Ring-wraiths and Dracula

No other denizens of Middle-earth have quite the array of arbitrary limitations, weaknesses, and powers as the Ring-wraiths. They live in a peculiar state of undeath; they fear crossing water; they blindly sniff out living things with strange desire; they can turn others into wraiths like themselves, under their command, with a strike; even the status of their physical bodies seems uniquely bizarre in Middle-earth as it shifts form throughout the text (and supplemental texts). So why did Tolkien design the Ring-wraiths like this, or—the better path for investigating Tolkien—what was his source of inspiration? I think we can uncover a primary influence on the creation of Ring-wraiths by investigating parallels with Bram Stoker's character Count Dracula.

In "The Hunt for the Ring," Tolkien summarizes many of the features of the Ring-wraiths that we otherwise receive in scattered glimpses throughout The Lord of the Rings. He says:

All except the Witch-king were apt to stray when alone by daylight; and all, again save the Witch-king, feared water, and were unwilling, except in dire need, to enter it or to cross streams unless dryshod by a bridge. Moreover, their chief weapon was terror. This was actually greater when they were unclad and invisible; and it was greater also when they were gathered together.

(UT 343)

Weakness in daylight, of course, isn't unique to Ring-wraiths; others such as orcs and trolls have problems with the sun too. But for Ring-wraiths, a major feature of this sunlight weakness is that of sight and perception. This is mirrored by their strength of vision in the dark of the "wraith-world," in the land of the "Unseen" (FR, II, i, 234–35) Tolkien notes that, of all the Nazgûl, the power of Khamûl "was most confused and diminished by daylight" (UT 352–3 n1), but all the Riders are affected by the sun (FR, I, xi, 202). And at Weathertop, Strider explains, "They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are hidden from us: then they are most to be feared" (FR, I, xi, 202). This is one of several echoes from Dr. Van Helsing's speech on the weaknesses and powers of Count Dracula: "He can see in the dark—no small power this, in a world which is one half shut from the light" (Stoker 211).

Unlike the Count Dracula of film versions (beginning with Count Orlok in Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, notwithstanding speculations on the lost film Drakula from 1920), where the vampire is reduced to ash in the bright beams of the sun, the Count Dracula of the novel is not burned by daylight any more than are the Ring-wraiths, but both are weakened by it, possessing dulled senses and lesser powers by day.

Although weakness in daylight isn't entirely unique within Tolkien's legendarium, the Ring-wraiths' fear of crossing water is. No other type of being in this storyworld has this strange limitation, and Christopher Tolkien notes that his "father nowhere explained the Ringwraiths' fear of water." But in his notes, J.R.R. Tolkien explains that one chief objective in the attack on Osgiliath was for the Nazgûl of Minas Morgul "to force the passage of the bridge of Osgiliath" over the Anduin, and that their travels north-west were greatly hindered by having to avoid river crossings. The difficulty with this wasn't theirs to bear alone: J.R.R. Tolkien himself found that keeping to this arbitrary rule as a writer "was difficult to sustain" (UT 344).

The Ring-wraiths are not always incapable of entering running water, as seen with the stand-off against Frodo at the Ford of Bruinen, but there Tolkien notes that the Ring-wraiths only "dared to enter the river" due to "the lure of the Ring straight before them" (UT 353n3). The hindrance of crossing water delayed them nonetheless, both at Bruinen...