From: <<<sbjensen -aaatt- midway.uchicago -daht- edu>>> (Steuard Jensen)
Subject: Re: Ring-scent?
Date: 2000/05/14
Message-ID: <d3ET4.28$v3.366@uchinews>#1/1
References: <391D983B.83B4F508@earthlink.net>
X-Trace: uchinews 958336329 128.135.12.7 (Sun, 14 May 2000 15:32:09 CDT)
Organization: The University of Chicago
NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 15:32:09 CDT
Newsgroups: alt.fan.tolkien,rec.arts.books.tolkien


Quoth <<<bradyseverns -aaatt- earthlink -daht- net>>>:
> In a couple places in the books, such as in the Woody End and near
> Midas Morgul, Frodo is nearly caught with the Ring as the Nazgul try
> to sniff him out.

You know, I was going to post a related question myself, so I figure
I'll include it here before addressing your question.  Frodo _does_
explicitly hear the Riders "sniffing" and "snuffling".  Strider does
at one point indicate that they "smell the blood of living things"; I
have assumed for some time this was not a literal sense of smell, but
now I'm questioning that.  It's still weird: any "real" sense of smell
would have trouble detecting blood that was quite safely contained
within the hobbits' bodies.  (Sharks can smell minute amounts of
blood, but only if it's actually been released into the water as far
as I know.)  What is the mechanism here?

> If they sensed the presence of the Ring strong enough to direct
> their attention to it, why would they stop and go away? What other
> need was more pressing? Or, what would alert a Nazgul to think, "I
> sense that the Ring is near! I must investigate" and then, after
> perusal say, "No, I was mistaken..."

So, here's my take on your question (assuming the Nazgul ability to
smell the blood of living things, however it worked).  I think that
the Ringwraith sense of the presence of the Ring was a pretty "broad"
effect.  That may not be entirely clear, so I'll draw a couple of
little graphs (I'm a scientific type, after all) showing different
ways that the "intensity" with which the Nazgul felt the Ring could
vary with distance:
                         |           
                        / \           
                      _/   \_
               ____---       ---____
_______--------                     --------______
-------------------------o------------------------
                      (Ring)

         _________________________________
        /                                 \
_______/                                   \______
-------------------------o------------------------
                      (Ring)

The notion here is that the higher the graph goes, the stronger the
Nazgul feel the presence of the Ring.  In the first case, it would be
quite easy for them to "home in" on the Ring and its bearer: it's
exactly the same idea as the childrens' game of "hot and cold"
("You're getting warmer, warmer, no, colder, warmer, hot, hot, hotter,
hotter, burning up, there it is!")  This clearly can't be the case, or
else all of your objections are entirely valid, and we have a glaring
plot hole.

On the other hand, if the second graph is more accurate, and the
"plateau" is wide enough, the best they could do would be to ride
around the area that the guessed was near the center of the effect and
look for other clues.  (It's quite possible that the effect wouldn't
be as even or symmertical as I've drawn it, too, which would make it
harder to pinpoint the center.)  This matches the observed behavior of
the Black Riders quite well: the one who tries to find Frodo in the
Shire was probably riding back and forth along the Road from one edge
of the "intensity plateau" to the other.

This makes it fortunate for the hobbits that it was Khamul who pursued
them through the Shire: according to UT, although he was the second
best Nazgul at "perceiv[ing] the presence of the Ring", he was "also
the one whose power was most confused and diminished by daylight."
That is, he had the best sense of that "intensity plateau" (perhaps he
felt a "wider" plateau than the others?), but he was the _least_
likely to be successful at seeing or smelling the hobbits when he had
to locate the actual source of the power... in daytime at least.  The
second time Khamul passed them, it was twilight and moving into
evening: his senses were clearing, and he was considerably more
confident that he had found his quarry.  (He just didn't want to take
on a whole troop of Noldor singlehanded. :) )

One more piece of support for this "plateau" notion: outside Minas
Morgul, the Nazgul Lord stops because (so says the narrator) he
"sens[ed] some other power within his valley.  This way and that
turned the dark head...."  Note here that even the Lord of the Nazgul
can't tell which direction the feeling of the Ring is coming from.  He
would need to be close enough to smell the hobbits' blood to pinpoint
them, and apparently they were a safe distance away for that threat.

Anyway, that's my theory, and I think it's a pretty good fit to the
facts.
						Steuard Jensen