Gothmog, the other one

i'm sure it'd be a pain to be the "second Gothmog". you see, everybody always saying: "hey, stop brawling. who do you think you are? a balrog? buuuuh" or "come, guys, goona throw ol' Gothmog out the window. we'll see if his like-wings can lift that piece of meat". that'd be really a hard life...

what i was wondering is how that second Gothmog became no less than liutenant of Minas Morgul. he had to be a very terrible creature... one which you'll never dare to mock at.

i'm saying this because i've heard the theory that he was one of the Nazgul. there were 6 or 7 Nazgul living there, so some people says that the liutenant should be one of them.

but i don't think a man called Gothmog would became one of the Nazgul for the afore metioned reasons. No man can be strong enough to bear the weigh of that name. Besides, Gothmog isn’t a name for a man.

might he be a troll? perhaps an Olog-hai? he’d be strong then, but i don’t think a troll can have wits enough to be a liutenant

i think he was an orc, but not the average orc we know, a really scaring orc.

I have never heard anything about a second Gothmog
were did you find him ???

o i'm sorry, perhaps i should have been more explicit... he appears in the chapter of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. he commands the attack after the fall of the Witch King.

This is another question for which there is no pat answer, that I know of, at least. If Gothmog's identity is discussed in HOME at all, it's in a volume I haven't read yet. That said, I don't think he's a Nazgul. I think that if Gothmog was a Nazgul, this fact would have been mentioned. I also don't think he was an Orc or a Troll, because Orcs and Trolls generally don't seem to be intelligent enough to have such a high level of command. Sure Orcs might command a company of other Orcs, but I don't see an Orc taking command of an entire army, especially one that includes Men. I think there might be a possibility Gothmog was a Black Numenorean. I realize this is a bit tenuous, since this is another case where such a fact is likely to be mentioned if true. OTOH Tolkien never says he isn't a Black Numenorean!!!!

I was going to make a thread like this today!

Personally, I think he was a Nazgul. If anyone is going to be the Lieutenant of Minas Morgul, the second in that city's chain of command behind the Morgul Lord himself, you'd have to be pretty impressive yourself. At that time, the scaries things next to Sauron himself were the Nazgul. Since about 2/3rds of the Nazgul resided in Morgul(with 2-3 in Dol Guldur), I can imagine that the command structure of Minas Morgul was mostly Nazgul with a few high ranking Orcs. I doubt a Troll would have a position above soldier. They're too dumb.

Now, he couldn't be a Balrog, because I doubt there'd be more than one Balrog named Gothmog. And since that other Gothmog was the Lord of Balrogs, it'd be a real bad idea to get them confused. Plus Sauron only had one Balrog in his forces and by the time of Pellenor, it was dead and its spirit in the Void.