Barrow-wight

• 1. Introduction

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  Tolkien named the wraith-like horror haunting Middle-earth's burial mounds the barrow-wight. In The Lord of the Rings, four hobbits step between two huge standing stones, leaning toward each other like the pillars of a headless door. Darkness falls around them, and they are lucky to escape the barrow-wight with their lives.

  What exactly is a wight? Where does the idea of the barrow-wight come from? And why does a creature dangerous enough to trap four hobbits never appear in Peter Jackson's film trilogy? Yet it keeps turning up in games built on Tolkien's world.

• 2. Origins

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  A barrow is simply a burial mound, the kind used as far back as Neolithic times. A wight, from the Old English wiht, means a person or other sentient being.

  In Norse mythology, tales tell of wights called vǣttr or draugr, undead grave-spirits that still have bodies. In Norway, people in places such as Eidanger believed the dead lived on in their tombs as vetter, or protective spirits. Even in modern times, country people there continued to leave sacrifices on the grave-mounds.

  Tolkien himself called 'barrow-wight' an invented name in his 'Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings.' He distinguished it from a word like 'orc,' which already existed in Old English.

  In a lecture on Beowulf, Tolkien explained that the poem's orcneas, or 'hell-corpses,' were monsters born of Cain that led to the creation of Grendel. He described this terrible northern imagination as the one 'to which I have ventured to give the name barrow-wights.' He added that these beings are 'not living' but still 'undead,' strong enough to 'strangle men and rend them.' He cited Glámr from the saga of Grettir the Strong as a well known example.

  Long before Tolkien wrote his own version, the term 'barrow-wight' had already appeared in print.

• 3. Naming History

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  Andrew Lang used the word in 1891, in his Essays in Little. He wrote, 'In the graves where treasures were hoarded the Barrowwights dwelt, ghosts that were sentinels over the gold.'

  Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris got there earlier still, using it in their 1869 translation of Grettis saga. Their translation describes a brutal wrestling match with the 'barrow-wight,' also called the 'barrow-dweller,' a creature named Kárr. The barrow-wight sets on 'with hideous eagerness,' and after a long struggle 'the barrow-dweller fell over on his back with huge din.'

  Grettir presents Thorfinn with a short sword taken from the mound, the finest weapon he says he has ever seen. Thorfinn recognizes it as an heirloom of his own house and asks, 'Whence came these treasures to thine hand?'

  The Grettis Saga calls its two undead monsters, Glámr and Kárr, haugbúar, meaning 'mound-dwellers,' a term close to draugr. This saga, whether read in the original Old Norse or through Magnússon and Morris's English, fed directly into Tolkien's own barrow-wights.

  The Swedish poet Carl Michael Bellman kept the tradition alive in 1791. Its second stanza appears in a song called 'Träd fram du Nattens Gud,' or 'Step forth, thou god of night.'

  Both the barrow-wight and the character Tom Bombadil made their first appearance together in Tolkien's own writing. They debuted in a poem called 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,' published in the Oxford Magazine on the 15th of February 1934.

• 4. The Barrow-Downs Ambush

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  The Witch-king of Angmar sent evil spirits to the Barrow-downs to stop the ruined Dúnedain kingdom of Cardolan from ever being restored. These spirits animated the old bones already resting there, some belonging to the Dúnedain and others to the Edain, dating back to the First Age.

  After parting ways with Tom Bombadil, Frodo Baggins and his companions become trapped inside the Barrow-downs. Frodo alone resists the wight's spell. Looking around, he finds the other three hobbits dressed in grave-goods, thin white clothes, gold circlets, and chains. Swords and shields lie around them, with a blade resting across their throats.

  He grabs a small sword lying nearby and cuts off the wight's hand. When the creature snuffs out the last dim light in the cavern, Frodo shouts for Tom Bombadil.

  Bombadil answers, driving the wight from the barrow, freeing the hobbits, and recovering its hoard, which holds a set of ancient Númenórean swords. Frodo watches the severed hand keep wriggling on its own, even after Bombadil has claimed the treasure hidden beneath the mound.

• 5. Barrow-Blades

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  Merry wakes from his trance shouting: 'Of course, I remember! The men of Carn Dûm came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart!' His words confirm that the cairn belonged to the last prince of Cardolan. Carn Dûm was the capital of the Witch-Kingdom of Angmar, a power constantly at war with the Númenórean realms.

  Bombadil arms each hobbit with a dagger from the wight's hoard, long, leaf-shaped, and damasked with serpent-forms in red and gold. Drawn from their black sheaths, the blades were 'wrought of some strange metal, light and strong, and set with many fiery stones.' They seemed 'untouched by time, unrusted, sharp, glittering in the sun.'

  Much later, Pippin offers his service to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who studies the young hobbit's sword closely. Denethor asks, 'Whence came this?... Many, many years lie on it. Surely this is a blade wrought by our own kindred in the North in the deep past?'

  That question about the blade's true age would occupy scholars long after the story itself had ended.

• 6. Reading The Wight

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  The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey calls it a 'great moment' when Merry wakes in the barrow and 'remembers only a death not his own.' Shippey argues Merry has absorbed the dead warrior's own personality rather than the wight's, since the memory recalls the dead with real affection. That leaves open, in Shippey's view, the deeper question of who or what the wight actually was.

  The literature scholar Patrick Callahan considers the entire Bombadil episode oddly disconnected from the rest of the story. Yet Callahan notes it echoes the final fight in Beowulf, where an aging king battles a barrow-dragon and dies. Even so, the treasure is recovered and the curse on it broken, just as with the barrow-wight.

  Callahan also places the barrow-wight in 'the class of revenants, or walking dead,' alongside the haugbúar of the Grettis Saga that Tolkien already knew. That debate over what to call the creature didn't stop later filmmakers and game designers from deciding for themselves.

• 7. Screen And Game Adaptations

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  Peter Jackson cut the barrow-wights entirely from his Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The humanities scholar Brian Rosebury argues the cut is acceptable, since trimming the episode doesn't fundamentally change the story or its running time.

  The Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff points out a side effect: without the wight's hoard, the hobbits have no ancient blades to carry. So the films have Aragorn hand them their swords at Weathertop instead, just as the party comes under sudden attack. He happens to be carrying four hobbit-sized swords, despite expecting to meet only Frodo and Sam.

  Games have kept the creature alive where film dropped it, including The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game. A barrow-wight also turns up in Khraniteli, a low-budget 1991 Russian adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is apparently the first moving picture to feature the character.

  The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brought barrow-wights back to the screen. VFX supervisor Jason Smith described them as 'ancient, reanimated heroes, acting for evil against their will.' He said their design reflects noble life, 'kings, queens, high-ranking officials,' set against 'glowing blue eyes, piercing through the dark.'

  Smith also reflected on Tolkien's own writing: 'The feeling the passages give you is of a doom that is approaching, not by speed but by being indefatigable.... It's a menace that is just going to encroach an inch at a time until you have nowhere to go and you die.' That patient, creeping dread is the version of the barrow-wight reaching new audiences long after Tolkien first wrote the word down.