When Frodo will get misplaced on the Barrow-downs in The Fellowship of the Ring, he finds himself surrounded by fog, with two big standing stones “towering ominous earlier than him and leaning barely in direction of each other just like the pillars of a headless door.” Panicked and unable to seek out his associates, Frodo runs round within the fog till he finds himself proper up in opposition to a big barrow, and a voice from underground says, “I’m ready for you!” An icy grip seizes him and Frodo blacks out, waking up imprisoned contained in the barrow itself alongside Merry, Pippin, and Sam, who’re all unconscious. It appears fairly clear that the panorama Tolkien describes right here is impressed by each Stonehenge and the various different standing stones and stone circles discovered throughout the British Isles and Brittany in Northern France, usually within the close to neighborhood of barrows.
The Barrow-wights themselves, nonetheless, are most strongly impressed by Norse mythology and the legends advised in Previous Norse sagas. The Scandinavian sagas have been written within the mid and later medieval durations, presumably based mostly on earlier oral histories, in a number of completely different genres. These are: Kings’ sagas, which advised tales of kings of Sweden and Norway; Íslendingasögur, which inform tales about early settlers and colonists in Iceland; up to date sagas, which inform story from their very own up to date or near-contemporary historical past; chivalric sagas, which is likely to be translations from French chansons de geste or Latin poems or is likely to be unique Icelandic poems; legendary sagas, masking Scandinavian delusion and legend from earlier than the settlement of Iceland, and saints’ and bishops’ sagas, that are translations of hagiographies or bishops’ lives.
Many of those sagas, particularly the Kings’ sagas and and Íslendingasögur, inform tales of undead creatures. Though they’re usually known as “ghosts” in English translations, these are usually not shadow-like or insubstantial, however zombie-like revenants which are literal strolling corpses (when they aren’t shape-shifting into seals). They might even be known as “trolls,” a phrase which was typically used for monstrous beings generally earlier than it began for use for a extra particular kind of creature. The revenants, or wights, have been typically known as draugr, aptrgangr, or haugbúi; the final time period being one which was usually used for the type that Tolkien may name a barrow-wight.
Barrow-wights, or mound dwellers, are a selected kind of revenant that reside in their very own tombs. Barrows, raised mounds masking a tomb that may embody treasure together with the human stays, have been utilized in varied elements of Europe throughout a number of millennia, and have been well-liked in England within the Bronze Age, and in Scandinavia within the Viking Age. The wights are sometimes there to protect their treasure from thieves. Some won’t disturb anybody if they aren’t disturbed themselves, whereas others, like Tolkien’s, are a bit extra proactive and may assault anybody passing close by. In Grettir’s Saga, for instance, a barrow-wight known as Karr the Previous sends up flames from his barrow to frighten away the locals. Grettir the outlaw heads over to the barrow to steal the treasure and fights Karr, defeating the wight by reducing off its head and inserting the pinnacle by its rear finish, a typical answer to the issue.
One other instance which will have been significantly influential on Tolkien is a king from The Saga of Hromund Gripsson known as Thráinn. Thráinn was not, as Hobbit followers may assume, a Dwarf, however an undead witch-king with a magic sword known as Mistletoe. The hero Hromund fights and defeats Thráinn, burns his physique, and takes the magic sword.
In Norse mythology, mound dwellers or barrow wights are undead, that’s, they are the useless particular person, reanimated and much more monstrous than they usually have been after they have been alive. In Tolkien’s lore, they’re barely completely different. Tom Bombadil tells the Hobbits that after the Númenorean kings whose our bodies lie within the barrows had been buried for a very long time, “A shadow got here out of darkish locations far-off, and the bones have been stirred within the mounds. Barrow-wights walked within the hole locations with a clink of rings on chilly fingers, and gold chains within the wind.” This appears to indicate that the Wights are usually not the kings themselves, however some form of shadowy evil spirit inhabiting their bones.
