How to take a Ring from an unwilling Ring-wielder? - crazy ideas

[Butterbeer]

course' a liddle bitsy bit of water down Bruinen way was enough to knacker up their bodies ... personally i think any sword could destroy their "physical" bodies ... why then did the WK "die" though ..or is he just effectivly out of action for the duration of the rest of the time period between Pelenor and mount doom?

[jammi567]

Originally Posted by Butterbeer

course' a liddle bitsy bit of water down Bruinen way was enough to knacker up their bodies ... personally i think any sword could destroy their "physical" bodies ... why then did the WK "die" though ..or is he just effectivly out of action for the duration of the rest of the time period between Pelenor and mount doom?

what i mean is distroying the magic that held it to both the spiritual world and the physical world, and just brought the witch-king (or any nazgul) into the physical world, so that normal wepons could hurt, and possibly kill, him/them.

Originally Posted by the batle of the pelennor fields

No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would've delt a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.

[Landroval]

We really don’t know how strong the wights were.

The way Tom reffers to them doesn't imply that a terrible force is necessary to withstand them:

Originally Posted by In the house of Tom Bombadil

Keep to the green grass. Don't you go a-meddling with old stone or cold Wights or prying in their houses, unless you be strong folk with hearts that never falter!

Moreover, if they have some significant power, why aren't they mentioned in any battle. If they are such successful warriors, why don't they appear anywhere alse than the barrows?

In Cardolan there were NO direct descendants of Isildur left, but there surely were indirect (not father-to son) ones.

Even if the last prince of Cardolan and the ruler of Arthedain are not the same, though they did die in the same year and the former is not named _anywhere_ in the chronicles, which makes his separate identification quite questionable, it cannot be argued that the wraiths can count on lack of information between the dunedain of cardolan and arthedain, not when they were all fighting the same war.

I would guess that this is much of the reason why knowledge of the swords seemed to have been lost to all but the Nazgul themselves and Bombadil.

Tom didnt even state the blades were magical

[jammi567]

Originally Posted by Landroval

Tom didnt even state the blades were magical

what makes you so sure that Tom didn't know that the blades were magical or not. just because a character (in any book you read) doesn't state that they know something or not, doesn't mean that they don't have that knowledge. afterall, Tom has been around probally since the universe began, so it's unlikely that he didn't have knowledge of the power that the blades have.

[Farimir Captain of Gondor]

Is there a 'How to kill a Nazgul' thread somewhere?

I'll just ask here for now since we're talking about the barrow blades killing the WK. The prophecy says no living man could kill him right? So why wouldn't Legolas' arrows hurt him? I remember someone saying something about that. Also, if the WK had killed Eowyn wouldn't the onslaught of the Dead Army be able to kill him too? I mean, they aren't living men?

[Landroval]

So why wouldn't Legolas' arrows hurt him?

Frodo has an armor that resisted a spear that could have skewered a boar; the w-k, as the most important servant of Sauron, ought to be fitted with the best armor possible, so stoping an arrow wouldn't be such a surprise.
Moreover, we see that Tolkien switched between man and Man as he saw fit - though Legolas can be said to be a 'man', by gender, he is not a 'Man', by race:

Originally Posted by Kings of the Mark

In that day Eowyn also won renown, for she fought in that battle, riding in disguise; and was known after in the Mark as the Lady of the Shield-arm. [For her shield-arm was broken by the mace of the Witch-king; but he was brought to nothing, and thus the words of Glorfindel long before to King Earnur were fulfilled, that the Witch-king would not fall by the hand of man. For it is said in the songs of the Mark that in this deed Eowyn had the aid of Theoden's esquire, and that he also was not a Man but a Halfling out of a far country, though Eomer gave him honour in the Mark and the name of Holdwine.

But that contradicts other refferences in the letters, where hobbits are said to be Men too.

[Butterbeer]

can we really call elves men in the sense you mean when they apparently don't like to have sex much?

yes you'd assume Sauron might still have some stock of mithril lying about ...but maybe not ...

in the words of the stones i guess he could always paint it black

Best BB


* interesting piece jammi - mainly for the questions it riases (oops wrong thread on that one!)

[jammi567]

Originally Posted by Landroval

Frodo has an armor that resisted a spear that could have skewered a boar; the w-k, as the most important servant of Sauron, ought to be fitted with the best armor possible, so stoping an arrow wouldn't be such a surprise.

I would think so. after all, he's your most powerful servent you have, so he should have the best armour-even if no-one's going to be able to get close enough to strike.

[Landroval]

I found another interesting quote in the Reader's companion; it sort of refutes the idea of the blades being known only to the dunedain of Cardolan, but it also gives the blades a good deal of importance:

Originally Posted by Chapter 6: THE BATTLE OF THE PELENNOR FIELDS, page 564, LotR Companion, by Hammond and Scull

On 18 April and 6 May 1963, Tolkien wrote to Anneke C. Kloos-Adriaansen and P. Kloos that the incidents of the witch-king [damned be his name ] in Book I, Chapter 12, and of Merry's sword in the present chapter:

[jammi567]

nice. so when the people made those swards, they bloody well knew what they were doing.

[Alcuin]

Landroval, I don't want to nit-pick, but I don't follow how that does or does not demonstrate that only Cardolan smiths knew the secret of making these blades.

I am uncomfortable with the idea myself; but context drives me to accept it. Consider that:

• Aragorn doesn't recognize the blades;
• Glorfindel doesn't recognize the blades;
• Elrond doesn't recognize the blades;
• Gandalf doesn't recognize the blades;
• None of Elrond's counselors recognizes the blades;
• Only Bombadil seems to recognize the blades & know what they are - other than the Nazgûl, of course.

Maybe you're right, & the secret has only been forgotten; or maybe Elrond, his sons & counselors, & Gandalf are all suffering some Elvish version of senile dementia, & with age, they are forgetting: "slowly to forget, & be forgotten," perhaps?

I think the only conclusion is that they never knew or understood the significance of the blades: the knowledge had been lost to the Dúnedain, & the Eldar either never knew or, as with the Second Age Númenóreans regarding the Rings of Power, never knew enough.

I'm not saying you're wrong, only that I can't derive your claim from your post. I'm not saying I'm right, only that I feel compelled to my position because nothing else fits. To paraphrase Sir A Conan Doyle's words in the mouth of Sherlock Holmes: When all other possibilities have been eliminated, what is left, however unlikely, must be the truth.

-|-

It's a wonderful quote, though! I had specifically looked for gems from that vein, but I missed that one.

[Landroval]

* Aragorn doesn't recognize the blades;
* Glorfindel doesn't recognize the blades;
* Elrond doesn't recognize the blades;
* Gandalf doesn't recognize the blades;
* None of Elrond's counselors recognizes the blades;
* Only Bombadil seems to recognize the blades & know what they are - other than the Nazgûl, of course.

This and the fact that the blades were wound about with spells for the bane of Mordor - even though Mordor was desolate at that time, shows, to me, that Tolkien's (later?) intent wasn't very much in tune with his final work, or that he moved back and forth between his ideas, seeing that in Sauron Defeated there are some quotes in which Gandalf gives more weight to the blades than on the final text. Concerning the Cardolan exclusive trademark on them, Tolkien reffers to the M-E Numenoreans as a whole, and he wants to integrate the blades in the entire mytho-historical background. It seems to me that the emphasis is on the numenorean as a "race" , than on a particular faction.

[jammi567]

well, what do you expect from a man who was constantly going between different ideas throught the 14 years of writing the story.

[Alcuin]

Originally Posted by Landroval

This and the fact that the blades were wound about with spells for the bane of Mordor - even though Mordor was desolate at that time, shows, to me, that Tolkien's (later?) intent wasn't very much in tune with his final work, or that he moved back and forth between his ideas, seeing that in Sauron Defeated there are some quotes in which Gandalf gives more weight to the blades than on the final text. Concerning the Cardolan exclusive trademark on them, Tolkien reffers to the M-E Numenoreans as a whole, and he wants to integrate the blades in the entire mytho-historical background. It seems to me that the emphasis is on the numenorean as a "race" , than on a particular faction.

Oh, ok. It could have been a Second Age discovery, and so whomever made the blades in Arnor (or its daughter kingdoms: if the blades were made during the wars with Angmar, they had to be made after III 1356, when the first war began, and before III 1636, when the barrow-wights infested the downs and the Dúnedain lost access to the tombs: at the beginning of the period, there were three kingdoms, and by the end of it, only Arthedain remained) was using information derived during the Second Age.

By implication, Landroval, you are still suggesting that the information was lost during the wars. The reasons are that

1. the blades are still unrecognized by the Wise, who should have known what they were and told the hobbits the importance of the weapons, and
2. Gondor should also have made such blades if the knowledge belonged to the Dúnedain as a whole, unless of course the information was remembered or reassembled only in the North (say, because Elrond or some other Elf or sage recalled some key point forgotten in the South).

The advantage of this hypothesis is that it gives the Númenórean armies of the Second Age devastating weapons against the Nazgûl. However, for that to be, the Noldorin Exile survivors of Ost-in-Edhil, whom we know escaped Rivendell with Elrond during the ruinous war Sauron waged against the Elves for possession of the Rings of Power that ended Eregion, and I don’t think that assumption can be supported: the evidence is that the Second Age Númenóreans were kept uninformed about the Rings of Power. (Mike Martinez did this work; I believe I can find the reference if you need it.)

If you move the development and manufacture of these barrow-blades into the Third Age, then you have Noldorin smiths from Ost-in-Edhil living in Rivendell watching their friends and allies get their heads handed to them (literally) in a war against Angmar reminiscent in some ways of the destruction of Eregion; moreover, Elrond had blood ties to the Dúnedain, and he acknowledged that. Finally, all Dúnedain in the North knew about Isildur and the One Ring, because until the fall of Fornost in III 1974, that was the penultimate disaster in the history of Arnor. So a Dúnadan asking about the Nazgûl and their nature in the Third Age, especially during or just after a real crisis threatening the survival of the Dúnedain and maybe even the continued existence of Rivendell (the last refuge in Middle-earth of the Noldor: CÃ*rdan ruled what should have been a mostly Sindar population derived from the survivors of Beleriand, while Lothlórien and Thranduil’s kingdoms were Silvan Elves), is a whole lot more likely to get a straight answer from the few remaining Noldor who knew something about the nature and manufacture of the Rings of Power than a Second Age Númenórean who might abuse the information. (Given the track record of Númenor toward its end, I think they would have abused that knowledge.) Elrond was going have to sign off on revealing those kinds of secrets.

Now, Elrond or even Gil-galad might have given his blessing on passing along this information during the War of the Last Alliance, when the Nazgûl must also have been a scourge; but then, as before, Elrond and Wise should have recognized the daggers, and given their potency, they would be remiss not to tell the hobbits what they were. They should have attempted to recover what were left of them since Bombadil left the whole trove exposed. Again, lack of recognition is not a sure-fire indication that the Eldar knew nothing about the nature of these particular blades, but it’s highly suggestive that they did not invent them, and that they did not know what they were, even if they knew that such blades had existed in the past.

The way out of that is to argue that Denethor did recognize Pippin’s blade: and of course, we know that he did. We don’t know whether he recognized the artwork and style, making that a cultural recognition (“Oh! that looks an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon brooch.� “Yes, it is. It came a nineteenth-century dig.�) or a functional recognition in the sense that Denethor knew what it did but did not say so. I have no answer to this part of the problem, it’s just an observation.

Finally, let’s consider the nature of the weapons themselves. The barrow-blades are the “good� counterparts of the “evil� Morgul-blade the Witch-king used against Frodo on Weathertop. Aragorn and Glorfindel did recognize that weapon, both from its actions and from its appearance. That means that the Morgul-knives were used many times against Men in the Third Age. We know that Boromir Ruling Steward of Gondor received such a wound in III 2475 in the war against Minas Morgul waged in Ithilien. He did not turn into a wraith and continued to live for many years, indicating that the splinter that broke off was successfully removed, but his life was considerably shortened nevertheless. It makes sense that the Morgul-knives preceded the barrow-blades. Turning a living Man into a wraith by means of leaving a poisoned or enchanted fragment inside the victim is necessarily an act of necromancy. Sauron is The Necromancer, and his chief servant the Witch-king is also a necromancer. That they would make a weapon for this purpose is just par for the course.

If these weapons first appeared in the wars with Angmar in the fourteenth century of the Third Age, then the Dúnedain, who were still fairly numerous in Arnor (or of course, its daughter kingdoms; though the Dúnedain in Rhudaur, where they were fewest, might have been wiped out right away in the first war) and still had a civilization all their own, should have started looking for a solution to this problem immediately. Instead of finding a cure, I think what makes sense is that the Dúnedain learned how the process worked – which by necessity had to include consultation with the Noldor of Rivendell, although the Noldor would not necessarily know the outcome of the efforts of the Dúnedain sages and smiths – and they were able to manufacture a weapon that acted on the wraiths in the same fashion as the Morgul-knives did on people. I think that fits with what you’ve quoted from Reader’s Companion.

You bring up one interesting point I had not considered before, and I don’t recall its being mentioned earlier in the threads here or in the other forum that we discussed this. Aragorn said that orcs recognized the barrow-blades of which they despoiled Merry and Pippin were “bound about with the bane of Mordor.� I don’t how far to take that: I don’t know whether it means that Aragorn did positively know and understand what the barrow-blades were, or that he merely read the runes and ciphers on the blades. (If you recall, Glorfindel told Aragorn there were “evil things� written on the hilt of the Morgul-knife.) You could push really hard on this and say that the orcs knew for what the knives of Merry and Pippin were intended; I don’t think it works, but I think you could try it.

I don’t believe taking the position that the blades were “bound about with spells for the bane of Mordor� means that they had to be made only during those times in which Mordor itself was openly occupied by Sauron or his minions. First of all, we are specifically told that these knives were made by the Dúnedain of Arnor (both by Denethor and by Tolkien as narrator) for the wars against Angmar and the Witch-king (by Tolkien as narrator). You’ve already pointed out that Mordor was presumably empty then. I wouldn’t go as far as to call Aragorn’s words “poetic license,� but I think that “the bane of Mordor� is indistinguishable from the “the bane of Morgul� or “the bane of Angmar� or “the bane of Dol Guldur.� They are all fruit of the same vile tree. Angmar is no more, but a weapon intended for the Witch-king in Angmar seems to me just as potent as the same weapon used against the Witch-king in Mordor – or on the Pelennor Field. The geographic location of the intended target of a hand-held, close-combat weapon is unlikely to be of any import.

Originally Posted by Landroval

in Sauron Defeated there are some quotes in which Gandalf gives more weight to the blades than on the final text.

I confess I have missed this entirely. I looked up all the Nazgûl, Ringwraith, and Wizard King (Witch-king) references in the index in Sauron Defeated for the Lord of the Rings material, and I can’t find any reference to the barrow-blades that way. Could you be a little more specific? I can’t find the reference, and I don’t remember it. You might explore trying to use that citation along with Aragorn’s words about “the bane of Mordor,� combined maybe with Denethor’s recognition of the knife as work of the Northern Dúnedain, to wedge open the idea that there is more knowledge about their history than I have ascribed to them.

[jammi567]

more knowledge!

[Valtir]

Dropping a large object would work -- crush the Ring Bearer, with the Ring unharmed amid the muck.

[jammi567]

i like your sense of humour.

[The One Ring, The Precous]

L.O.L. means Laugh Out Loud.