Rings of Power: who is Khamûl, the only Ringwraith besides the Witch-king that Tolkien ever named?
Of the nine Ringwraiths, Tolkien gave a name to exactly one, and it isn't the one everyone remembers.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns for season 3 on November 11, with four episodes on Prime Video and the rest following over the next two weeks. The season is set five years after the fall of Eregion, with Sauron's armies holding most of Middle-earth. Among the new cast: Zubin Varla as Khamûl, "the Easterling of Rhûn."
The name problem
The Witch-king of Angmar is the famous Ringwraith, but "Witch-king" is a title, not a name. Tolkien never revealed who he was before the Ring. The other seven don't even get titles.
Khamûl is the exception. He's named in Unfinished Tales, the collection of Tolkien's notes and drafts that Christopher Tolkien published in 1980, in the section "The Hunt for the Ring." That makes him the only one of the Nine with a personal name.
Who he was
According to Tolkien's notes, he was:
- A king of the East — a lord of the Easterlings, one of the men Sauron seduced with the Nine Rings. Only three of the nine kings were Númenóreans.
- Second in command — among the Nazgûl, he ranked below only the Witch-king, which is where his titles "the Second Chief," "the Black Easterling" and "the Shadow of the East" come from.
- The best at sensing the Ring — Tolkien's notes make him the Nazgûl most able to feel its presence, and also the one the sun troubled most.
Where he shows up in The Lord of the Rings
Readers have met him without knowing it. In 2951 of the Third Age, Sauron sent him with two other Nazgûl to reoccupy Dol Guldur, the fortress in Mirkwood, and he commanded it for decades.
When the Nine went looking for the Shire in 3018, Khamûl was the Black Rider at Hobbiton who asked Sam's father, the Gaffer, about "Baggins," just as Frodo was leaving. He then followed the hobbits east and nearly caught them at Bucklebury Ferry. The Fellowship of the Ring never says which Rider it was; Unfinished Tales does.
The Ringwraith who nearly got Frodo in the Shire wasn't the Witch-king. It was his deputy.
What the show is doing with him
The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, before the Nine became wraiths, so Khamûl arrives as a man. The show has coined a word for the in-between stage, Nazgnagôl, the corrupted ring-bearers partway to becoming Nazgûl, and Khamûl is one of them. The season also sends Gandalf to Rhûn, Khamûl's homeland.
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It isn't his first screen appearance. Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies put him in Easterling armor for the fight with the White Council at Dol Guldur.
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