Before Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, high fantasy was considered a commercial risk. After it, the genre became one of the dominant forces in mainstream entertainment. Released between 2001 and 2003, the three films became a cinematic landmark, collectively earning 17 Academy Awards and grossing more than $2.9 billion at the worldwide box office. The Return of the King in particular became the first fantasy film in history to win Best Picture, sweeping all eleven categories for which it was nominated. The awards underlined how the trilogy raised the bar for visual effects, world-building, and large-scale storytelling, directly influencing the development of subsequent franchises like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. The Lord of the Rings trilogy’s cultural footprint is so massive that it remains the definitive benchmark against which every fantasy film released since 2001 is still measured.
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Tolkien’s source material, however, runs far deeper than any three-film adaptation can fully surface. The novels are accompanied by hundreds of pages of appendices, genealogies, constructed histories, and invented poetry that flesh out Middle-earth with the density of an actual mythology. Furthermore, songs and verse are woven throughout the prose, and each carries embedded lore that the films largely leave unspoken. What makes Jackson’s trilogy extraordinary is how reverent it is to the original books, with new details added to capture Tolkien’s passion for poetry as a worldbuilding tool.
The Nazgûl Theme Contains Verses of a Special Poem
The Nazgûl, the nine black-robed servants of Sauron, have a haunting musical motif that appears in multiple songs and that audiences heard in almost every dark sequence across The Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, few fans realized that the choir performing that motif was singing an original poem, and that the language it was composed in carried a lore connection to the Nazgûl’s own history. The Nazgûl’s musical motif is built around a poem called “The Revelation of the Ringwraiths,” written by Philippa Boyens, one of the co-writers of Jackson’s screenplay. Boyens wrote the poem inspired by Tolkien’s lore in original Adûnaic. The poem reads:
Nêbâbîtham Magânanê
Nêtabdam dâur-ad
Nêpâm nêd abârat-aglar
îdô Nidir nênâkham
Bârî’n Katharâd
Or, as linguist David Salo, who’s an expert in Tolkien, translates it:
We renounce our Maker.
We cleave to the darkness.
We take unto ourselves the power and glory.
Behold! We are the Nine,
The Lords of Unending Life.
Portions of that text appear across five separate tracks on the Fellowship of the Ring original soundtrack: “The Shadow of the Past,” “The Black Rider,” “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony,” “A Knife in the Dark,” and “Flight to the Ford.”
Adûnaic was the language of the Men of Númenor during the Second Age of Middle-earth, an ancient island kingdom that was ultimately destroyed. The nine men who would become the Nazgûl were among the most powerful rulers and kings of that era, gifted Rings of Power by Sauron himself. One by one, according to their native strength and the nature of their wills, they fell under the dominion of the Ring they bore and the overriding control of the One Ring. After that, they entered the realm of shadows and became Sauron’s most terrible servants. Singing their theme in the ancient tongue of those men shows Boyens’s concern with historical precision, as the new text she created for the movie still reflects the language that the Ringwraiths would have known before their transformation.
The content of the poem also reveals Boyens’s attention to detail when it comes to respecting Tolkien’s history. The “Maker” renounced in the opening line refers to Eru Ilúvatar, the supreme deity of Middle-earth’s cosmology, and the declaration of “Lords of Unending Life” is a direct expression of what the nine kings sought when they accepted Sauron’s gifts. The poem captures both the hubris of their corruption and the trap embedded in it, condensing an entire arc of tragedy into five lines that most audience members never realized they were hearing.
The full scope of this achievement was documented in 2010, when journalist Doug Adams published The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films, a comprehensive account of Howard Shore’s scores developed in direct collaboration with Shore himself, which provided an official translation of “The Revelation of the Ringwraiths” and credited all of its creators. Before that publication, the poem’s existence was largely unknown outside of dedicated Tolkien scholarship. Shore’s score contained dozens of leitmotifs, each mapped to specific factions, characters, and themes, but the Nazgûl theme stands apart because its hidden layer requires knowledge of in-world history to fully decode.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is currently available to stream on Max.
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