Quote:
Originally Posted by Elmo
The 'Wraith world' is interesting. Who made the wraith world, Eru?
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He must've indirectly as everything ultimately came from and went to Eru. However, I think the wraith world is a bit of a misnomer. It is used to explain a perhaps larger concept to people who couldn't understand it otherwise.
I've always believe the "wraith" world was actually the perspective of the Ainur, where they had their entities when they were not cloaked as men. It is still the world of the living, it is not a separate entity but rather a separate perspective. That's why the Nazghul still interact with the living, and when Glorfindel is seen by Frodo as he was on 'the other side' he still sees him across the river fighting the Nazghul.
It wasn't a different reality but just a different perception. It is the world of the senses, without the ring Frodo could feel a deep fear of the Nazghul and voila! With the ring on Frodo saw them and they sure were scary. So to finish off this bit of a tangent, the 'wraith' world is actually a state of heightened senses, where things are percieved differently.
It also explains why the Nazghul didn't see things as the hobbits did. They were almsot solely in the 'wraith' realm and therefore unable to feel with the conventional senses.
Going back to the discussion, I think that we are being too hasty claiming the Nazghul had never died. The Witch King was attempting to pierce Frodo's heart with the cursed blade, which would've made him into a wraith instantaneously. If you stop and think about it, piercing someone's heart with anything but a cursed blade of Morgul will also kill them instantaneously. Therefore it may just be that, in order to fully turn a wraith, you have to die physically and your fear has to somehow be 'contaminated' in a way that binds it to Middle Earth rather than going to whatever destiny awaits it (Mandos or the gift of men).
Furthermore, if this is true, then it may just happen that the difference between the Nazghul and the dead men of Dunharrow is not their undead/dead nature, but rather the kind of curse that binds their fear to Middle Earth and to a higher cause. Because neither wight is free, the Nazghul are slaves to Sauron and the men of Dunharrow are slaves to their oath.
So perhaps it's not whether you die or not, but rather whether your soul is free or not at the moment you die. Furthermore, the "kind" of wight you turn into depends on the type of curse you suffered. Sauron would not only want to curse but would want to have minions who can do physical harm, as he knew he could never wrestle the "wight world" off the Valar, but he sure could master the "physical" world and for that he needed wights who could carry weapons. Conversely, Isildur did
not want wights who could fight, he probably just wanted to scare them into fighting and what bound them to Middle Earth was their oath and not anything Isildur may have done.
So, since we are making distinctions, I would suggest that there are two different types of "undead" that we read of in LoTR alone.
The wights, which are souls that are trapped in Middle Earth through a curse or an oath or any other entity that has the power to do so and
The spirits of the undead inhabiting bodies
or objects. Here we have the barrow wights, where the bodies they inhabit are not their own and we also have the spirits that inhabited the doors of the tower where Frodo was caught. These are also disembodied spirits, with the difference that rather than remaining in their "spirit" form, they instead possessed (whether willingly or not) something else.