The Lie About The Nine Rings | Why The Nazgûl Were Empty Slaves?

[00:00:05]If you believe the nine riders hunted the ring-bearer with their own rings of power gleaming on their fingers, the films have deceived you.

[00:00:12]Sauron gave nine mortal lords a gift, and it was not power.

[00:00:18]It was a cage with no walls.

[00:00:21]What those mortals mistook for the key to immortality was, in truth, the most patient and exquisite torture ever devised in Middle-earth.

[00:00:30]They did not die.

[00:00:32]That was the horror.

[00:00:36]To understand the catastrophe, you must first understand the bargain.

[00:00:41]The nine were not born monsters. They were ambitious mortal men of the Second Age.

[00:00:47]And to each of them Sauron, wearing the fair mask of Annatar, gave a ring of power. Through these gifts, they became kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old, the finest of their kind.

[00:01:01]But notice what the ring did not give.

[00:01:03]It did not grant strength of arm, nor mastery of fire, nor any sorcery a mortal could wield like a weapon.

[00:01:11]The deception was subtler than that.

[00:01:13]For a mortal man, a great ring does not enlarge life. Tolkien is precise on this point through the mouth of Gandalf. A mortal who keeps such a ring does not grow or gain new years.

[00:01:26]He merely continues until every minute is a weariness.

[00:01:30]The gift was not more life. It was the same thread of life drawn out and out and out. At first, this felt like triumph.

[00:01:39]Glory came to them and wealth beyond counting. And then the centuries began to pass, and the thread did not break.

[00:01:49]Imagine it.

[00:01:50]Imagine a span of life meant to last three score years and 10, stretched across centuries and stretched still further, Tolkien gives us the perfect image of this through old Bilbo, who carried only a fraction of such a burden, and who described the feeling in words no reader forgets.

[00:02:08]That he felt thin, sort of stretched like butter scraped over too much bread.

[00:02:14]Now multiply that thinness across hundreds of years.

[00:02:19]This was the true nature of the gift.

[00:02:21]The body did not age into a merciful death.

[00:02:24]It faded into something stretched and gray.

[00:02:27]The mind wore down to exhaustion. And the one release that every other mortal was promised, the gift of men, which is death itself, was the one door now closed to them.

[00:02:38]They could not grow old enough to die.

[00:02:41]They could only persist.

[00:02:43]And as the years hollowed them out, something far stranger began to happen.

[00:02:48]They started slowly to vanish.

[00:02:51]Not from the world, but into another one.

[00:02:55]Here, the bargain reveals its cruelty.

[00:02:58]Those who used the nine became great in their day, and in their greatness, they were undone.

[00:03:04]They had, as it seemed, unending life.

[00:03:07]And that life became unendurable to them.

[00:03:10]The glory soured. The treasure meant nothing.

[00:03:14]One by one, sooner or later, according to their inborn strength and to the good or evil in their wills, each of them fell [music] under the thralldom of the ring he bore, and under the domination of the one that ruled them all, which was Sauron's.

[00:03:30]They had reached for immortality.

[00:03:32]What closed around them instead was ownership, and the prison they had walked into so willingly had no bars, no walls, and no door, because it was not built of stone. It was built of shadow.

[00:03:46]For as these men faded out of the waking world, they did not vanish into nothing.

[00:03:51]They were being drawn, year by year, into a second world that lay just beneath this one, a gray and silent country where Sauron alone was king.

[00:04:01]And what they would see there would break the last of what made them men.

[00:04:07]So, who were these men who walked so willingly into the dark?

[00:04:12]They were not nobodies. They were the great ones of their age, kings and sorcerers, lords of cities and commanders of armies.

[00:04:20]And among the nine, Tolkien gives us one detail that sharpens the whole tragedy.

[00:04:26]In the Akallabêth, the account of Númenor's downfall, >> [music] >> he writes that among those whom Sauron ensnared with the nine rings, three were great lords of Númenórean race.

[00:04:37]Understand what that means.

[00:04:40]Númenóreans were the highest of all mortal men, long-lived, far-sighted, blessed beyond any other people of their kind.

[00:04:49]These were not weak souls easily broken.

[00:04:52]These were the closest a mortal could come to the grandeur of the elves.

[00:04:56]And it was precisely these men, the proudest and most gifted, who reached hardest for what was forbidden, and who fell the furthest. The greater the man, the greater the ruin.

[00:05:08]Because the rings did not simply lengthen their years.

[00:05:12]The rings began, slowly, to pull them out of the world entirely.

[00:05:17]And the place they were being pulled into had no sun.

[00:05:21]This is the part the films could never truly show.

[00:05:25]As a mortal faded under his ring, he did not become a ghost in our world. He began to exist in two worlds at once.

[00:05:33]There was the seen world, the waking lands beneath the sun, and there was the unseen, a realm of shadow that lies beneath all things, invisible to mortal eyes.

[00:05:45]Tolkien tells us the gift came a terrible power. These faded men could walk unseen by all eyes in this world, and they could perceive things in worlds hidden from living men.

[00:05:57]It sounds like sorcery.

[00:05:59]It sounds like an advantage.

[00:06:01]But here is the cruelty buried in the line.

[00:06:04]Tolkien adds that too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron.

[00:06:10]They had been given new sight, yes, but the world they were now condemned to see most clearly was a world furnished by their master.

[00:06:18]Their eyes were open in a country built entirely of his lies.

[00:06:22]So, picture them again. Not as dread lords soaring on fell beasts by choice, but as blind men groping through a fog of nightmares that only their enemy could lift.

[00:06:33]This is the cage with no walls.

[00:06:37]They were not chained. No door was ever locked behind them, and yet they could not leave because the prison was their own perception.

[00:06:45]The more the ring claimed them, the more the real world dimmed to a gray blur, and the more they belonged to the shadow realm where Sauron's will was the only solid thing.

[00:06:55]They existed in both worlds, but they lived in only one of them, and that one had a king.

[00:07:02]Every glory faded. Every memory of sunlight thinned.

[00:07:06]What remained was dependence, total suffocating dependence on the will and the works of the one who had given them the rings in the first place.

[00:07:15]And you might think that is the bottom of this horror.

[00:07:18]A mind trapped in an enemy's illusions, blind to the living world.

[00:07:24]It is not the bottom, because the deepest cruelty of all is not about what the nine could see. It is about a single object none of them possessed, and the lie the films told you about who was holding it.

[00:07:39]Now we reach the lie at the very heart of the popular image.

[00:07:43]Picture the scene everyone thinks they know. Nine dread kings sweeping across Middle-earth hunting the ring-bearer, >> [clears throat] >> each commanding his own terrible power, each with a ring of power upon his finger.

[00:07:56]Autonomous dark lords, Sauron's deadly equals.

[00:08:00]It is false.

[00:08:02]During the War of the Ring, [music] the Nazgûl did not possess their own rings at all.

[00:08:07]Tolkien states it plainly in his letters, in letter 246, describing how the Ringwraiths were laid upon their errand by Sauron, who through their nine rings, which he held, had primary control of their wills.

[00:08:23]Read that again.

[00:08:24]Which he held.

[00:08:26]The rings the nine had bargained their souls for were not on their hands during the hunt for Frodo.

[00:08:32]They were in the hand of their master.

[00:08:34]Now, if you know your Tolkien, you may be ready to object because there is one line where Gandalf says the opposite.

[00:08:41]Hold on to that objection because answering it is exactly what separates the truth from the myth.

[00:08:48]Here is the honest reckoning.

[00:08:51]At the Council of Elrond, Gandalf says four words that seem to contradict everything.

[00:08:56]The nine the Nazgûl keep. And critics love to quote it. But one line is not the verdict. It is the outlier.

[00:09:05]Look at the weight of everything else Tolkien wrote.

[00:09:08]In Unfinished Tales, in the account of the hunt for the ring, he is unambiguous. The Ringwraiths were entirely enslaved to their nine rings, which Sauron now himself held.

[00:09:19]And they were quite incapable of acting against his will.

[00:09:23]In the Shadow of the Past, Gandalf himself confirms the truth directly.

[00:09:28]The nine Sauron had gathered to himself.

[00:09:31]And on Weathertop, when the wraiths close in around a terrified Frodo, he sees their gray faces, their pale crowns, their cold blades, but no rings upon their fingers.

[00:09:43]The overwhelming testimony of the legendarium agrees.

[00:09:47]By the end of the Third Age, the nine rings had been gathered back into Sauron's own keeping in the darkness of his tower.

[00:09:54]So, sit with what that truly means.

[00:09:58]The master did not merely command his servants. He held the very chains that bound them, and those chains were the rings they themselves had craved.

[00:10:08]This is the final humiliation, and it is total.

[00:10:12]Strip away the rings from their own keeping, and the Nazgûl had nothing of their own left. No independent power, no will to call their own, no possibility of rebellion.

[00:10:24]Tolkien tells us they could not act against Sauron's will.

[00:10:28]He tells us that if even the Witch-king, their dread captain, had laid hands on the One Ring itself, he would not have kept it. He would have carried it straight back to his master like an obedient hound.

[00:10:41]Think on that. The single most powerful of the nine holding the most powerful object in the world would have had no choice but to surrender it. That is not a dark lord. That is a tool that walks.

[00:10:53]The rings had promised these men dominion over others.

[00:10:57]What the rings actually delivered was a leash, and the hand that held it was never their own.

[00:11:02]And yet, even the theft of their rings was not the last thing Sauron took from them.

[00:11:08]There was one possession deeper than any ring, older than any crown, and in the end, that too [music] was stripped away, until not even their own names remained.

[00:11:20]So, we come to the last thing taken, and it is the cruelest of all.

[00:11:25]The final horror of the Nazgûl was never the hooded robe or the unseen face beneath it.

[00:11:31]The final horror was the death of the self.

[00:11:35]As each man passed fully under his ring, Tolkien tells us, he entered into the realm of shadows, becoming forever invisible to all living eyes, save the one who wore the ruling ring.

[00:11:48]And as the body faded out of the world, so did the man within it.

[00:11:52]The memories of who he had been, the deeds he had done, the face his mother had once known, all of it thinning away.

[00:12:01]Like that butter scraped over too much bread until nothing recognizable remained.

[00:12:06]And here is the proof of that erasure, written not in what Tolkien tells us about them, but in his silence.

[00:12:14]Consider this.

[00:12:15]Nine of the mightiest mortals who ever lived, kings, warriors, sorcerers of legend, and the histories of Middle-earth preserve for almost all of them no name at all.

[00:12:27]We know one by a title only, the Witch-king [music] of Angmar, and a title is not a name.

[00:12:35]We know a single other, Khamûl the Easterling, named only in Tolkien's later writings.

[00:12:41]The rest are simply numbers in the dark.

[00:12:44]Men who once commanded kingdoms, remembered now by no one, not even themselves.

[00:12:51]This was Sauron's true masterpiece.

[00:12:54]Not the forging of metal, but the unmaking of a soul.

[00:12:58]He took kings and left behind instruments. He took names and left behind shadows. The Úlairi, the enemy's most terrible servants, of whom Tolkien wrote that darkness went with them and they cried with the voices of death.

[00:13:13]But here is the truth that should chill you most.

[00:13:17]This hunger, this ruin born from the craving to possess a single object of power, was never a sickness of men alone.

[00:13:26]The immortal and the wise fell to it, too.

[00:13:29]And one of the greatest kingdoms the world has ever known was drowned in blood over a single shining jewel.

[00:13:39]The tragedy of the nine reveals how the desire to escape death turned kings into nameless slaves.

[00:13:45]But the curse of obsession over an object of power was no burden of mortals alone.

[00:13:51]The elves fell, too.

[00:13:53]And the ruin of one of the greatest realms of the First Age began with an Elven king's greed for a single Silmaril.

[00:14:01]To witness how one king's greed shattered the protective enchantment of Melian and left the kingdom of Doriath to be drowned in blood, click the video now on your screen.