Editing Nazgûl (section)

== Analysis ==

=== Literary modes ===

Shippey writes that the Nazgûl function at different [[Anatomy of Criticism#Literary modes|stylistic levels or modes]] (as categorised by [[Northrop Frye]] in his ''[[Anatomy of Criticism]]'') in the story. At one level, they serve simply as story elements, dangerous opponents. But, Shippey notes, the level rises from the romantic, with heroes taking on the Black Riders, to the mythic, giving as example the assault of Minas Tirith. The leader of the Nazgûl directs the attack on the Great Gate; he bursts the gate using both the battering-ram Grond, written with "[[Magic of Middle-earth|spells of ruin]]", and with "words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone".<ref name="Siege of Gondor" group=T>{{harvnb|Tolkien|1955}}, book 5, ch. 4, "The Siege of Gondor"</ref><ref name="Shippey 2005 Siege">{{harvnb|Shippey|2005|pages=242–243}}</ref>

=== 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"/>

=== Gradual incarnation ===

Steve Walker, a Tolkien scholar,<!--http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/905-Power-of-Tolkien-Prose.php--> writes that the story gives the Ringwraiths credibility through a "gradual incarnation of bodiless presence". Little by little, in his view, Tolkien increases the reader's insight into their nature, starting with Black Riders who are "spies more human than diabolical", rather than developing their character. Walker sees this as appropriate: the Nazgûl's main weapons are psychological, namely fear and despair. He writes that the progressive revelation of their capabilities, and their "escalation of steeds" from horses to fell beasts, builds up in the reader's mind an "increasingly infernal vision".<ref name="Walker2009">{{cite book |last=Walker |first=Steve C. |title=The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-Earth's Magical Style |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zaq_AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA24 |date=2009 |publisher=[[Palgrave Macmillan]] |isbn=978-0230101661 |pages=23–24}}</ref>

=== The Black Breath ===

{{redirect|Black Breath|the band|Black Breath (band)}}

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 (journal)|Mallorn]]'', describes its normal course as "progressive loss of consciousness and [[hypothermia]], leading to death".<ref name="Urquart 2014">{{cite journal |last=Urquart |first=Jennifer |title='The House of his Spirit Crumbles.' A medical consideration of Faramir's condition on his return from the retreat from Osgiliath, in The Lord of the Rings |journal=Mallorn |date=2014 |issue=55 Winter 2014 |pages=14–17 |url=https://journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn/article/download/50/44}}</ref> 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."<ref name="Urquart 2014"/> Faramir, on the other hand, who was thought to be suffering from the Black Breath, she diagnoses as most likely exhaustion with [[heat stroke]], combined with "psychological distress" and pain, as his symptoms were quite different.<ref name="Urquart 2014"/> Judy Ann Ford and [[Robin Anne Reid]] note that [[Aragorn]]'s use of the herb ''[[athelas]]'' to heal Faramir and others of the Black Breath, a condition "which harms the spirit more than the body",<ref name="Ford Reid 2009"/> identifies him to his people as the true King.<ref name="Ford Reid 2009">{{cite journal |last1=Ford |first1=Judy Ann |last2=Reid |first2=Robin Anne |author2-link=Robin Anne Reid |title=Councils and Kings: Aragorn's Journey Towards Kingship in J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings' and Peter Jackson's 'The Lord of the Rings' |journal=[[Tolkien Studies]] |volume=6 |issue=1 |year=2009 |doi=10.1353/tks.0.0036 |pages=71–90}}</ref>

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".<ref name="Wodzak Wodzak 2014">{{cite journal |last1=Wodzak |first1=Michael A. |last2=Wodzak |first2=Victoria Holtz |title=Visibílium Ómnium et Invisibílium: Looking Out, On, and In Tolkien's World |journal=[[Tolkien Studies]] |volume=11 |issue=1 |year=2014 |doi=10.1353/tks.2014.0002 |pages=131–147}}</ref> 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.<ref name="Wodzak Wodzak 2014"/>

[[File:Alfred Bastien-GAS ATTACK, FLANDERS, 1915 (CWM 19710261-0084).jpg|thumb|[[John Garth (author)|John Garth]] suggests that the Black Breath may derive from Tolkien's experience of  [[Chemical weapons in World War I|gas in the First World War]].<ref name="Garth 2009"/> Painting ''Gas Attack, Flanders'' by [[Alfred Bastien]], 1915]]

Tolkien's biographer [[John Garth (author)|John Garth]] finds Christopher Gilson's ''Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in "The Lord of the Rings"'' especially interesting for its rendering of two of the Dark Lord [[Sauron]]'s epithets, ''Thû'' meaning "horrible darkness, black mist" and ''Gorthu'' meaning "mist of fear".<ref name="Garth 2009">{{cite journal |last=Garth |first=John |author-link=John Garth (author) |title='Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in "The Lord of the Rings"' (review) |journal=[[Tolkien Studies]] |volume=6 |issue=1 |year=2009 |doi=10.1353/tks.0.0059 |pages=248–255}}</ref> Garth comments that these names "anchor him in the primal night" of Tolkien's [[Giant Spider (Middle Earth)|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 [[The Great War and Middle-earth|Tolkien's First World War experience]] "of smoke barrages, [[Chemical weapons in World War I|gas attacks]] and 'animal horror' on the Somme."<ref name="Garth 2009"/> Earlier, in his 2003 book ''[[Tolkien and the Great War]]'', on the other hand, Garth merely notes the "Black Breath of despair that brings down even the bravest" as one of several elements of ''The Lord of the Rings'' which "suggest[s] the influence of 1914–18".<ref>{{cite book |last=Garth |first=John |author-link=John Garth (author) |title=Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth |title-link=Tolkien and the Great War |publisher=[[HarperCollins]] |year=2004 |orig-year=2003 |isbn=978-0-00711-953-0 |page=312}}</ref>

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".<ref name="Bradley 1961"/> They thereby became radioactive and "immune to radiation poisoning, as is shown by their dwelling in the blasted tower of Minas Ithil [which glowed in the dark]."<ref name="Bradley 1961"/> Further, Bradley writes, the Nazgûl gave off "radioactive contamination", causing the Black Breath.<ref name="Bradley 1961">{{cite journal |last=Bradley |first=Marion Zimmer |author-link=Marion Zimmer Bradley |title=The Jewel of Arwen |journal=I Palantir |date=1961 |issue=2 |url=https://arwen.nu/20/BRADLEY,%20Marion%20Z.%20-%20The%20Jewel%20of%20Arwen.pdf}}</ref>

=== Opposed to the Nine Walkers ===

{{further|Company of the Ring}}

[[File:Nine Walkers vs Nine Riders.svg|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.<ref name="Council of Elrond" group=T/><ref name="Little 2020"/>]]

The [[Inklings]] scholar Ariel Little writes that Tolkien explicitly opposes the enslaved Nine Riders with the Nine Walkers, the free Company of the Ring. In "[[The Council of Elrond]]", Elrond announces that "The Company of the Ring shall be Nine; and the Nine Walkers shall be set against the Nine Riders that are evil".<ref name="Council of Elrond" group=T/><ref name="Little 2020"/> Little describes the Nazgûl as "homogeneous, discordant, intensely individualistic", a group bound and trapped by Sauron, noting also Gandalf's description of them in "[[The Shadow of the Past]]" as "Mortal Men, proud and great [who] fell under the dominion of the One, and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants".<ref name="Shadow of the Past" group=T/><ref name="Little 2020"/> They had thus, Little writes, lost their identities as humans, even losing their substance and becoming what Tolkien calls "nothingness" under their black clothing. He adds that the evil characters in ''The Lord of the Rings'' are characterised by infighting, as among the Orcs, lack of harmony, and "hate-filled discord", forming an "anti-community".<ref name="Little 2020"/>

Little contrasts this disharmony with the Company of the Ring, which is "diverse, bound by friendship, relying on each other's strengths".<ref name="Little 2020"/> The Company is joined by its common purpose, and by "devoted love".<ref name="Little 2020"/> There are strong bonds of friendship, seen initially between all the Hobbits. Further friendships develop throughout the Company as they travel together; Little notes that Frodo says that "Strider" (Aragorn), viewed initially with suspicion, is "dear to me".<ref name="Little 2020"/> He comments that "the deep affection of the Fellowship breaks down racial and cultural barriers" as all its members drop their initial reserve and come to an "appreciation for the cultural distinctiveness" of their companions.<ref name="Little 2020"/> A case in point is the strong friendship between the Dwarf Gimli and the Elf Legolas, members of two races with radically dissimilar cultures, and which had often clashed in the past; Little notes that even the other members of the Company, in Tolkien's words, "wonder ... at this change".<ref name="Little 2020"/> He writes that even when the Company splits up into smaller groups, it is not destroyed: far from it, Frodo and Sam sustain each other through their arduous journey, their friendship deepening with time; Merry and Pippin supporting each other; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli acting as a team, all continuing to function as communities. Little adds that the Company functions as a true team, every member being essential to the success of its mission.<ref name="Little 2020"/> The Christian commentator [[Ralph C. Wood]] writes that "the greatness of the Nine Walkers lies in the modesty of both their abilities and accomplishments. Their strength lies in their weakness, in their solidarity as a company unwilling to wield controlling power over others."{{sfn|Wood|2011|pp=116–134}} Rebecca Munro notes that in the Company, "no one acts alone without dependence on the deeds of others".{{sfn|Munro|2014|p=645}}