We return to the text of The Lord of the Rings with the first chapter of Book II! Frodo awakens in Rivendell after the incident down by the river to find Gandalf beside him. Now that it’s all over and done, Frodo is relieved to find that he and his friends are alive and whole, but as he learns more about events since Weathertop, he realizes how close he came to becoming a wraith himself. We get up to a Tolkien Quote of the Day about children, and get down to why the Barrow was “the most dangerous moment of all”. Also, another chance to talk about werewolves? Yes.
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Recommended Reading:
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings (Mariner Books, paperback) pp. 213-219, “Many Meetings”
Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, paperback)
Tolkien, J. R. R. and Douglas A. Anderson, ed. The Annotated Hobbit (HarperCollins, hardcover)
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) The Silmarillion (Mariner Books, paperback)
Tolkien, J. R. R. Tree and Leaf: Including “Mythopoeia” (HarperCollins, paperback)
So Witch-king presumably is a numenorian king, the tallest of all wraiths, but his co-workers – hear me out, – not necessarily should be occasional men, so to speak. Let us suppose that one or two of them were Haradrim, maybe one from Gondor, one from Arnor and so on. But.
What if among them was one from a little folk which generally accepted to be the keen of second children of Eru the one.
Just imagine hooded dark and cooling figure with stature.. well, of just a half of a man. Always getting into ghost-like hair of his companions, struggling to saddle up the deadly horse or winged creature, complaining about absence of the second life and all that. Magnificent image.
At the ford when Frodo saw them in full package, he was so angry and confused because he realized that one of his enemies from his people – perhaps the most dangerous moment of all, wasn’t it?
I haven’t find the legitimate argument to believe that at least one of the nazguls wasn’t a hobbit.
Maybe that was the reason, In the year 1601 of the Third Age, for two Fallohide brothers named Marcho and Blanco gained permission from the King of Arnor at Fornost to cross the River Baranduin and settle on the other side.
Just a playful thought)
Sorry for my English. Wish everyone well!
“It has not neen hard for me to read your mind and memory”: “Read” is from OE raedan, to discern or read (Chambers). I prefer to think Gandalf is using his power of discernment, not literal mind-reading. He would know most of the story from Frodo’s companions. With the Barrow, for example, Frodo might have babbled an interior monologue. Anyway it lets Gandalf off from invasion of privacy.
With the seen and unseen worlds, I think Tolkien is trying to reconcile Christian and pre-Christian ideas. The “other side” feels like the Celtic Otherworld, the fairy realm, like in the story of Prince Pwyll in the Mabinogion. (Tolkien comments on this story in ‘English and Welsh’. Powyll is a mortal prince. Out hunting one day he meets the hunt of Arawn, king of the fairies. Side note: Araw is the Sindarin name of Orome.) OTOH Catholic angelology/demonology doesn’t exclude a “bad” unearthly place, like Dante and Milton’s Hell.