[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Gordis

I have to disagree. IMO, Bilbo and Gollum were much more closely tied to the One Ring than the nazgul. Sauron himself was tied to the One. The nazgul were primarily tied to the Nine, not the One. It were the Nine Rings that made them wraiths. It was the One that had prolonged Gollum's life far beyond his normal life span.

The One had melted, and everything done by its power directly crumbled immediately: Sauron became disembodied, Barad-Dur fell to ruin, Bilbo has become 128 years old all of a sudden +Gollum would have turned to dust, had he not fallen down into the lava.

The Three, the rest of the Seven and the Nine Rings were not melted, they only started to lose there power: slower or faster, but not at once. The golden Wood hasn't disappeared in a cloud of yellow smoke, it simply started to fade fast, as the power that had supported it, the Power of Nenya, was passing away.

Well, I disagree, although we should probably not get too deeply into that, as that would be for another thread. But whatever, I think that the Rings - Three, Nine etc. - lost their power immediately. So, speaking in a very simple way, Galadriel could not anymore "do any magic" with her Ring (like if a painter runs out of paint for the picture - he cannot add anything more), but the things made with the Ring started to vanish slowly, like everything else in Arda did, impossible to be renewed and alien to the "age of Men", indeed, like something preserved from ages past, which should not have been here anymore under normal circumstances (the same as Gollum). You have a dead Neanderthalian frozen in a glacier, his body is preserved. You put him in a freezer (the Ring). Your freezer becomes broken (the Ring destroyed), the ice starts to melt, as soon as it melts completely, nothing prevents the body to dissolve in the way it should have ages ago.

What about the nazgul?
The nazgul perished in the explosion of Orodruin, because they happened to be quite close to the volcano. What if they were a bit further away or already in Sammath Naur?

My answer is: they wouldn't have died immediately. This conclusion is supported by Tolkien's earlier outlines where the nazgul are very much alive, bodies and all, after the destruction of the Ring:

This really sounds interesting, but it would be certainly for another thread (Let me just say that I am not quick to accept this theory, even with the outlining - it was just a draft after all, not thought through completely.)