed likewise into shadow, and for the greater part of a millennium and a half no chronicle in the West reports them.

They returned about the year 1300 of the Third Age, and their reappearance is bound up with the ruin of the northern kingdom. Their chief established himself in Angmar, beyond the Ettenmoors, and from there made war on the divided realms of Arnor for six and a half centuries. In 1409 his armies broke into Arthedain and Cardolan, the tower upon Weathertop was burned and its king slain; in 1974 Fornost itself was taken and the last northern king driven to his death in the ice. The victory was brief. In 1975 an army from Gondor under Eärnur, joined by forces out of Lindon and by Glorfindel of Rivendell, shattered the power of Angmar at Fornost, and the Witch-king fled south; Glorfindel's parting words, that he would not fall by the hand of man, were remembered long afterwards. In 1980 he came to Mordor and gathered the other eight about him there.

Their next work was against Gondor. In 2000 the Nazgûl came out of Mordor and laid siege to Minas Ithil, and in 2002 the city fell to them with its palantír; thereafter it was held as their own fortress and was called Minas Morgul, and Osgiliath below it was left desolate. In 2043 their chief challenged the new king Eärnur to single combat, and challenged him again in 2050; that year Eärnur rode down to the gates of Morgul with a small company and was never heard of after. No successor was crowned, and the Stewards ruled in his stead. During the Watchful Peace, while Sauron was absent in the East, the Morgul valley was quiet, but the wraiths were not gone from it; and in 2951, when Sauron declared himself openly, three of the Nine were sent north to hold Dol Guldur in Mirkwood.

The later account of the search for the Ring gives the shape of their last errand. In the summer of 3018 Sauron sent them out under his own compulsion, and they crossed the Anduin at Osgiliath by night under cover of an assault upon the city, then rode north in secret to find a land whose name their master knew only imperfectly. Their search along the Greenway and through the empty country by Tharbad was slow, for they had no certain map of the Shire and could not question openly; what they learned they had at last from Isengard, whether given willingly or under pressure. The narrative also notes the limits under which they worked: daylight hampered them, they read the world more by scent and by the shapes of shadow than by sight, and their chief strength lay in the fear their presence carried before them.

On the twenty-third of September four of them crossed the Sarn Ford into the Shire, and the pursuit that followed occupies the first book of the tale: the watching of Hobbiton, the road east, the failed attempt on the inn at Bree, and the hunt across the Midgewater country. On the sixth of October five of them closed upon the hollow beneath Weathertop, and there their chief wounded Frodo Baggins in the shoulder with a Morgul-knife, a stroke intended to bring him under their power rather than to kill. The chase ended on the twentieth of October at the Ford of Bruinen, where all nine rode into the water after their quarry and were caught by the flood that Elrond loosed. They were not destroyed; but they lost their horses and their raiment, and were driven back to Mordor to be re-clothed, which cost Sauron several months of the year he could least spare.

They came back mounted on winged creatures, and in this form served as scouts and as instruments of terror over long distances; one was brought down over the Anduin near Sarn Gebir in February 3019, though only its steed was killed. On the tenth of March the Lord of Morgul led the host of Minas Morgul out under the darkness sent from Mordor, took the ruins of Osgiliath, and harried the retreat of Gondor's forces across the Pelennor. On the fifteenth he broke the Great Gate of Minas Tirith, the only enemy ever to pass it; but the Rohirrim came at sunrise, and on the field he was destroyed by Éowyn of Rohan and Meriadoc Brandybuck, the words spoken of him at Fornost proving exact. The remaining eight fought on until the twenty-fifth of March, when Sauron recalled them from the battle before the Black Gate and sent them to Mount Doom; they arrived too late, and were consumed in the ruin of the Ring that had made them.

The wraiths entered the story before Tolkien knew what they were. In the earliest drafts of the opening chapters, written when the hero still bore the name Bingo and the tale was conceived as a second hobbit-book, a rider in black halts on the road above the Woody End and stoops from the saddle as if smelling for something; Christopher Tolkien notes that the figure was unpremeditated, and that his father, having written the scene, briefly weighed the possibility that the rider was Gandalf come to play a trick on the travellers. The menacing detail of the sniffing was thus present from the first, while the explanation of it was not.

What the riders were emerged only as the lore of the Rings was worked out behind them. In the successive versions of the chapter that became The Shadow of the Past, the ring left by Bilbo hardens by stages into the Ruling Ring, and the pursuers are attached to it as men whom lesser rings had consumed; the fixed number, the distribution of nine rings to mortals and the long account given at the Council of Elrond belong to later stages of drafting still, and were revised repeatedly before reaching their published shape. The end of their chief was likewise unsettled: the drafts and outlines for the battle upon the Pelennor pass through several arrangements of the encounter before the deaths on the field took their final form.

Every screen and radio version has had to deal with the Nine early, and the older ones differ chiefly in the means available to them. In Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 the riders were among the figures worked up from live-action footage rather than drawn outright, which gives them a texture distinct from the surrounding animation; because the film breaks off after Helm's Deep, only the pursuit from the Shire to the Ford of Bruinen is covered, and the later history of the Nine is never reached. The BBC Radio dramatisation of 1981, in twenty-six half-hour parts, is the fullest of the older treatments and keeps the shape of the hunt substantially as the book has it, the wraiths being conveyed by voice and sound alone. The Rankin/Bass television film of 1980 begins after the point at which the other two versions leave off and so encounters the Nine only in the last war; its chief episode involving them is the fall of their leader on the Pelennor, retained within a narrative otherwise heavily compressed.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003 is the version whose alterations are most often discussed. Their chief was played in the third film by Lawrence Makoare, with Andy Serkis supplying the voice. The departures are structural rather than incidental. Glorfindel is removed from the flight to the ford and Arwen takes his part, summoning the flood herself. The Barrow-downs are omitted, and with them the origin of Merry's sword, so the films offer no equivalent explanation for why the stroke on the Pelennor told against a foe otherwise proof against men's weapons. An invented sequence in the second film brings Frodo and Sam to Osgiliath and sets a winged Nazgûl within reach of the Ring, an encounter with no counterpart in the text. The extended version of the third film restores the meeting at the broken Gate of Minas Tirith but has the Witch-king break Gandalf's staff, an outcome the book does not give.