The scariest characters in the LOTR?

[The Sixth Wizard]

Originally Posted by Mansun

Oliphaunts are pretty scary considering their size. What if one decided to land it's foot on the Witch King & crush him?

Well, the Witch-King had the raw power to drive his servants mad, couldn't he just raise a hand or scream or something and get away?

I think that the scariest places for me when I FIRST read the book (about 10 years old) were the places that it really seemed like there was no way out. The Balrog wasn't that scary to me because you knew Gandalf was going to finish it off. But in that chapter, I find the 'drums in the deep' very disturbing. Just as we finished reading about how the dwarves were trapped and killed, we get the same drums. Scary.

Other places that made me scared were the Barrow-Wights (until Tom came, which was a relief, let me tell you!) the lair of Shelob, Boromir attacking Frodo, anywhere past the Fellowship of the Ring involving Nazgul and Frodo and Sam, when the wolves closed in around them on the hilltop, the Nazgul that Legolas shoots down and was described as "a shadow [like] the Balrog", when Frodo was captured by the enemy (I really thought Sam would go it alone then) and Pippin saving Faramir.

Sorry, not so much characters as scenes.

Places that I didn't get scared in include: Balrog vs. Gandalf, Lorien (Galadriel), the King of the Dead (I was a bit lost at this point) and Saruman wasn't really scary either.