Editing Nazgûl (section)

=== Invisible, but corporeal ===

{{further|Witch-king of Angmar}}

[[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<ref name="Kisor 2013"/>]]

Despite his shadowiness and invisibility, Shippey writes, the Nazgûl on the Pelennor Fields also comes as close as he ever does to seeming human, having human form inside his black robes, carrying a sword, and laughing to reveal his power when he throws back his hood, revealing a king's crown on his invisible head.<ref name="Shippey 2005 Siege"/>

Yvette Kisor, a scholar of literature, writes that while the Ringwraiths and others (like Frodo) who wear Rings of Power become invisible, they do not lose any of their corporeality, being present as physical bodies. They require, she writes, physical steeds to carry them about, and they can wield swords. She notes that only a person in a body can wield the One Ring, so the invisibility is just "a trick of sight". When Frodo, wearing the Ring, saw the Nazgûl in the "twilight world", they appeared solid, not shadowy. He also saw Glorfindel in that world, as a figure of white flame; and Gandalf explains later that the Ringwraiths were "dismayed" to see "an Elf-lord revealed in his wrath".<ref group=T>{{harvnb|Tolkien|1954a}}, book 2, ch. 1 "Many Meetings"</ref><ref name="Kisor 2013">{{cite book |last=Kisor |first=Yvette |chapter=Incorporeality and Transformation in The Lord of the Rings |title=The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality |editor-first=Christopher |editor-last=Vaccaro |publisher=[[McFarland & Company|McFarland]] |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-78647478-3 |pages=20–38}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Croft |first=Janet Brennan |author-link=Janet Brennan Croft |title=Review: The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth |journal=[[Mythlore]] |volume=33 |issue=1, Fall/Winter 2014 |year=2014 |pages=146–149 |url=https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol33/iss1/9}}</ref> 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",<ref name="Pelennor Fields" group=T/> has in fact to cut through real, but invisible, sinews and flesh.<ref name="Kisor 2013"/>