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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I’m on Wadsworth’s The Poacher from Stratford, a now somewhat dated academic book on the Shakespeare authorship question which affirms the orthodox case and studies the skeptics.
I started Master and Commander this week. I saw the film before, and it's both a perfect adaptation could not be better, and doesn't hold a candle to the book, at the same time. The sheer wildness of the book is amazing. I'm also kind of amused at the number of times Maturin calls Aubrey fat in the book, and I'm curious how everyone else pictures Jack.
After watching the films in theaters, I started the Fellowship of the Ring on Audible, the Andy Serkis reading was available free. What a majestic work. I hadn't read it in years, and I'm so happy returning to it. It's interesting though that Serkis' reading is clearly influenced by the films, when he voices the main characters at times it feels like Serkis-doing-Orlando-Bloom instead of an independent interpretation of Legolas. T
he film adaptation can really close in your mind, in some ways, like the visualization of the Nazgul becomes the canonical view of them. I'm really reconsidering them on this read/listen. When the hobbits raise the alarm in Buckland, the Nazgul scamper, clearly a bunch of farmers showing up with torches and pitchforks would have been bad for them in some way. Were they secretly kinda cotton candy under the cloaks?
I was always a bit confused by how weak or timid the black riders were in the first book. Explained it as not wanting to draw the attention of the remaining powers in the north, either Saruman or Rivendell.
You don't want your guys to find the baggins and the ring, only to meet Glorfindel in a dark alley on the way home east, or Saruman in the gap of Rohan heading south. And that's exactly the sort of thing sauron would be worried about, especially because he knows the enemy knows something (if only because saruman's developed ring-mania and elrond is still around), but not how much.
So even once they find Frodo they want to grab him far from watching eyes and get home quietly (Aragorn says something almost exactly like that after they leave bree iirc).
But it could just be the power scaling of the first book vs the third, as we'd call it today.
Think of the nazguls as leaders and special ops. They're good one on one fighters, and can serve as force multipliers when leading troops (through inspiration or terror), but in the north, they're in enemy territory.
Our gamer minds have been infected by RPGs into seeing power scaling by orders of magnitude, your hero starting as a level 1 with tens of hitpoints and finishing at level 99 with tens of thousands of hitpoints and no reasonable numbers of lvl 1 characters could even come close to representing a serious threat to it. But Tolkien probably had something more like Dark Souls scaling in mind, where super powerful characters are a couple of times more powerful than starting characters, but even beginning trash mobs in the right situation and in the right numbers can still be a credible threat. Aragorn is a powerful fighter and would be almost guaranteed to win a 1 on 1 fight against any other characters weaker than the Lich King or an ancient elf. But I don't think Tolkien had in mind that if, say, 10 average gondorian guardsmen surprise attacked Aragorn their swords would essentially bounce off of him because they're too weak and he's too powerful. Or that he could solo the entire Shire in an open fight. Or think of Boromir's fate; he was supposed to be one of the most powerful human warriors out there, and I think it's probably fair to assume he would have been at least a match for one nazgul that isn't the Lich King, as that was the point of opposing 9 members of the Fellowship to the 9 riders. He was killed not in a fight against another "unique" named enemy, but just tens of orcs/uruk hai.
So your nazguls, if they didn't act covertly, would risk facing a couple of hundred strong hobbit militia, and that's just wasteful use of elite special forces or officers.
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