cute pterodactyl by Sergey Sobin

seems fairer but feels feller

Michael Drout points out1 an echo, when the Lord of the Nazgûl objects to being hindered by Eowyn: “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey!”  LotR, V, vi.

That’s exactly how King Lear objects when Kent tries to hinder his beatdown of Cordelia. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” King Lear, I i. Except that, as Drout notes, Lear is speaking metaphorically and the Nazgûl is being quite literal, except that the Witch-King seems to elide the difference between himself and the beast he rides.

I think we need to add this one next to the Ents’ attack on Isengard,2 under the rubric of “LotR making Shakespeare’s metaphors literal”.3

But jumping back up, eliding that difference is interesting — what is a “Nazgûl”, then? Votes for “just the Ringwraith” come from Elrond, Radagast, Shagrat, and Pippin.  Votes for “Ringwraith+Flying beast” come from Grishnakh, the Witch-King, and Gorbag. The narrator and Gandalf switch between sides as they please. If we’re just counting heads, a Nazgûl is the corrupted human. But I can’t help noticing that the characters who use the term only for the flying combination, though they are outvoted, are the ones who had the longest and closest contact with them.

Notes

  1. Drout, Michael DC. “Tolkien’s prose style and its literary and rhetorical effects.” Tolkien Studies 1.1 (2004): 137-163.
  2. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. The letters of JRR Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. No. 163
  3. Shippey, Tom. JRR Tolkien: Author of the century. HMH, 2014. p. 192ff.