Why did the Nazgûl drop Merry in Bree?

[Alcuin]

Prodded by a post in the thread “Emblem of Minas Morgul”, I want to frame and pose a question that has long troubled me.

It certainly appears that at least one, if not both, of the men trying to kidnap Merry in the east end of Bree was a Ringwraith. The scene first appears, as far as I know, in Return of the Shadow, and begins with Merry bursting into the sitting-room at the Prancing Pony with Trotter (later Strider) and Bingo (later Frodo) discussing Barnabas Butterbur (later Barliman, and at this point a hobbit) and Gandalf’s letter to Bingo (Frodo), which Butterbur has just delivered. Merry enters and declares that he has seen a Black Rider in Bree. He followed the Rider and his horse to the east end of the village, “heard him speaking, or whispering, to someone on the other side” of a dark hedge. Then Merry “came over all queer and trembling suddenly, and bolted back.” (All from the chapter, “Trotter and the Journey to Weathertop”) Merry has not fainted. There is no Nob, there is not yet a gatekeeper or a West Gate. It seems that the Ringwraith was speaking to Bill Ferny, but perhaps there was another Rider on the other side of the hedge.

Later in the chapter “To Weathertop and Rivendell” (still in Return of the Shadow), CJR Tolkien notes that

Merry’s story of the Black Rider whom he saw outside the inn and followed differ in … that whereas in the original version … the Rider went though the village from west to east and stopped at Bill Ferny’s house (hole), here

and CJR Tolkien begins to cite the draft narrative,

‘He was coming from the east,’ Merry went on. ‘I followed him down the Road almost to the gate. He stopped at the keeper’s house, and I thought heard him talking to someone. I tried to creep near… I am afraid I suddenly began to shiver and shake, and bolted back here.’

In this case, the Rider may be speaking to Harry the Gatekeeper, who has now appeared in the story as a character suborned by the Nazgûl.

In Reader’s Companion, “A Knife in the Dark”, notes for p 177 (I:189), Hammond and Scull cite Tolkien’s notes on the event for the finalized form of the book:

…three Black Riders who had been sent to Weathertop and told to ride back along the Road

(All the elisions and editorial parentheticals in this citation are as cited from Hammond and Scull in Reader’s Companion. There is more to their citation after that, but nothing elided by me in this passage. By the way, “Marquette MSS 4/2/36” does not indicate that the papers were composed in 1936, before the publication of the The Hobbit. The numbers have something to do with how Marquette University numbered the boxes and documents they purchased from Tolkien. “MSS” is an abbreviation for “manuscripts”. This manuscript is part of Tolkien’s nearly finished work on the time scheme for the movements of the Black Riders.)

Now, in the text as it stands, in Fellowship of the Ring, near the end of the chapter “Strider”, Merry bursts into the room “followed by Nob.” He was standing “just outside the light of the lamp”, presumably the lamp in front of the Inn, when he saw the Ringwraith across the road in the shadows. “There was no horse.” Merry followed to the east end of town to the last house on the road, Bill Ferny’s. He continued on. Then

”I seemed to be drawn… I heard voices by the hedge. One was muttering, and the other was whispering, or hissing… I began to tremble all over. … I was just going to bolt home, when something came behind me, and I . . . I fell over.”

“I found him, sir,” put in Nob. “… Just nigh Bill Ferny’s house, I thought I could see something in the Road. … it looked to me as if two men was stooping over something, lifting it. I gave a shout, but when I got to the spot there was no sign of them, only Mr. Brandybuck lying by the roadside.”

Why in the world did the two Nazgûl leave Merry by the roadside and not shanghai him off to the Witch-king, or at least to the woods outside town to wring all he knew out of him? It might not have been the same as catching Frodo, but it would have been a tremendous coup to get one of his companions. Then they attack the Inn without success. (Who are these two Ringwraiths, Frick and Frack?)

And kudos to the Dúnedain who waylaid the messenger sent to the Witch-king. They could not stand all Nine at Sarn Ford, but they seemed to have redeemed themselves in preventing the messenger from arriving in a timely fashion, which might have proven fatal.

I apologize for the length of this starter. But I want to establish two things:

1. It was definitely Black Riders who were trying to kidnap Merry, but dropped him.
2. It was definitely Black Riders – moreover, the same two – who attacked the Inn and ruined Mr. Butterbur’s good bolsters.

Why did they drop Merry? That really bothers me. They couldn’t possibly have been scared of Nob, and it’s not as if he’d have been able to stop them. They were near the edge of the village: did they expect the whole town to come out after them? And even if they had, couldn’t two Nazgûl scare the willies out of a bunch of Breefolk in the dark and sent them scampering back into town while they made off with their catch?

-|-

Added (much) later. No other changes to this post except this addition.

Since starting this thread, I have discovered that “Marquette MSS 4/2/36” stands for “Marquette manuscripts series 4, box 2, folder 36”.