who are the nazgul?

[mhagain]

There's more info I was previously unaware of (or had previously passed over - same result) in a plot outline given in the Siege of Gondor chapter in HoME 8:

Gandalf says things are still not so bad - because the W[izard] King has not yet appeared. He reveals that he is a renegade of his own order ... [?from] Numenor.

This is obviously an abandoned concept but otherwise I'm not sure what to make of it. I haven't cross-checked with when the idea of Istari as Maiar first arose, so maybe Tolkien is playing around with different ideas for their origin here? Was the Witch-king viewed as possibly a renegade Istar at the time (yes)? Were the Istari viewed as Numenorean in origin at the time (don't know)? Was the Witch-king at this point viewed as being a separate entity from the Ringwraiths (don't know)?

Either way it seems that the idea of the Witch-king as a Numenorean was something that had always been in Tolkien's mind, even though he never expressed it in published work.

What's interesting is that the original concept for the Mouth of Sauron was that he would be the Witch-king, so the idea of a renegade Numenorean in a high-ranking position in Sauron's service never really went away.

We don't really know how long a transition took into Wraith form, but more than 60 years seems quite likely

I've dealt with this previously but in summary:

• Only 3 of the Ringwraiths were noted to have been Numenorean,
• The other 6 were therefore Haradrim, Easterlings or Edain,
• Khamul, the second in command, is definitely confirmed to have been an Easterling,
• But Haradrim, Easterlings or Edain don't have long life,
• But that doesn't matter because Gandalf's words in Shadow of the Past confirm: it's not how long you have a Ring for that matters, it's how much you use it.

It should be obvious that the "long life" argument is bogus. If the other 6 Ringwraiths don't need to have long life, why should the 3 Numenoreans be a special exception?