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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
May 13, 1:38pm
Post #1 of 3
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Helm Hammerhand, Ringwraith
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1. Introduction
I propose that Helm Hammerhand, the hero king of Rohan, had acquired a Ring of Power and was in the process of turning into a Nazgūl. The idea of the famous Helm Hammerhand not having triumphed over his enemies with sheer grit and heroism may sound weird, but on a closer look so many weird details pop out that one might think one is reading a fantasy story rather than a fictional historical chronicle.
But to look at the level of speculative weirdness required for the different options:
a) Helm got his hands on a Ring of Power somehow.
b) Helm was a totally weird king of Rohan for no particular reason or some unknown relatively mundane reason. (Dismissing it all as "insanity" is too vague. Insanity has many forms and Helm would have ended up with an extremely weird one.)
c) The Rohirrim made up weird folklore about their hero king for some weird reason.
d) Something else?
Well, I can't think of what that "something else" might be, and I think the Ring of Power explanation works at explaining the weirdness in one neat package as well as giving a reason why Tolkien included in Appenix A such a detailed story about Helm's exploits that otherwise would only have very tangential relevance to the main story.
(Large parts of this post are compiled from my earlier posts about Helm on this forum. If the text feels familiar, that is probably why.)
2. Combined Probabilities
So, I will be going with the thesis that "Helm got his hands on a Ring of Power somehow" This vague "somehow" is not such a danger to this theory as one might think. The outcome is the important part. The point here isn't to try to pinpoint exactly how Helm could have acquired a Ring of Power. The point is that there are multiple plot paths that could have potentially resulted in Helm getting a ring, making the total combined probability larger than any of the individual ones.
There are a lot of options for Helm's potential Ring of Power:
- A "Dwarf" ring that had been lost and only thought destroyed because it couldn't be found by anyone
- A ring that Sauron gave to someone who thought the ring too suspicious to use and hid it
- A ring that Sauron never managed to retrieve from its Elf owner back then but which nevertheless had been tainted by Sauron's influence in the creation of the rings and because of that had been kept unused and hidden away for thousands of years
- A ring that Sauron had kept in reserve and now put to use to prevent Rohan and Dunland from uniting and becoming powerful
- A new ring that Sauron had made or had someone else make for the same purpose as the previous option (but not necessarily with the same classic form factor)
- A "Dwarf" ring that Sauron had retrieved and now used for the same purpose as the previous two options
The idea that Helm's ring had used to belong to a Dwarf king in earlier times and now was being reused by Sauron is probably the most plausible one. Sauron may have failed to retrieve Durin's Ring, but there are also other Dwarf clans, and according to Gandalf:
"Seven the Dwarf-kings possessed, but three he has recovered, and the others the dragons have consumed."
-- Gandalf in The Shadow of the Past
(I wonder how Gandalf knows all that?)
I think the idea that Sauron could have redistributed the "Dwarf" rings he recovered makes a lot of sense as long as the weakened Sauron didn't need the power boost himself.
As for complaints about going and inventing new rings, Tolkien gives next to no detail about the Rings of Power beyond the One and the Three. The Witch-king's ring might be the Ring of Frost, maybe? (Even this is speculative.) With a situation like this, you don't as much invent a new ring as increment a number. (Maybe Helm's ring was the Ring of Unarmed Combat? Based on the Three, the rings created by Celebrimbor presumably have their own domains of effect, with the earlier rings weaker and more specific in domain of effect than the Three. I could easily see Sauron choosing to delegate the Ring of Unarmed Combat as not that necessary for his personal use.)
3. Helm and Freca
I think already in the conflict with Freca, four years before the war, Helm showed signs of aberrant thinking that could point to magical influence. It is as if his thought processes had been compromised in a way that benefited Sauron's long-term plans. The situation with Freca didn't even need to be a conflict, but Helm escalated at every point.
I think Freca was an ambitious man, but he wasn't planning to be a traitor to Rohan. Rather, he had chosen the path of diplomacy that would have tied himself closer to Rohan and ensured peace on Rohan's borders for many years to come. I think the fault here lies with Helm. Helm was the first person to resort to harsh words and the first to use violence. I get the impression that Helm premeditated killing Freca or at least severely beating him. Freca anticipated no such things, having himself benevolent intentions, and allowed himself be separated from his men.
Wulf would have been a good, even ideal, match for Helm's daughter, politically speaking, and not too low in status. I think Freca rode in with "many men" specifically to give a good impression of himself and his power and wealth so that Helm would be more inclined to accept the marriage offer. Freca didn't bring nearly enough men to overthrow Helm, and I think Freca did that on purpose because he didn't want to threaten. The marriage also would have been highly unlikely to result in Freca's offspring getting the throne because Helm already had two strong sons to inherit. Also, the delay of four years before Wulf attacks proves that Freca didn't have an invasion force ready.
So yes I think Helm was the real villain here, a dangerously violent (yet calculating) individual who incited a destructive war with his anti-diplomacy.
4. Helm the Combat Monster
Helm was unusually powerful and acting weird even before his death. A king going out alone in freezing weather to kill enemy soldiers with his bare hands (and possibly cannibalize his victims) is not normal. A normal king might have led a sortie or something. Helm was clearly not normal, and I think this shouldn't be just ignored but rather considered a hint about something unusual.
Helm's two sons only display normal levels of heroic prowess, so it doesn't sound like special genetics were involved. Rather, the cause for Helm's beyond-human battle prowess would need to be something outside of Helm himself, such as a magic item.
Yes, Helm's actions could be called by a guerrilla campaign, but Helm's actions are also the sort that are normally a quick way to death. Helm didn't even take any trusted men with him. (See Faramir in Ithilien for a more normal guerrilla campaign.)
He would go out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands. It was believed that if he bore no weapon no weapon would bite on him. The Dunlendings said that if he could find no food he ate men. That tale lasted long in Dunland.
-- Appendix A
Helm's action hero ways shouldn't make him invulnerable to swords and arrows. I'm reminded of the Witch-king here.
And then it sounds like Helm didn't stay in his grave:
Yet men said that the horn was still heard at times in the Deep and the wraith of Helm would walk among the foes of Rohan and kill men with fear.
-- Appendix A
This is reported as a rumor, but the description does sound strangely similar to a Nazgūl.
5. Rumors
For people who are the type to automatically disbelieve anything referred to as a rumor, the beliefs of the people would have been caused by something. "Actual historical events" is the simplest explanation here. Tolkien chose to include the folklore about Helm in the Appendices for some reason. I don't think it was to demonstrate the foolishness of the common people and their silly superstitious folk stories.
As for objections that the Dunlendings had confirmed false rumors about the Rohirrim, the part about the Rohirrim supposedly burning their captives comes from this passage:
The men of Dunland were amazed; for Saruman had told them that the men of Rohan were cruel and burned their captives alive.
-- The Road to Isengard
The words "Saruman had told them" are the key here. Saruman had a clear personal incentive to lie. On the other hand, the old stories of the undead Helm would likely have been the result of multiple reports from brave warriors claiming to have encountered an undead horror beyond understanding.
6. Helm's Transformation
"And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings."
-- Gandalf in The Shadow of the Past
Note that Gandalf uses the word "if" in the previous sentence. It took a long time for the original Nazgūl to turn. Helm wasn't active nearly that long.
Also I'm not so sure that Helm really died of the cold with that strange statue-like stopping of his:
One night men heard the horn blowing, but Helm did not return. In the morning there came a sun-gleam, the first for long days, and they saw a white figure standing still on the Dike, alone, for none of the Dunlendings dared come near. There stood Helm, dead as a stone, but his knees were unbent.
-- Appendix A
Helm had gone out to the cold many times, but he didn't expect the return of sunlight. He may not even have known that he had developed a sunlight vulnerability during the winter and should have started to wear a Nazgūl cloak if he wanted to go about in daylight. (The way Helm just stopped standing up reminds me of the three Trolls in The Hobbit, as strange as that connection might sound. There is much we don't know about Troll biology. They might even be undead in Tolkien's world contrary to the usual monster classification...)
7. Helm as an Undead
Then there is the argument that the Helm who was seen after his death instead was a ghost or spectre closer in nature to Hamlet's father than the Witch-king, or some kind of undead being other than a Ringwraith.
So I went looking through the text of The Lord of the Rings to see how Tolkien uses the words "ghost" and "spectre". It doesn't look like Tolkien uses these words to refer to a specific incorporeal category of undead being like the well-defined ghosts in Dungeons & Dragons.
living ghosts -> the Nazgūl
a ghost that drinks blood -> Gollum in rumors
ghosts -> the Dead Men of Dunharrow
spectre -> gloss for Dwimmerlaik
Appendix A refers to the post-death Helm as a wraith with a small w. Tolkien is not always consistent with his use of capital letters to refer to types of beings.
I think there are strong and weak wraiths, and also there would probably be types of undead beings other than wraiths, though this would depend on what Tolkien meant with terms like "wraith" and "wight" and the like. Tolkien never gives exact definitions for these things, and the people of Rohan probably weren't experts in the field of undead classification. An ordinary ghost shouldn't have been able to be as deadly as Helm was in death, or else all the hype about the Nazgūl is founded on sand.
I think the power level issue is very important. The post-death Helm is portrayed as a very powerful undead with a serious fear aura. He was capable of killing warriors all on his own and did so repeatedly. Therefore any weak types of undead can be ruled right out because Helm obviously wasn't any of them.
Also, if ordinary people would sometimes spontaneously turn into undead akin to Helm, this should have been more visible in the worldbuilding. (And no, I don't think the Dead Marshes count. I think that was Sauron's doing.)
The curse of undeath in Tolkien is a thing that can have multiple origins (possibly all related ultimately though), and someone made undead by a Ring of Power is different from someone made undead by a Morgul wound. (A Morgul wound would incidentally be exceedingly difficult to explain in Helm's case.) A Ring of Power would result in a strong variety of undead.
I know that there are other ways of becoming a wraith than possessing a Ring of Power, but these ways are not interchangeable in their end results:
"They tried to pierce your heart with a Morgul-knife which remains in the wound. If they had succeeded, you would have become like they are, only weaker and under their command. You would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord"
-- Gandalf to Frodo in Many Meetings
Clearly there are differences between different categories of wraiths. Ringwraiths are particularly strong ones, and it doesn't appear to be a close thing. Ringwraiths are difficult to produce too, and that probably has a lot to do with their power level at the end of the process.
Also, there isn't anything to even hint at the possibility that Helm might have received a Morgul-wound, and in fact that would go strongly against all evidence. Helm's case isn't at all similar to that of Boromir I, the Steward of Gondor.
So this leaves the Dead Men of Dunharrow and their vague curse method. It is important to remember that the Dead Men of Dunharrow are an entire people, and their massive output of Fear Units is not the output of any of the individual Dead alone. Also trying to find a way that Helm could have possibly been contaminated by the curse requires much wilder speculation than thinking of how Helm could have gotten a Ring of Power.
As for the possibility that Helm could have become a wraith through some other way, there is nothing to suggest that such a thing is even possible, let alone that it could occur naturally. Helm doesn't belong to the group of the Dead Men of Dunharrow and appears to be a unique case among the Rohirrim as well as individually not a weak type of undead. It is probably very relevant to the total effect that the Dead that aid Aragorn come in numbers large enough to count as an army. Yet Helm is able to cause significant fear all by himself.
8. Warning: Fictional Math!
It is known that the Nazgūl evoke the greatest fear when they are together. Based on that there appears to be some sort of monotonously increasing mathematical function f(x, n) that applies to the combined effect of multiple fear auras of the strength x. (This function would presumably apply to all entities with fear auras.) Given that the increase in fear is significant and noticeable from one to a single digit number of Nazgūl -- f(N, 1) to f(N, 9) -- we can estimate that the function doesn't have a very slow growth.
(I am assuming for simplicity that the individual auras being added together all have the same strength. I know this isn't strictly true, but it makes the math simpler and should be good enough for an approximation. It's not like we have enough information to benefit from complicating the matter anyway.)
Therefore, the army of the Dead should have a greatly larger fear effect than a single one of the Dead alone. f(D, 1) doesn't sound like it could be all that large even if the total effect for the whole army consisting of an entire nation worth of Dead is very large. Also, there have been reports in The Lord of the Rings of small groups of the Dead, and those didn't have the overwhelming fear effect of the complete army.
Helm also has a rather large fear effect all on his own at f(H, 1). An army of Helm copies should have an effect that... Well... Just based on my mathematical intuition, the effect should be significantly larger than the Army of the Dead. Exact numbers are impossible to give, of course. Unfortunately the Tolkien characters didn't carry around a fearometer.
The point is, I think the Fear Units have something to do with the overall strength of an undead being. I don't think it's a direct threat level measurement, but not completely unrelated either.
Like, a powerful Wraith emits a lot of Fear Units like a powerful lamp emits a lot of lumens. The black cloaks on the Nazgūl work somewhat similarly to a lamp shade and diminish the amount of Fear Units that reach an outside observer. However lumens and Fear Units appear to work differently when the units from multiple sources are added together, but that may be merely an artifact of non-linear fear perception, so that 2000 Fear Units appear to be more than twice as scary as 1000 Fear Units.
9. Re: Gorlim
Gorlim is another character that needs to be addressed for potential relevance.
I think it's entirely possible that Sauron was responsible for every single undead spirit in the First Age and that's why they had such a scary reputation. This could well indeed include Gorlim the Unhappy. Even the Witch-king displays some independent thinking and personal opinions, so Gorlim warning Beren does not necessarily mean that Gorlim was free from Sauron's control, merely that Sauron's control had holes in it. Having Gorlim curse himself "out of his own free will" may have been necessary for Sauron's First Age method for turning someone into an undead.
The other option is that Gorlim wasn't turned by Sauron. Under that scenario Gorlim's dream message might have been a case of after-death communication (sent from the Halls of Mandos, presumably as a special favor) or else Gorlim really had remained behind and used his own spiritual power to connect to Beren's mind. I think in this latter version Gorlim would have been properly classified as dead, not undead, and would have lacked any real capacity to affect the world. He would have been like a weaker human version of an Elven fairė, and sending the message to Beren's sleeping mind would have been the extent of Gorlim's powers.
Tolkien describes the Houseless Elves who rejected the Call of Mandos as relatively powerless spirits, though capable of some telepathy and even possessing bodies under the right circumstances, and I think Gorlim under similar circumstances wouldn't have been any stronger.
10. Conclusion
With some thinking about what really went on, the case of Helm Hammerhand offers us a rare glimpse into what the Nazgūl were like as rulers and how Sauron's control worked.
With the story of Helm Hammerhand I also think Tolkien subverts the idea of the martial hero king. If Helm had been genuinely a good king who was good for Rohan, he wouldn't have been the hero of song because the war with Dunland would have been avoided. If Helm had survived the war and remained on the throne, he could well have come to be remembered as a supernatural villain in Rohan too.
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Otaku-sempai
Elvenhome
May 13, 2:39pm
Post #2 of 3
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Could Helm have somehow acquired one of the Seven Dwarf-rings? Let's look at some possibilities.
1.Might have Helm inherited a Ring of Power through Fram of the Éothéod? We know that Fram slew the dragon Scatha around Third Age 2000 and claimed its hoard for his own. Scatha's hoard had previously belonged to Dwarves who had possibly settled in the Grey Mountains after being driven out of Khazad-dūm by Durin's Bane in the year 1981. As many of three of the Seven might have been kept in Khazad-dūm, not only Durin's Ring but also maybe the Ring of the Broadbeams and the Ring of the Flamebeards. While the Longbeards (Durin's Folk) established the kingdom of Erebor in the Lonely Mountain, the Flamebeards and/or the Broadbeams might have founded a settlement in the Grey Mountains that might have become the basis of Scatha's hoard. So, Fram might have acquired a Ring of Power from the dragon, possibly without even realizing its significance. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that one of the Great Rings could have remained in the hands of the Éothéod (and subsequently the Rohirrim) for over seven centuries while going unnoticed and having no significant impact.
2. Could a Dwarf-ring come from Sauron? We are told that Sauron has recovered Three of the Seven, while the other four are believed to have been destroyed. One of the Three was Durin's Ring that Sauron reclaimed after King Durin's capture in the Battle of Azanulbizar (2799). The other two were presumably recovered sometime after the dragons began afflicting the Dwarves in the Grey Mountains around the year 2570. So it's at least plausible that Sauron gifted a Dwarf-ring to Helm or to one of his ancestors, perhaps through an intermediary so that the origin of the Ring remained unknown.
That, to me, seems to be it in regards to the Dwarf-rings. It's possible that yet another of the four, thought destroyed, had actually survived, but allowing one to Scatha is probably stretching things as far as we should. It's certainly as far as I'm willing to go.
Do I think that King Helm had become a Ring-wraith? No, I don't think that Tolkien's text strongly supports that conclusion; I believe that the story of Helm becoming a wraith was nothing more than a rumor originally stread by his enemies and inspired by his terror tactics against the besieging Dunlendings. There is no real need to take it any further than that.
Hell hath no fury like that of the uninvolved. - Tony Isabella
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Felagund
Nargothrond
May 13, 7:57pm
Post #3 of 3
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Good to see all of this in one place and in essay format, congrats! And those Fear Units are back!
I thought I'd post a link to the original discussion here - in addition to your hypothesis, there were great contributions along the way from Otaku-sempai, Noria and Hamfast G (apologies if I've forgotten anyone!).
PS My strike rate at successfully posting hyperlinks to other threads is very poor - fingers crossed this time!
Welcome to the Mordorfone network, where we put the 'hai' back into Uruk
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