The scariest characters in the LOTR?

[Elmo]

Eru, he's a scary blighter... wouldn't want to mess with him...

Originally Posted by hewhoarisesinmight

Eru, he's a scary blighter... wouldn't want to mess with him...

Eru is not from the LOTR strictly speaking . . . . can you think of a time in the book where he is mentioned?

[Elmo]

Good point, isn't he mentioned in the appendices somewhere... I dunno.

If you're talking about the book, I do get a very creepy feeling when ever the Nazgul are mentioned

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Opinion threads go on the Novices and Newcomers forum - I'm moving this one there. Please continue to read and post at the new location - thanks!

My vote goes to either the Balrog of Morgoth or Sauron.

[The 1,000 Reader]

I don't know why, but I got a rather odd sense of being in a dark, hidden world no man was meant to be in when reading about Aragorn and company passing through the Paths of the Dead. Tolkien did a terrific job of making time seem foreign there, and, if I recall, there was some village located there, cut off from the rest of the world, which mistook Aragorn as the King of the Dead and entered a panic. Very creepy, and it seemed like a different world altogether.

The Nazgul gained my respect as the book went on. From normal men who hissed when they spoke, they basically became Middle-Earth's personal Grim Reapers who could go anywhere incredibly quickly thanks to the fell beasts that they rode. Infact, whenever a Nazgul "entered the scene" everything seemed to become more interesting. In ROTK, the parts with the Witch-King in them just seem to glow with an aura of awesomeness.

Sauron, however, did not seem frightening at all. When Sauron fought with the Ring, two minor characters (Elendil and Gil-Galad) slew him in combat. Right off the bat, that made me think that the Ring wasn't so mighty, and since minor characters are typically less important than major characters (they are minor characters after all,) it made me think that Sauron was a pushover. Throughout the entire story, Sauron is just some dude sitting in a large tower we only see once (the tower, not Sauron.) In the end, Sauron just seemed like a weakling who hid from everybody and waited until his armies killed everything before he'd come out. He was only a figurehead and, like Big Brother, felt like he was not real and only a symbol to rally under. He was like Gollum or Grima, but without the will to take action on his own (Gollum) and without the trickery (Grima.) He corrupted Denethor, yes, but Denethor was already rather unstable, and it felt more like Denethor was insane than corrupted.

[Lord Halsar]

hmmmmmmm.


scariest thing in LOTR?
i'd have to go with shelob.
if Sauron came up to me, i'd ask for some pointers. if it were the WK, i'd be too exited to be scared. but shelob, she cant be reasoned with.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by The 1,000 Reader

When Sauron fought with the Ring, two minor characters (Elendil and Gil-Galad) slew him in combat. Right off the bat, that made me think that the Ring wasn't so mighty, and since minor characters are typically less important than major characters (they are minor characters after all,) it made me think that Sauron was a pushover.

I wouldn't call Elendil&Gil-Galad "minor characters" In the LotR book they do not appear, of course, but personally I think that at their times they must have been more famous than seven Boromirs put together. Oh, and we don't see the tower once, we see it at least three times I think, maybe more. But this doesn't matter.

Anyway... I'd subscribe most of what has been said here of the Nazgul, and I think the Balrog of Moria is pretty scary as well. Not speaking of the Watcher in the Water - as always, the creepiest things are those you don't see. This however, at least in my case, does not work for Sauron. Definitely not in LotR - of course in Silmarillion, this is something else (in the tale of Beren and Lúthien, not only in Tol-in-Gaurhoth but also the Gorlim part), however, Mansun introduced this thread as only for LotR, so I'll leave this now. Generally I'd say that I agree with most of the things the 1000 Reader said about Sauron - succintly, Sauron is too much "sitting in a tower doing nothing" to be able to awake some "personal" feelings in the reader. There is, however, still one moment where Sauron seems creepy to me, and it is the moment when Pippin looks to the Palantír. There Sauron looks exactly how I think he should all the time - this is the closest we get to him. He speaks (through Pippin, but...), he is scary, well, I think this is one of the most emotionally thrilling moments of the book.

[Selmo]

Originally Posted by The 1,000 Reader

I don't know why, but I got a rather odd sense of being in a dark, hidden world no man was meant to be in when reading about Aragorn and company passing through the Paths of the Dead.

I feel the same.
I first read LoTR in the early 1960s and, more than forty years later, I can still vividly recall sharing Gimli's fear on the paths of the dead. That chapter cost me some sleepless nights.
It wasn't the ghosts themselves that were scary, but the situation. When the army of Dead were revealed and explained, the fear was gone.

In The Hobbit, I was as scared as Bilbo when he went down the tunnel to meet Smaug for the first time. In all the underground sequences, the walk in the dark towards the unknown was scarier than whatever waited at the end of the tunnel. As soon as there was a tangible enemy to fight or outwit, my emotion turned from fear to exitement.

To me as a youngster, Shelob was the most scary creature in LoTR (I used to have a phobia of spiders), but the walk in the dark before the encounter with her was worse.
.