I, Nazgûl

The Nazgûl were not always slaves to the ring.

The terrible hooded beings you know from the Lord of the Rings were men once. They were not necessarily evil men. But being men they were prone to certain evils. They desired power and mastery. They lusted after wealth and influence. Kings and princes among them were given rings of power by the chief evil of their age and were slowly corrupted as they used the power conferred by those rings to defeat their enemies and conquer their world. It would be easy to say that the rings corrupted those men simply by giving them the capacity to take what they wanted. Power corrupts.

But that isn't exactly right.

For Tolkien, the story of the Ringwraiths was slow to come together into a cohesive Narrative. What would become The Lord of the Rings was the evolution of a simple children's story about a hobbit named Bilbo who had found a magical ring. Over many years, this simple story merged with a vast philological project and an ambitious legendarium to create the archetypal model for all high fantasy fiction forevermore. The nature of the rings emerged most clearly with the writing of The Mirror of Galadriel, the seventh chapter of the second book of The Fellowship of the Ring. Galadriel, probably the most powerful non-angelic being remaining in Middle-Earth¹, already possesses Nenya. This ring of adamant, one of the three fashioned for the elves and unsullied by Sauron's hands, has allowed her to preserve her land against threats which ought to have overwhelmed it. It is but a rearguard action. Her people decline and so does she. There is one thing in this living world which could sustain them: The One Ring. When the young hobbit comes before her bearing it, he offers it to her freely.

Galadriel's response to this temptation², not the loyalty of Samwise Gamgee nor the bravery of the Three Hunters nor the wisdom of Gandalf the White nor the lesson that a heroic spirit does not require us to be among the great, is the central idea of the novel. She rejects the tool which whispers salvation, knowing that it contains her damnation³. That is what distinguishes her from the men who would become Nazgûl. But the story of the Ringwraiths is not a story of Faustian bargains. It is a story of delusion. It is a story of men telling themselves that they were mastering a thing, oblivious to its encroaching mastery over them. It is a story of men who saw a one-way road to manifest their will, but who unwittingly submitted themselves to the will of another.

There are magic rings in our world, too. Yet they are fashioned not from gold and sorcery but from symbols.

With one hand, these symbols guide us to perceive them as the product of our own reason, yet with the other they supplant that reason with meanings determined in the minds of other men.

They bind our will not to the reason which first led us to our beliefs, but to the symbol with which we now identify them. Once the symbol becomes our point of attachment, we no longer have to be convinced to follow those who determine the meaning of the symbol to some new end. They need only tell us the new meaning of the symbol.

If we are not careful these rings will make wraiths of us all.