squire
Half-elven
Feb 4 2013, 9:35pm
Views: 868
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The Rangers were not immune to fear of the Nazgul, but they could master it better than most
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I agree that the Dunedain in the Third Age are the most superior race of Men on Middle-earth, with stronger minds and wills than so-called "lesser" men. Because of their innate excellence, they were the least susceptible to the terror that the Nazgul use as their primary weapon. But they were not immune to the fear: remember Aragorn gripping the chair at Bree as he tells Frodo about them, and remember that in Unfinished Tales' "The Hunt for the Ring", the Nazgul scatter the Rangers that Aragorn stationed at Sarn Ford to guard the Shire. And Aragorn never "takes on the 'Lord of the Nazgul' in face to face combat. Rather, he rushes the wraith with torches in hand, knowing that the Witchking would fear fire more than a blade. His goal is to drive the Nazgul away, not to fight him in a duel. I'm not sure I go along with some of the other terminology you are using. "Elite crack battalion" implies that the Rangers of the North were the best of some battlefield army, but the book is pretty clear that they are all that is left of a former military class; there are not many of them, and they rarely ride together as a fighting force. Their training seems to be more along the lines of Strider's when we first meet him in Bree: wilderness survival, hunting, patrolling, and guarding. So "warriors" and "brotherhood of war" are misleading terms as well, I think. We may remember that Aragorn at the Council of Elrond specifically contrasts his men's methods of fighting the Darkness with those of the trained and assembled armies that Boromir and Faramir lead in Gondor. Only when they finally ride south as the "Gray Company" do we learn that they have knightly training, but we never learn in what manner they actually fight in the final battles at the end of the book. We should be very clear that the names you found for the eight other Nazgul (besides Khamul) are indeed as "used in [some] game", and not at all from the book. Tolkien never named them, and any of the names given them by numerous game writers in the past few decades are essentially fan fiction.
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