Nazgúl Hobbies!

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

The only exception to this spirit of community mindedness was #6 who was a cow and spent most of his spare time eating grass.

Giving rise to a common misconception that the Nazgûl had formed a ragtime jazz combo. In fact the allusion to 'the horns of the Nazgûl' in an obscure footnote to Letter #360 refers directly to those of Daisy, the Black Jersey.

During 1943, Tolkien toyed briefly with the idea of making all of the Nazgûl into cattle: the Witch-king was to be a large Frisian bull; Khamûl was to become a young Guernsey heifer and the only others described in his brief, scribbled re-write were clearly based on Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless from Cold Comfort Farm. The rapidly abandoned idea that one of these four was to be the very cow that jumped over the moon from the popular Shire folk-song also dates from this period of revision, which can be quite closely placed to an evening described in Tolkien's diary: "Entered the Bird and B, and was pleasantly surprised to find Jack already in residence and somewhat the worse for wear. He told me that he had devised a drinking game based on reciting the Canterbury Tales and paying an alcoholic forfeit when a mistake was made, which we duly played. Sadly, I find myself unable to remember anything that happened after half-past ten, but I appear to have written some arrant nonsense about the Nazgûl at some point during the night. Edith tells me that I came home singing of goblins and woke half of Oxford. I must remember to ask C.S.L. what on earth we were doing in the meantime (if he can remember any more than I)."

The same muddled and almost wholly illegible manuscript, entirely obscured in places by beer stains, bears two notes of relevance to this thread: "1: WK should remain obsessed with spoons, but should possess morbid fear of boiled eggs. 2: Khamul's railway to have survived and become part of London Underground Central Line."