Khamûl

The name from the East

Khamûl's name is preserved only in Unfinished Tales, in the account of the hunt for the Ring; in The Lord of the Rings he is one of the unnamed Riders. He was an Easterling, a lord of the peoples beyond the Sea of Rhûn, and so one of the six of the Nine who were not of Númenor. Like the rest he accepted a Ring of Power from Sauron in the Second Age and faded under it into a wraith, and among the Nazgûl he stood second only to the Witch-king. The Elves called him the Shadow of the East, and the Men of the West, when they had any name for him, the Black Easterling.

Dol Guldur

After the Witch-king's return from the North and the taking of Minas Ithil in T.A. 2002, Khamûl dwelt with the other Nazgûl in Minas Morgul. In 2951, ten years after the White Council drove Sauron from Mirkwood, Sauron declared himself openly in Mordor and sent three of the Nine to reoccupy Dol Guldur, the fortress on the southern edge of the forest. Khamûl was their captain, and for the rest of the age the tower was his. From it he watched the Vales of Anduin, threatened Lothlórien and the realm of Thranduil, and kept Sauron's hand on the eastern side of the Misty Mountains.

The hunt for the Ring

When the Nine were sent out to find the Shire in 3018, Khamûl rode with them. Unfinished Tales records that he was of all the Nazgûl the most sensitive to the presence of the Ring, and also the most confused and weakened by daylight, so that he was both the most likely to find the Ring-bearer and the least able to seize him by day. In the Shire it was Khamûl who came to Hobbiton on the evening of 23 September and questioned the Gaffer at the gate of Bag End, and Khamûl whose sniffing shadow stopped on the road above the hollow where Frodo crouched among tree-roots with the Ring burning in his pocket, only a few hours after the hobbits had set out. He turned away when Frodo did not put it on. Later the same night he searched Woody End, and it was his approach and that of a second Rider that the Elves of Gildor turned aside. He was the Rider who spoke with Farmer Maggot at his lane and was shown the door, and who stood on the western bank at Bucklebury Ferry watching the hobbits cross.

He rode with the rest to Bree and to Weathertop, and at the Ford of Bruinen on 20 October he was among the Nine who were swept down the river by Elrond's flood. He made his way back to Mordor with the others, horseless and disgraced.

The last year

In the War of the Ring the Nazgûl rode on fell beasts, and Khamûl presumably returned to Dol Guldur, whose army struck three times at Lothlórien in March 3019 and burned the northern forest in a battle with Thranduil's Elves under the trees. When the Witch-king was destroyed on the Pelennor on 15 March, Khamûl became by default the Lord of the Nazgûl, though only for ten days. On 25 March the eight remaining Ringwraiths flew against the Captains of the West at the Black Gate, and when the Ring went into the fire Sauron's last summons sent them racing toward Mount Doom. They arrived as the mountain burst and were consumed with it. Whether Khamûl led that flight is not stated, but no Nazgûl survived it.

Legacy

Khamûl is a shadow with one distinguishing mark, his name, and it is enough to give a face to the second Rider at the Ferry and the hooded thing that sniffed at the road in the Shire. In the story of the Ring he is the servant of Sauron who came closest to it in the open and did not know it, and his Dol Guldur, thrown down by Celeborn and Galadriel after the war, was the last fortress of the Shadow to fall.

Perished with the seven remaining Nazgûl in the eruption of Mount Doom on 25 March T.A. 3019 when the One Ring was destroyed.