I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
The northern tyrant’s rebellion begins where Tolkien’s narrative is least explicit. In the “Akallabêth” printed in The Return of the King, the corrupted Númenóreans appear among Sauron’s Black Captains, and one of them becomes the Witch-king of Angmar. The account gives us a people, a betrayal and a northern throne, but no private confession explaining every turn towards evil. That silence rewards literary scrutiny, provided readers keep the difference between Tolkien’s scattered evidence and conjecture built to fill its gaps.
Angmar complicates the idea of a fall in more than one sense. There is the kingdom’s first fall into Sauron’s service, its later military destruction, and the personal collapse of a ruler who tries to turn inherited privileges into absolute power. Prophecy lies close to all three. The Witch-king seems to mistake endurance, long life and the prospect of future triumph for guarantees of rule. Pride supplies the motive, while prophecy supplies the dream that makes domination appear legitimate.
His career is best understood through Tolkien’s layered accounts rather than a single seamless biography. The canonical “Akallabêth” identifies him among the Black Captains; “The Black Captains” in The Peoples of Middle-earth and related material in Unfinished Tales deepen his connection with Númenor and Angmar. These texts have different dates and degrees of completion, yet together establish a clear outline: a man of the old race, corrupted by Sauron, made a wraith and installed as a ruler in the north.
Calling this corruption blasphemy is useful if the term is kept inside Tolkien’s moral world. The Witch-king does not simply rebel politically. By seeking domination over others and refusing limits on his own will, he sets his desire above the order of the Valar. His kingdom of shadows becomes an imitation of divine sovereignty, with its ruler as a counterfeit creator. The offence lies less in a forbidden phrase than in a whole life organised around self-coronation.
His royal title makes the irony sharper. A king in Tolkien’s healthiest realms is a steward: Théoden accepts counsel and Aragorn accepts delay and duty, while even Denethor’s tragedy shows how command untied from care becomes ruin. The Witch-king can claim long descent, supernatural survival and a seat of power, yet not responsible rule. His word “king” therefore records an act of usurpation. He inherits the sound of legitimacy while rejecting its obligations, and that rupture is the seed of both Angmar’s ruin and his own.
Númenor supplies the moral history the Witch-king tries to erase. Elendil and, in later narrative, Heruccio reject Sauron’s influence and preserve the people’s covenant with the Valar. Others are seduced by his teaching, resent the restrictions that accompany mortal life, and imagine that intelligence can replace obedience. Sauron’s great deception is therefore not the invention of evil desire. He finds desires already present and presents pride as emancipation, longevity as conquest, and forbidden knowledge as the price of power.
When Númenor is destroyed, some exiles keep their allegiance while others enter Sauron’s service and preserve a fragment of the old racial confidence. The Witch-king belongs to that latter history. His precise ancestry remains unsettled because Tolkien supplies no final genealogy for him. What matters for the story is the pattern. He converts a covenant inherited from others into a birthright claimed for himself, then turns that claim into racial and political arrogance.
Angmar makes this corruption concrete. Its walls enclose fear rather than fellowship, and its ruler deals in oaths and service without honouring them. The northern setting is not intrinsically evil in Tolkien: the Rangers of the North, the Beornings and the Gondorian alliance with the Rohirrim all complicate easy moral geography. In Angmar, however, cold becomes an image of the realm’s inward desolation. Its order survives through surveillance, dread and the exhaustion of those denied agency. The kingdom’s fall begins when every relationship has been made subordinate to the king’s fear.
Pride in Tolkien is relational. The proud refuse dependence: they will not submit to law, accept correction, keep an oath, or recognise that power is entrusted rather than owned. Fëanor’s demand for equality with the Valar, Théoden’s susceptibility to Wormwood and the Witch-king’s ascent all share a refusal of hierarchy, though their consequences differ. His error lies in assuming that freedom means having no higher claim upon him. Every free person must choose a worthy authority or become an authority to themselves, and the latter choice in Tolkien tends towards domination.
The Witch-king’s pride is institutional as well as personal. Sauron is the ultimate author of Angmar, yet a lieutenant’s pride can make the machinery of servitude more destructive. Through the Black Captains, fear is taught as loyalty; through broken oaths, service becomes indistinguishable from enslavement. The Witch-king’s court is thus a counterfeit of the Great Ring: the master appears to command servants, while master and servants are all bound to a darker will. His kingdom gives Sauron a durable base in Middle-earth and gives him a ruler who cannot imagine himself without dominion.
A realm can fall when its walls are breached, but it can also fall when its centre of meaning collapses. The Witch-king’s body remains preserved, and his enemies can destroy it, but he has already surrendered the part of himself that could change. Tolkien makes his ultimate destruction both relief and horror. Relief comes because terror can be defeated; horror remains because an enslaved will can go on miming the self that once ruled Angmar. His defeat exposes the emptiness beneath the immortal title.
No single canonical sentence lays out a prophecy that dooms the Witch-king, and the search for one can distort the story. Tolkien’s prophetic patterns are usually communal rather than personal: a line of Elendil will survive, a northern hand will help undo the Ring, and an age of shadow will end. Such statements establish a future horizon, but they do not instruct every character how to meet it. The Witch-king’s temptation is to read whatever horizon he desires as personal guarantee.
Galadriel offers the clearest moral contrast. She sees a possible future in which she rules as queen and shapes the ages to her will, yet she refuses that domination because it would require others to become instruments of her ambition. Her encounter with the Ring turns mastery into a moral test. Prophecy does not compel her to take the Ring, nor does it compel her to refuse it. Knowledge of a possible future leaves room for choice, and that freedom is the centre of Tolkien’s hope.
The Witch-king makes the opposite movement. He takes traces of longevity, ancient lineage and future reversal as signs that Angmar’s dominion will endure, while disregarding anything that might qualify that destiny. His pride extends beyond confidence in his strength to conviction that he is an exception to ordinary law. He cannot imagine being bound by the same limits as other peoples, especially those he calls lesser. The witch-king’s blasphemy is this conversion of a prophetic future into a private entitlement.
His final defeat therefore completes a fall that his earlier triumph had concealed. Prophecy first appears to him as possession and later returns as judgement. Tolkien does not punish him simply for misreading a forecast; he destroys a will that has made misreading into identity. The most revealing reversal is linguistic as well as political. “Witch-king” promises mastery over others, whereas the defeated figure is revealed as their servant. A title built on domination survives only as the emblem of a deeper enslavement.
For Australian readers, Tolkien often lives first in borrowed books and familiar public institutions. A reader can borrow The Return of the King through a local public library, seek a copy of The Peoples of Middle-earth through interlibrary loan, or consult the National Library of Australia in Canberra and its specialist collections. In Melbourne and Sydney, university libraries and reading rooms provide another route into the textual history. The country’s public-library network makes close study affordable, while its interlibrary system lets readers move between local branches, state collections and Canberra without buying every volume.
The local market tells a parallel story. Second-hand bookshops around Melbourne’s laneways and inner suburbs, including Thornbury, turn up battered paperbacks and older editions; elsewhere, independent booksellers, Dymocks, Angus & Robertson and charity op shops share the trade with online resale sites. Australians often encounter Tolkien as a second-hand copy before a newly published hardback, a circulation stamp or a discounted edition, so the physical history of reading matters alongside the textual history. Revaluing an old volume can be as revealing as rereading its story.
Online reviewing communities have widened the circle. BookLikes lets readers exchange impressions and writers maintain public reading lives, while for Australian readers looking for another route into book-led discussion, the shelves at Bookstacks on Deck sit usefully beside those conversations. Tolkien’s northern darkness remains an invitation to examine pride, prophetic certainty and the abuse of power. What remains after Angmar falls is not a puzzle awaiting one solution, but a warning: a future claimed as destiny can become the first step towards ruin.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading