![]() ![]() ![]() So we can see that the use of 'creature' to describe Gollum is hardly a neutral term. And they, too, as we will recall, are called creatures as well as ghosts. The Nazgûl, too, were 'physical enough in form and power' - we should not confuse their invsibility with incorporeality - else they would not need or even be able to ride horses, to wear cloaks or wield swords, open gates or knock on doors, be washed away by floods or killed by swords. ![]() Similarly, Faramir says of the Nazgûl: 'to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they had become, terrible and evil' ( TT 4.vi.692). Ghosts that drink, and climb, and creep, and slip through windows are quite clearly 'physical monsters, with blood, able to be slain.' Tolkien has taken 'ghost,' the direct etymological descendant of gæst, and used it here much as he has argued gæst is used in line 102 of Beowulf. From the thinking fox in the Shire ( FR 1.iii.72) to Treebeard's rhyme, 'Learn now the lore of living creatures' ( TT 3.iv.464) from Gandalf's 'hobbits really are amazing creatures' ( FR 1.ii.62) to Elrond's puzzled comment on Bombadil: 'He is a strange creature' ( FR 2.ii.265) from Quickbeam and other ents ( TT 3.viii.549, 568) to Grishnákh and the fell beasts the Nazgûl ride ( TT 3.iii.447 4.iii.645) and from the kind-hearted description of a post-Lockholes Lobelia as a 'poor creature' ( RK 6.ix.1021), and of Bill the Pony as 'a poor old half-starved creature' ( FR 1.xi.179), to Frodo's Ring-induced visions of Bilbo as Gollum (or something very like him), and Sam as an orc: To his distress and amazement found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. Usage varies, describing a wide range of living or sentient beings, good, evil, and in between. 'Creature/s' occurs 105 times in The Lord of the Rings, 95 times in the tale itself, and 10 times in the prologue, synopses, and appendices. ![]()
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