Home | Literature Index | Movies & Broadway Index | Television Index | Music Index | Miscellaneous Index | Submit Your Own
No one would have believed in the last years of Middle Earth that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than hobbit's and yet immortal unlike their own; that as hobbit's busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a Balrog with a microscope might scrutinise the transient goblins that swarm and multiply in a mine of Moria. With infinite complacency hobbits went to and fro over the Shire about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of Mordor as sources of hobbit danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most Hobbits fancied there might be other creatures in Mordor, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of land, minds that are to hobbit minds as hobbits are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded Middle earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against them.
………
In another moment Aragorn had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below him. A mighty space it was, with gigantic numbers of orcs here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange creatures. And scattered about it, some on their overturned war-beasts, some on the now rigid flying beasts, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Nazgul--dead!--slain by the putrefactive and disease-ridden Gollum against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the orcs was being slain; slain, after all man's and elve's devices had failed, by the humblest thing that God, in his wisdom, had put upon Middle Earth.