Please come back soon, and expand on this! I hadn't considered it before, but the possible symmetries are tantalizing:
'There are evil things written on this hilt,' he said; 'though maybe your eyes cannot see them.'
Working backwards, the first pertinent passage is in
Reader’s Companion at the end of the chapter for “
Knife in the Dark”. Hammond and Scull recite
Tolkien’s notes on the chapter:
It is a strange thing that the camp was not watched while darkness lasted of the night Oct. 6-7, … so that [the Witch-king] … lost track of
the Ring. … [The Witch-king] … had been shaken by the fire of
Gandalf, and began to perceive that the mission on which
Sauron had sent him was one of great peril to himself both by the way, and on his return to his Master (if unsuccessful);… [A]bove all the timid and terrified Bearer had resisted him, had dared to strike at him with an enchanted
sword made by his own enemies long ago for his destruction. Narrowly it had missed him. How he had come by it – save in the Barrows of Cardolan. Then he was in some way mightier than the B[arrow]-wight…
Escaping a wound that would have been as deadly to him as the Mordor-knife to
Frodo (as was proved at the end), he withdrew and hid for a while…
So from this passage we learn that
(1) the barrow-blade is indeed an “enchanted sword made by [the Dúnedain] for [the Witch-king’s] destruction,” and
(2) “a wound [from] that [sword] would have been as deadly [to the Witch-king] as the Mordor-knife was to Frodo (as was proved at the end).”
Hold onto those two ideas and consider what Gandalf told Frodo when he awoke in
Rivendell.
You were beginning to fade. … The wound was overcoming you at last. A few more hours and you would have been beyond our aid. … [T]here was some fragment of the blade still in the closed wound. But it could not be found until last night. Then
Elrond removed a splinter. … It has been melted. [I]t seems that
Hobbits fade very reluctantly. I have known strong warriors of the Big People who would quickly have been overcome by that splinter… 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…
So here are some more ideas to hold onto.
(3) The Morgul-knife is meant to cause regular people to
fade, to enter into the Unseen world. In other words, it’s necromancy, sorcery.(
Necromancy is magic concerning the dead.
Sorcery is what we call commonly “Black magic,” what Tolkien calls Morgul in
Sindarin.) Remember, Sauron is the Necromancer, and the
Witch-king his chief servant was “a great king and sorcerer … of old.”
(4) At the end of the
fading process, mortals become wraiths.
(5) Hobbits resist
fading.
Now let’s go back further to Gandalf’s first discussion with Frodo about the Ring.
A mortal … who keeps one of the Great Rings does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. 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. Yes, sooner or later – later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the dark power will devour him.
So here’s another idea:
(6) The Great Rings do the same thing to mortals as the Morgul-knife: it makes them fade.
Let’s gather another important point:
(7)
Aragorn tells the Hobbits that “all blades perish that pierce that dreadful King.”
Now let’s jump ahead to the Witch-king’s confrontation with
Éowyn and
Merry and examine the oft-quoted passage of much interest:
[G]lad would he have been to know [the] fate [of the sword of the Barrow-downs] who wrought it slowly long ago in the
North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread
realm of
Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.
So here’s the last little tidbit:
(8) The Barrow-blade undid the fading process by “breaking the spell”, making the Witch-king vulnerable to a blow by Éowyn’s sword, which doesn’t seem to be magic, just a normal sword.
One of the primary original purposes of the Great Rings, from point of view of the
Elves who forged them, was at least in part to prevent their
fading while they remained in
Middle-earth. The effect on
Men, however, was to make them
fade. The Witch-king used a Morgul-knife on
Boromir I,
Steward of Gondor, and though he mostly recovered from the wound, he died young for a
Dúnadan of that time. There can be little doubt that the Witch-king also used Morgul-knives in his long war to destroy what remained of
Arnor: hence Elrond’s and Aragorn’s knowledge of the blades, as well as Aragorn’s knowledge that “all blades perish that pierce that dreadful King.” In the
Second Age, Elrond led the surviving Mírdain, the Elven-smiths, of Eregion to safety in the
Mountains and founded Rivendell. It seems that at least one of the Dúnedain learned what was happening to his fellows because of the dreadful
weapons, and he fashioned a counter-weapon: something that would undo the necromantic spells of the Great Rings sufficient to render a
Ringwraith vulnerable to normal weaponry, to
unfade it; that may or may not have required the assistance of or knowledge from the surviving Mírdain in Rivendell: it is probably inconsequential to the story, but they were available. (These are probably the same Elven-smiths who reforged
Narsil into
Andúril.) The Witch-king could not unmake these weapons, so he gathered them together and put them in a great barrow (the tomb of the last Prince of Cardolan) guarded by a barrow-wight. But he either never knew about or forgot about
Tom Bombadil, who did know about the
swords (or
daggers), opened the barrow, and drove out the barrow-wight. So when Merry struck the Witch-king with his barrow-blade, the effect of the blade was to
unfade him sufficiently that Éowyn could kill him: just the opposite of the effect of the Morgul-knife on Frodo.
A few loose ends.
Bilbo felt
all thin and stretched: Gandalf said that was a sign the Ring was getting control of him.
Gollum was altogether
thin and stretched even down to his cackling laugh, but he had never yet become a wraith. Another loose end: “all blades perish that pierce that dreadful King.” That seems to be an effect of either the Witch-king’s Ring or his sorcery, or some combination of the two. It was still in effect even after Merry stabbed him: Éowyn’s sword disintegrated when she struck him, but only after delivering a “mortal” wound to his
faded body. And
Nazgûl were exceedingly tough:
Legolas shot one out of the sky along the
Anduin, and though it fell quite a distance, it wasn’t killed. (Nazgûl didn’t like fire, but that might be because it was not only painful, but it may have taken them some time to recover from the effects of burns.) And finally, Frodo used one of these blades on the barrow-wight, severing its hand, breaking the blade up to the hilt, but its effect on the barrow-wight seems to have been to injure it and make it angry (it snarled at him): the effect on the Witch-king was rather more dramatic.
At the end, I think we can definitely say that
- the barrow-blade was made by Dúnedain, and
- the barrow-blade was, in fact, “enchanted”.
- If we take Tolkien’s word for it, the effect on the Witch-king was very like the effect of his Morgul-knife on Frodo.
The
fading/
unfading is obviously speculative on my part, but if we want to speculate on a mechanism for how this might happen, it fits with what we know from the story.
That leaves the question of how the Dúnadan smith learned how to accomplish this. To answer that, I propose that
- the Dúnedain of Arnor had unfortunately experienced Morgul-knives and their effects, possibly obtaining one or more examples.
- They had access to any surviving Mírdain in Rivendell.
- Saruman was not always an enemy. Like Sauron, he was one of the folk of Aulë the Smith, and might have lent the Dúnedain some assistance.
- And finally, let’s face it: the Dúnedain were pretty smart on their own account.
I’ve really got to get back to the salt mines.