And of course Gandalf has an all-white horse after he returns. Because he understands Style.
Why did the Witch-King send out the Barrow-wights? Just to cause trouble? Were they in a very strategic area? I still have trouble with the geography in LOTR sometimes.
And I’m still slightly annoyed that the actors for the nine Men chosen as Nazgûl were all old white guys, but that’s a personal irritation.
Yeah, the Barrow-Downs was in part of Arnor, the Northern Kingdom that the Witch-King defeated. He sent the Barrow-Wights to haunt the great tombs there as, presumably, a sort of area-denial tactic to keep the place from being resettled.
It’s nice that he never stopped thinking of home.
I thought the barrows were the tombs of the Barrow-wights. They were presumably lords underneath the Witch-King while alive, and then died, were buried in style, and then got themselves undead-ified.
I don’t think that’s the case, I believe the Barrows were tombs of great kings of Men long before the Witch-King arrived on the scene.
The barrows were Tombs or Lords and Kings, but not under the Witch-king. The Witch-king absolutely sent the spirits out though to infest the barrows.
I believe somewhere is the briefest mentions that some of the Tombs predate the Dúnedain and were thus from the 1st and 2nd ages. But the Tomb the Hobbits found themselves in was a Prince of Arnor or at least one of the 3 Kingdoms of Arnor.
I always took it as a retroactive desecration of people he’d defeated. They were his enemies in life and in death these spirits would invade their tombs.
Partially true as far as I know.
This isn’t a silly question per se,but anyway; what would happen if a Nazgûl saw some of Saruman’s “homemade” orcs and mistook them for Mordor ones. Do the White Hand guys tell him to pound sand? Bow and say they have other orders, then beat feet? Attack?
The Orcs of the White Hand would be scared shitless of a Nazgûl. If it gave them orders, they would at least pretend to do so until well away from him.
If he demanded they turned over the Hobbits, the Orcs of the White Hand would have.
That makes sense. For some reason I was thinking they’d never met a Nazgûl, but surely one had visited Saruman at some point as he became corrupt. Also the Nazgûl innately spread fear, of course.
I’m absurdly pleased that my phone automatically puts the little accent mark on “ Nazgûl.”
What about “Nozdrûl”?
Nozdrul.
Sadly my phone is not as well-read as it should be.
You need to get a phone that appreciates the classics.
ROTFLMAO I was working with my new jumper [horse for steeplechasing rather than dressage, Just got her and she really wasn’t trained on open land, just ring jumping] I was doing a slide jump [jump at the top of a hill, jump at the bottom of a hill, object was to jump, rump slide down the hill then jump at the bottom] and my wee beastie objected, stopping before jumping the top jump, however I guess one would say that I completed both jumps and the slide in between. [broke my ankle and finished the course because it was the same distance out and back] I could now see some poor nazgul taking a header because of a new horse balking =)
Gwaihir - Ijada is my main there. I also have an account over on the EU server, but since Christian passed I haven’t had the heart to log in over there =(
That’s the problem with fiction where the protagonists are simply “pure evil”. They are just a boring force for mindless destruction.
Sauron and the Nazgul never really got a lot of character development, beyond being a menacing eye or creepy armored figures.
Saruman probably had some academic or esoteric hobbies, much in the same way Gandalf was into fireworks and getting baked with Hobbits.
Orcs and goblins are never really portrayed as having any sort of functioning society in the way that Elves, Dwarves, and Humans do. What “downtime” we are shown is consistent with what one might expect of poorly disciplined soldiers in a dysfunctional army (fighting, bullying, grab-assing, prepping meals, barely performing their duties, etc)
Sounds like an antihistamine. Which has an unfortunate side effect.
Tolkien also mentioned in one of his letters that he cleaned up the orcs’ dialog considerably, and that in reality, they talked in much the same way that orc-minded individuals still do.
Not to mention that they’re all basically ghosts of a sort. Every one of them is literally a shadow of their former selves, completely devoid of substance.
That’s not an attempt at a pun, by the way, it’s literal. Something of a double entendre.
You can say Tolkien would have done better with more fleshed-out antagonists (again, meaning this in both senses, not a pun), but I think that was sort of the point. One thing that you gained with those antagonists, and what makes it work for the story, is that they not just served as foils for the heroes, they also served as warnings. It’s not just a matter of beating the enemy, you have to avoid becoming the enemy. In Middle-earth, that was the true conflict. It was keeping your humanity/elvishness/dwarvishness/hobbithood/whatever.
Those who failed didn’t just die, they became nothing, empty. For me, I think it worked. It’s why I’m a fan. And the fleshier villains of the story (that weren’t just plain old monsters) were those sliding toward becoming wraiths someday. Folks like Saruman, Denethor, Gollum, or Grima. They were tragedies.
Which actually might be consistent with Tolkien’s experience fighting in WWI. I feel like Tolkien wanted to portray an unambiguous battle against war, aggression, death, and the hate, greed, and lust for power that drives it. More fleshed out antagonists become more humanized (also, elfanized, dwarfanized, hobitized, etc…not to be species-ist). It becomes a more ambiguous political or ideological conflict so you have to start worrying about such pesky things like all those displaced non-combatant orc and goblin families and whatnot.