Khamûl

SECTION: Where Khamûl's Name Comes From in Unfinished Tales

Welcome to Ranger of the Realms. This whole episode is about Khamûl, and about the odd, almost accidental way his name got into Tolkien's world.

If we go looking for the word "Khamûl" in The Lord of the Rings, we won't find it. It isn't in The Fellowship of the Ring, it isn't in The Return of the King, and it isn't anywhere in the Appendices. Nine cloaked shapes on black horses, and that's all Frodo ever learns about them.

The name turns up in Unfinished Tales, a book Christopher Tolkien assembled from his father's papers and published in nineteen eighty, seven years after Tolkien died. Inside it is a piece called "The Hunt for the Ring." It's more like a bundle of late working notes than a full story. In them Tolkien tried to get the movements of the Black Riders straight: who rode where, and on which day, in the months before Frodo left the Shire. Tolkien had written those chapters years earlier, and the dates didn't quite line up. So Christopher sat down and worked the whole thing out, the way someone checks a train schedule.

And in the middle of that timetable, one of the Riders picks up a name. Christopher Tolkien's summary of the notes puts it like this:

"Of Khamûl it is said here that he was the most ready of all the Nazgûl, after the Black Captain himself, to perceive the presence of the Ring, but also the one whose power was most confused and diminished by daylight."

That sentence is most of what we have. The "Black Captain" in it is the Witch-king. He's the most famous Ringwraith of them all, and he has no personal name anywhere in Tolkien's writing. He's the Lord of the Nazgûl. He's the Witch-king of Angmar, the Lord of Morgul, the Black Captain. Every one of those is a job or a place. Whatever that man was called before he took his ring is gone.

Even the word "Nazgûl" works like that. It's Black Speech, the language Sauron made for his servants. The first half, nazg, means "ring." It's the same word that sits in the inscription on the One Ring, "ash nazg durbatulûk," one ring to rule them all. The second half, gûl, means "wraith" or "spirit," and it's also the element we hear in Minas Morgul. So "Nazgûl" is simply "ring-wraiths." The word tells us what they carry and what they've turned into. It doesn't tell us who any of them were.

And that's what makes Khamûl so odd. Out of nine beings whose whole existence has been reduced to a function, only one of them walks out of Tolkien's notes with something that sounds like an actual name. And the name doesn't come alone. Around it, the notes hang a small cluster of labels. He's "the Shadow of the East." In an earlier draft, he's "the Black Easterling" and "the Second Chief," second in rank to the Witch-king. He's the Rider who came up the lane to Bag End. And he's the one who commanded Sauron's fortress in southern Mirkwood.

A name, a rank, a homestead, a post, and a week of dated movements in the Shire. For a Ringwraith, that's basically a biography. For any other character, it's almost nothing. We get no face, no kingdom we can find on a map, no year of birth, no record of what Khamûl wanted before Sauron handed him a ring. Tolkien gave us enough to pick him out of a crowd of nine, and then stopped.

So what does knowing Khamûl's name actually tell us? Where did he come from, what did he hold, what did he do in the Shire in September of thirty eighteen, and what happened to him at the end? Tolkien left a surprising amount of that open, maybe on purpose. But maybe because the Ring had already taken the rest.

SECTION: Nine Rings for Mortal Men: Three Númenóreans and Six Others

Many of us are familiar with the rhyme. Three rings for the Elven-kings, seven for the Dwarf-lords, nine for Mortal Men doomed to die. Gandalf fills in the history for Frodo in "The Shadow of the Past":

"Nine he gave to Mortal Men, proud and great, and so ensnared them. Long ago they fell under the dominion of the One, and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants."

Sauron picked these men carefully. The Silmarillion describes the men who took them as "kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old." They became mighty in their own day. They won glory and wealth. They got what looked like unending life, and then that life became unbearable to them. And one by one, the Silmarillion says, "according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning," they fell under the power of the ring they wore, and under the domination of the One.

So the Nine fell one at a time, each man holding out as long as his own strength let him. That matters for Khamûl, because Tolkien ranks him second among the Nine, and a high rank among the wraiths may say something about how strong the man was before he broke.

Gandalf also explains how it works to Frodo. A mortal who keeps one of the Great Rings doesn't die, but he doesn't really live either. He just continues, until every minute is a weariness. And if he uses the ring to go 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." That's the road Khamûl walked. At some point in the Second Age, a man, probably from the East, put on a gift from Sauron, and over the years he wore away into something that could only be seen by the one who held the Ruling Ring.

Now, who were these nine men? Good question. The Silmarillion gives us one hard fact. In the Akallabêth, the account of Númenor's downfall, it says that "among those whom he ensnared with the Nine Rings three were great lords of Númenórean race."

That leaves six who weren't Númenórean. Six men from the peoples of Middle-earth itself, from the lands the Númenóreans sailed to and ruled. And of those six, Khamûl is the only one Tolkien ever tied, even loosely, to a people and a direction. We don't even know where the other five are from, let alone a name.

If Tolkien's earlier label holds, Khamûl's people were the Easterlings, the Men of Rhûn. Rhûn is simply the Elvish word for "east," and on the map it's the great open country beyond Mirkwood, centered on the inland Sea of Rhûn. The Easterlings have a long and bitter history in Tolkien's world.

Let's go back to the First Age. Easterlings first came west over the mountains into Beleriand, and two of their chieftains, Bór and Ulfang, took service with the Elves. At the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears in 472 of the First Age, Ulfang's sons turned on their allies in the middle of the fighting, and that betrayal helped break the Elvish host. Bór's sons stayed loyal and died fighting. So from their first appearance, the Easterlings are split between men who kept faith and men who didn't.

In the Third Age, they're one of Gondor's most persistent enemies. The Wainriders, a confederacy of Easterling peoples who traveled in great wagons, attacked Gondor starting in eighteen fifty-one of the Third Age and killed two of its kings, Narmacil the Second in eighteen fifty-six and Ondoher in nineteen forty-four. In twenty-five ten, another Easterling people called the Balchoth crossed the Anduin and nearly overran Gondor's northern province. They were stopped at the Field of Celebrant by Eorl the Young, and that ride is how Rohan came to exist. In the War of the Ring, Easterlings marched at the Pelennor and at the Black Gate, and besieged Dale in the North, where King Brand and Dáin Ironfoot were killed in March of thirty nineteen.

So if he was one of them, Khamûl sits at the root of that long story. Long before any wagon rolled toward Gondor, one lord of the East was proud and great enough for Sauron to single out.

SECTION: Black Easterling or Shadow of the East?

The difficulty starts with the labels themselves, because Tolkien didn't really settle on them.

"The Hunt for the Ring" survives in more than one version. These are Tolkien's own drafts of the same notes, written at different times, and Christopher Tolkien compared them when he edited the book. In an earlier draft, the Rider who comes to Hobbiton is called "the Second Chief," and beside that, in brackets, "the Black Easterling." In the later version, Tolkien calls him Khamûl, and gives him the title "the Shadow of the East."

At first glance, that looks like the same idea said twice, but there's probably a real difference.

"The Black Easterling" is a statement about where a man came from. An Easterling is somebody born among the peoples of Rhûn, the way a Dúnadan is somebody born of the line of Númenor. If that label had survived into the final version, we'd have a pretty straight forward answer: Khamûl was an Easterling by blood.

"The Shadow of the East" is looser. It could mean the same thing, a shadow that came out of the East. But it could also just describe where he was stationed. When Tolkien wrote those later notes, Khamûl was holding Dol Guldur, and Dol Guldur sits in southern Mirkwood, on the eastern side of the Anduin. Seen from Lórien, or from Gondor, or from Rivendell, Dol Guldur is the East. So the later title fits a post just as neatly as it fits a birthplace.

There are two ways to read this. One reading says the labels are cumulative. Tolkien called him the Black Easterling first, never took it back, and the later title just adds to the picture. The other says the revision matters, that Tolkien moved from an ethnic description toward a political one, and that we shouldn't lean too hard on a label he replaced. Both of those are fair readings, and neither one can be proven, because Tolkien never wrote a sentence explaining what he meant.

The name itself doesn't help. Most names in Tolkien's world can be taken apart. Elvish names break down into Quenya or Sindarin roots, Númenórean ones into Adûnaic, and Tolkien usually left notes explaining them. "Khamûl" doesn't come apart. It isn't built from any of the Elvish languages, and it doesn't look Adûnaic, and Tolkien never explained what it meant. The simplest reading is that it's meant to sound foreign even inside Middle-earth, a word from a language of the East that none of our sources bothered to translate. It does end on the same "-ûl" sound we hear in Nazgûl and Morgul, and it's tempting to read that as a hint that "Khamûl" was a title Sauron's people gave him rather than the name his mother did. That's a guess. It's an interesting one, but Tolkien left no note either way.

Then there's everything that's missing. Tolkien gives Khamûl no year of birth. No kingdom. No reign. No battle from his mortal life. We don't know when in the Second Age he took his ring, or how long he held out before it took him. All we're told about the Nine as a group is that they fell "long ago," and Appendix B says the Ringwraiths first appear around twenty-two fifty-one of the Second Age. Tolkien never gave Khamûl a more precise date than that.

If Khamûl was an Easterling by birth, then the Rider at Bag End came from the same peoples who marched on Dale and the Pelennor in thirty nineteen, still serving the master who'd taken their lord thousands of years before. If he wasn't, all we're left with is a word with no meaning attached, and a rank that only describes him in relation to somebody else.

SECTION: Dol Guldur After 2951: A Nazgûl in Mirkwood

The least we can do, is pin down where Khamûl stood, and for how long.

Dol Guldur means "hill of sorcery." It's a bare, stony height in the south of the great forest the Elves once called Greenwood the Great, just across the Anduin from Lothlórien. And it was dark long before Khamûl got there.

Around ten fifty of the Third Age, a darkness fell on Greenwood, and men began calling it Mirkwood. Around eleven hundred, the Wise, meaning the wizards and the great Elves, discovered that some evil power had built a stronghold at Dol Guldur. At first they thought it was one of the Nazgûl. In fact it was Sauron himself, hiding behind the name of the Necromancer.

That fortress went on to shape the next two thousand years. In twenty sixty-three, Gandalf went to Dol Guldur, and Sauron slipped away into the East rather than be discovered. That began what the Appendices call the Watchful Peace, almost four hundred years of quiet. In twenty-four sixty the Peace ended, and Sauron came back to Dol Guldur stronger than before. In twenty-eight fifty, Gandalf went in a second time, in secret, and this time he confirmed that the Necromancer really was Sauron. It was in those dungeons that he found Thráin, the heir of the Dwarf-kings, dying, and took from him the map and key that would later send Thorin and Bilbo to Erebor. The next year the White Council met, and Gandalf urged them to attack. Saruman talked them out of it.

It took ninety more years. In twenty-nine forty-one, the same year Bilbo found the Ring, the Council finally moved against Dol Guldur, and Sauron abandoned it. Sauron had planned for that. He went back to Mordor, and ten years later he stopped hiding.

Appendix B sums up the year twenty-nine fifty-one like this:

"Sauron declares himself openly and gathers power in Mordor. He begins the rebuilding of Barad-dûr... Sauron sends three of the Nazgûl to reoccupy Dol Guldur."

The Appendices don't say which Nazgûl they were. Tolkien's notes in Unfinished Tales tell us one: Khamûl, the Shadow of the East, the chief of the three. The other two stayed faceless.

Holding Dol Guldur was important because of where it sits. The hill is almost within sight of Lothlórien, where Galadriel and Celeborn kept one of the last great Elven realms in Middle-earth. It's close to Thranduil's Woodland Realm, and it overlooks the Anduin valley, the road north and south between Gondor and the lands of the Beornings and Dale. A Ringwraith on that hill threatened all of them at once.

And it wasn't a short posting. From twenty-nine fifty-one until the Nine rode out on their hunt in thirty eighteen, that's sixty-seven years. For nearly seventy years, the Elves of Lórien lived with a Nazgûl across the river.

We get glimpses of what that garrison did. In June of thirty eighteen, the same month Sauron attacked Osgiliath, Appendix B says that Thranduil's realm was attacked, and in the fighting Gollum escaped from the Elves who'd been guarding him. Those orcs almost certainly came out of Dol Guldur, which means the fortress was a fist Sauron could swing as well as a watchtower.

And the fist kept throwing punches after Khamûl left. In March of thirty nineteen, while the War of the Ring was being fought in the south, Lórien was attacked three times from Dol Guldur, and on the same day as the battle of the Pelennor there was a great battle under the trees of Mirkwood, where Thranduil threw back the forces of Dol Guldur. Lórien held every time. Appendix B says the power that dwelt in Lórien was too great for anyone to overcome, unless Sauron himself had come there.

Dol Guldur only fell once Sauron did. After Barad-dûr had come down, Celeborn led the army from Lórien across the Anduin and took Dol Guldur, and Galadriel tore down its walls and laid bare its pits. Thranduil and Celeborn renamed the forest Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves.

By then, Khamûl had been gone from that hill for months. His real mission had taken him far to the west, a lovely, green place in a corner of Middle-earth where nobody had ever heard of the Nazgûl.

SECTION: The Black Rider at Bag End: September 23, 3018

The hunt starts with Gollum. In thirty seventeen, Sauron's servants had Gollum in Mordor, and under torment he gave up two words: "Shire" and "Baggins." Then Sauron let him go. That year Aragorn caught Gollum in the Dead Marshes and brought him to Thranduil for safekeeping.

So in the summer of thirty eighteen, Sauron sent out all Nine, disguised as riders in black, and they went looking for a land none of them had ever seen. Appendix B has the dates from there, and we have some precision.

On the 18th of September, the Black Riders crossed the Fords of Isen, the river crossing below Saruman's fortress. On the 22nd, they reached the Sarn Ford on the Brandywine at evening, the southern way into the Shire, and they drove off the Rangers who'd been guarding it. On the 23rd, before dawn, four Riders entered the Shire. The rest went east to watch the Greenway and the road toward Bree.

And at nightfall on the 23rd of September, a Black Rider came to Hobbiton.

Tolkien's notes say that Rider was Khamûl.

Frodo was leaving that evening. He'd sold Bag End to the Sackville-Bagginses, and he'd waited until dark to slip away quietly with Sam and Pippin. As they left, Frodo heard voices down the lane. It was Sam's father, old Hamfast Gamgee, the Gaffer, talking to somebody on a horse. And the Gaffer was telling this stranger exactly where to look:

"No, Mr. Baggins has gone away. Went this morning, and my Sam went with him: anyway all his stuff went. Yes, sold out and gone, I tell'ee... He's moved to Bucklebury or some such place, away down yonder."

The Gaffer got the timing wrong, but the direction was dead right. The stranger rode off, and Frodo didn't think much of it at the time. That was Khamûl's first conversation in the Shire.

The next afternoon, on the road east, the hobbits heard hoofs behind them and hid. A Rider stopped almost on top of them, and sat there turning his hooded head from side to side. Later that evening, near the Woody End, another Rider came creeping toward them in the dark, and only the arrival of Gildor's company of Elves, singing as they walked, made him withdraw.

On the 25th, the hobbits cut across country to Farmer Maggot's farm. Maggot told them a Rider had been there that day, asking for Baggins. Tolkien's notes say this was Khamûl again, with one of his companions from Dol Guldur. When Maggot told him there was no Baggins in these parts, the Rider offered to come back with gold if Maggot would tell him when Baggins passed. Maggot told him to get off his land before he called the dogs, and the Rider went, but Maggot didn't like the look of him one bit.

That evening, the hobbits crossed the Brandywine by the Bucklebury Ferry. As they pulled away from the bank, Frodo saw a dark bundle on the landing stage they'd just left. It swayed this way and that, as if searching the ground, and then crawled back into the gloom. The ferry saved them. A Rider couldn't follow without going miles north to the Brandywine Bridge.

On the 26th, Frodo and his friends went into the Old Forest, and for a few days the Riders lost them completely. Then, in the early hours of the 30th, Riders broke through the door at Crickhollow, the house Frodo had supposedly moved into. Fatty Bolger, who'd stayed behind as a decoy, fled out the back and raised the old Horn-call of Buckland: "Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!" The Riders found the house empty and rode away. That night, at Bree, the hobbits' room at the Prancing Pony was attacked too, but they'd been moved.

Side by side, those dates tell a story. Khamûl got the right village, the right name, and even the right direction from the Gaffer, on the night Frodo left. For a week after that, Khamûl and the Riders with him were always one day, or one river, or one door behind.

SECTION: Why Khamûl Could Sense the Ring But Not See in the Sun

There's a sentence from Unfinished Tales that explains a lot about those near-misses. Khamûl was the Nazgûl "most ready" after the Black Captain "to perceive the presence of the Ring," and also the one "most confused and diminished by daylight."

We see this with his experience in the Shire.

Aragorn explains how a Ringwraith finds things, when he talks to the hobbits on Weathertop, and it's a pretty clear description:

"They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are hidden from us: then they are most to be feared. And at all times they smell the blood of living things, desiring and hating it."

When we think about that, we can interpret the Shire scenes differently. When the Rider stopped on the road that first afternoon, he couldn't see the hobbits hiding a few feet away, under a tree just off the lane. Tolkien describes the moment: from inside the hood came "a noise as of someone sniffing to catch an elusive scent," and the head turned from side to side. The Rider knew something was there. He was hunting by smell and by the pull of the Ring, in the middle of the afternoon, with the senses the sun couldn't take from him.

Frodo felt the pull from the other side.

Crouching under that tree, Frodo was seized by a sudden desire to put on the Ring. His hand was already moving toward his pocket when the Rider sat up and rode on. The Ring was pulling on the wraith and the hobbit at the same time.

Tolkien's notes say that Rider was Khamûl, following on from Hobbiton, and it all fits. He's the Nazgûl best tuned to that pull, and he's within arm's reach of it. But it's afternoon, and daylight muddles him worse than any of the others. He can feel the Ring and he can't find it, and the sun is the reason.

The night scene is the reverse. That evening near the Woody End, another Rider crept toward the hobbits in the dark, when a Nazgûl should be at his strongest. And then Gildor's Elves came down the road singing a hymn to Elbereth, and the Rider slipped away. Tolkien's notes say that was Khamûl too. And we know how the Nazgûl feel about Elves. Gildor's people were High Elves, the kind who had lived in the light of the Blessed Realm, and to a wraith, Elves like that are their own sort of daylight.

Tolkien wrote about this directly in nineteen fifty-eight, in a letter to a man who wanted to put the story on film. Letter 210 says the Black Riders' "peril is almost entirely due to the unreasoning fear which they inspire (like ghosts)." They have "no great physical power against the fearless," Tolkien wrote, "but what they have, and the fear that they inspire, is enormously increased in darkness."

In the Shire, all Khamûl did was ask questions. He questioned the Gaffer in a lane and Farmer Maggot at a farmhouse door, and he offered gold in a strange voice. The Gaffer, more annoyed than frightened, answered him and sent him on his way. Maggot threatened him with dogs, and the Rider went. Out in the open, face to face with a stubborn hobbit, one of the most feared servants of Sauron had nothing to use except dread, and dread doesn't do much to people who won't give in to it.

So the two halves of Khamûl's description don't cancel out. They're the same curse. The Ring made him keener, and it made him weaker. It sharpened the sense that tied him to Sauron's will, and it dimmed everything that belonged to the ordinary world of sunlight and farmers and gates. The closer the Ring drew him in, the less of him was left anywhere else.

SECTION: The Second Chief After the Witch-king Fell

Khamûl's rank is "second," and every time we try to measure him, we end up measuring him against the Witch-king.

The comparison doesn't flatter Khamûl. Around thirteen hundred of the Third Age, the Witch-king founded Angmar in the far North, and he spent the next seven centuries grinding down the North-kingdom of Arnor, until he took its last capital, Fornost, in nineteen seventy-four. The next year his army was broken, and he vanished from the North, and in two thousand and two he took the Gondorian city of Minas Ithil and made it Minas Morgul.

In Letter 210, Tolkien says the Witch-king, is the leader, and is more powerful in all ways than the others.

So the two Nazgûl we can actually tell apart are two very different kinds of servant. The Witch-king had a kingdom and a crown, and Khamûl had a fortress and a list of questions. The Witch-king struck in person, while Khamûl hunted.

We also see that difference on the road to Rivendell. On the night of the 6th of October, thirty eighteen, five Riders attacked the hobbits' camp under Weathertop, and the blade that went into Frodo's shoulder belonged to the Witch-king. Khamûl had been the one who found the trail in the Shire, and the Witch-king was the one who tried to finish it.

Two weeks later, on the 20th of October, all Nine came together at the Ford of Bruinen, just short of Rivendell. Frodo made it across. The Riders followed him into the water, and Elrond and Gandalf sent the river down in flood. The horses were swept away, and without them the Riders were crippled. They drifted back to Mordor, and when they appear again, it's on winged beasts over the fields of Gondor.

And then, on the 15th of March, thirty nineteen, on the Pelennor Fields, the Witch-king died. Éowyn and Merry killed him, and Glorfindel's prophecy from more than a thousand years earlier, that he wouldn't fall by the hand of man, came true.

That should have been Khamûl's moment. If the Witch-king was first and Khamûl was second, then for the last ten days of the war the Nazgûl had a new captain, and it was him.

But Tolkien never says this.

There's no line anywhere that names a new Lord of the Nazgûl. There's no scene of the eight remaining wraiths regrouping under Khamûl. When they appear over the Black Gate at the end, they come as a group, and no sentence says who leads them. It's a very reasonable inference that the Second Chief led them, because that's what "second" means. But it's our inference. Tolkien left that door unopened.

The end, at least, is on the page. On the 25th of March, when the Ring went into the fire, the Nazgûl were racing toward Mount Doom, and caught in the ruin of the mountain and the sky, "they crackled, withered, and went out." Khamûl went out with them, one of nine, and nobody thought to say which one he was.

So that's the Ringwraith Tolkien named. He may have been an Easterling born, or he may only have stood watch in the East. He was the keenest of the Nine at sensing the Ring and the most helpless in the sun. He was second to a captain who died ten days before the end, and nobody tells us whether he ever took that captain's place. Tolkien drafted two answers to where Khamûl came from, kept both in his papers, and never chose.

So it may be the best Tolkien could give us about the Ringwraiths. The Nine Rings promised "proud and great" men everything a king could want, and what they delivered was a slow erasure, until all that was left was a function in Sauron's service. The Witch-king lost even his name. Khamûl kept his, and very little else. A man from the East who might have had a kingdom, a family, and a history of his own, and all that survives of him is a name in a working note, a date on a hill in Mirkwood, and a voice in a lane in Hobbiton, asking for Baggins.