(Context, credit, and source below poll.)
Today's poll is based on this thread with notable principles @penny-anna, @elodieunderglass, @elanorpam, and @earhartsease. All of the options above are paraphrased from their original answers.
The full original question:
Can I please ask for your top five theories on why the Ringwraiths become so much more powerful over the course of the LotR trilogy? By the end of the books a single Ringwraith holds an army of 6000 men in paralysing dread from a height of a mile, they're dismaying hosts of men, etc. And in the beginning, they're easily defeated by "jumping behind a tree," "pretending to be in a different room," "getting on a little boat," "man with a stick on fire," etc.
My theory is it’s because they’re fairy tale villains in the first half of Fellowship and epic villains in ROTK. The books practically change genre after Rivendell
That’s the unreliable narrators answer! I’m personally quite fond of it. We note that Bilbo wrote The Hobbit, and had started work on the first part of the Fellowship when the delegates convene. He then passes the torch on to Frodo, noting that his (Bilbo’s) own story is going to have a happy ending. From there, Frodo wrote the rest - his journey, picked up and written after encountering Bilbo in Rivendell - in his own tone. Bilbo’s experiences, writing style, narrative voice/character sense/self-awareness, translation priorities, sense of humour, and deep appreciation for the absurd - all mean that his works are characterised by a narrative lightheartedness - Bilbo is clearly more of a children’s book author. Scenes that would have an average writer biting their pencil in half are breezily dismissed in a comfortably bloodless fashion, all while making fun of himself, and you can imagine him narrating them to the children at the fireside, with lots of rhyming passages (a mark of an oral storyteller or someone experienced with children! All you have to do is get to the repetitive rhyming part and it’s like hitting a save point for your memory! You can tell whole chapters of story seamlessly, out loud, all night this way.) Bilbo is in the business of happy endings; writing, poetry and storytelling were his calling, and his pride. He enjoyed them.
Frodo’s work is diligent and serious. He also fights trolls and intelligent spiders, but he didn’t really want to. When he writes about enemies, it’s with horror and discomfort. He never particularly dreamed of being an author. He just chalks down a historical record - mostly, it seems, because Bilbo wanted it.
Thus, There and Back Again and the first part of The Red Book of the Westmarch are Bilbo’s memoirs, and Ringwraiths come across as just spooky in his writing. The later parts of the Red Book are Frodo writing his own nightmares with a thousand-yard stare about the terrors that permanently disabled him - and the Ringwraiths appear to change but are simply described in a tonal shift.
It’s a good theory! You should vote for it
My theory is that their power level depends on how much Sauron is feeding into them, and their behavior shifts based on how much power they have access to.
Sauron's only just gotten back on the horse, as it were, in the past hundred years. Prior to that he was on the downlow to the point that his shenanigans were mistaken for a mortal necromancer's until Gandalf was like, "Oh, dip." during the Hobbit.
Now he's dealing with Gondor, he's dealing with Rohan, he's trying to manage every orc and troll in the realm who have previously been left to more or less self-govern and probably aren't all in on the Age of the Orc if it means they've got three extra tiers of bossman telling them what to do. Smaug's dead-dead, so that's going to be a fair amount of jockeying around the edge of territory nobody previously wanted to fight a dragon over. The dwarves are on the move, and their political alliances are undergoing a massive shift. The elves are on the move, the eagles are on the move, etc. Fucking Saruman's building his own goddamned Russian front for Mordor's Germany.
There are a lot of irons in that particular fire, is what I'm saying. The Nazgul have been sent to retrieve something very important, yes, but from a fucking gentleman farmer in Fantasyland's version of Bumfuck, Nowhere.
Sending them out looking like they're about to terrorize Gondor into submission is going to draw a lot of attention, which would open yet another goddamned front for Sauron to deal with, as well as point everyone who wasn't previously on the alert for the Ring in its direction. Sending them out in full Kings of Men mode is also probably risking an internal challenge that Sauron absolutely cannot afford with all the other shit going on.
Like, is Sauron its master? Yes. Does Sauron need to deal with the fucking Witch-king getting his hands on the Ring along with his own ring while Sauron is trying to deal with Gandalf and Isengard? No. Plus it's not like they can be killed by an external force, no matter how nerfed he leaves them. The flood that takes them off their mounts is a temporary inconvenience, from Sauron's perspective.
So there aren't many drawbacks to throttling them down, and if it weren't for Gandalf getting wind of something being up and the hobbits having an experienced escort on the way to Elrond's, it absolutely would have worked.
Once they're back at their day job, there's no reason not to have the taps open full-blast, so they're back to being PTSD-machines.
Plus like... at what point in the entire history of the rings have these guys, separately or as a group, as mortals or wraiths, ever been sent out to find Some Dude? Not an elf-lord, or a warrior king in exile, or a wizard, or a goblin king who's been pretending he never got Sauron's letters requisitioning troops. Legit just Some Fucking Dude, who's so deep in Some Fucking Dude mode that he's like, "lol The Horrors are after me? Guess I'll just fucking walk to Rivendell. On the road. With my feet." The response to The Horrors being a lot closer than he thought was like "Guess I'll cut through this dude's fields!"
This is comically outside their skillset. This is outside their boss's skillset. They don't have their own henchmen to ask for advice. They're basically milling around at a crossroad crabbily smoking pipeweed while the Witch-king is furiously texting Sauron like "This isn't working, can we just nuke them?" and getting back "NO YOU CANNOT JUST NUKE THEM." "Okay, how the fuck are we supposed to do this without nuking them?" "JUST FUCKING FIND THEM I DON'T CARE." "There are elves. :( :( :(" "DEFINITELY DO NOT NUKE THEM OR YOU WILL GET GANDALFS. >:|"
"That Tom Bombadil asshole showed up." "DOES TOM BOMBADIL HAVE MY RING." "No." "THEN WHY AM I HEARING ABOUT TOM BOMBADIL."
"We need more money to bribe people and hire spies." "WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY I GAVE YOU." "The price of bribes and spies has really gone up in the past 500 years, and everyone charges ten percent more when they see they're getting paid in cursed grave goods. Or we could just, you know..." "NO NUKING THEM." ":("
"Now there's a Ranger." "YOU BROUGHT ARNOR TO ITS KNEES." "I had a map to Arnor. And an army. And a budget." "DO YOU WANT TO BE WALKING HOME." "Okay, no, fine. It's not a problem."
"We almost had them." "IS THIS HORSE SHOES OR PERHAPS HAND GRENADES." "I'm just saying. I stabbed the one with your Ring. He's got maybe three days before he's a wraith himself. One way or another, we've got this in the bag." "JUST GET IT DONE."
"So, there were more elves." "ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT YOU STILL DO NOT HAVE MY RING." "I'm telling you that we need to revise our timeline a little bit. And that we need a new batch of horses." "YOU DO NOT HAVE MY RING AND ALSO YOU DO NOT HAVE MY HORSES." "We can still pull out a win here." "DO YOU THINK I AM MADE OF HORSES." "Is this a trick question? Are you? Do you have a physical form again?" "JUST GET BACK HERE." "The horses drowned? Because of the elves?" "THEN WALK." ":("
Splendidly written. I also throw my hat into the ring for this take: “Ringwraiths are not skilled outside of their immediate job description, and lack professional initiative.”
OR perhaps they have both skill sets and initiative, but they feel that their union doesn’t support them going too far beyond their specific job description; so that even though they could have solved some of their immediate problems by interrogating Fredegar, or could even have laid a little bitty bit of the Black Breath on Farmer Maggot’s barking dog, they absolutely would not. Interrogation (5B) and Cruelty to Animals (605-3) are not in their contract negotiations, and if Sauron wants them to take on additional responsibilities, that’s a different conversation. They only agreed to take on this project because it aligned with their top-level objective of “Being A Menace to Society (1C) and furthermore allowed them to use their competencies in “Spreading Dread and Fear (35X)” which were being under-utilised in the current working environment, leading to low morale. One of the younger Ringwraiths did want to show some more personal initiative, to be seen as more management-track, but the others squashed this, as the most important thing to learn to manage are expectations.
have you considered reputation
as in the more you know about them, the scarier they are, and that basic oh fuck there's a witchking in the sky is enough to spread dread throughout a whole army
the whole "that's a gundam" moment you get in giant robot anime
and especially in gondor, i bet momma gondorians scared their little ones into good behaviour with threats of the witch king
so imagine being in a battle you're pretty sure is going to go badly and you're not coming out of this whole, and there's the gundam
but inthe shire no one knows what they are, so why would they be afraid of them
