Barrow-wights

The Barrow-downs

The Barrow-downs east of the Old Forest are a range of grassy hills crowned with ancient mounds and standing stones. Some of the barrows are far older than the Dúnedain, raised by the forefathers of the Edain in the First Age before they crossed into Beleriand; others were the tombs of the Dúnedain of Cardolan, and the last prince of that land was buried there. The Downs were sacred and quiet until the Witch-king made them a place of horror.

The coming of the wights

Appendix A records that after the Great Plague of T.A. 1636 had emptied Cardolan, the Witch-king of Angmar sent evil spirits out of Angmar and Rhudaur to enter the deserted mounds. The wights animated the bones that lay there, and the barrows became their houses. When Angmar fell in 1975 the wights remained, and the Downs were shunned by all the folk of Eriador for the thousand years that followed; the hobbits of the Shire and the Men of Bree knew them only by evil rumour.

Nature

A wight is a spirit rather than a body. It possesses the dead, gives the bones a cold and stony life, and can command fogs and enchantments. It appears as a tall dark figure with pale eyes, and its touch is deadly cold. It sings in a thin cold voice, and its song is a spell of sleep and cold. Its purpose is to draw the living into the tomb, lay them among the treasures of the dead, and, in the manner of the old burials, kill them with a sword. Sunlight and the daylight world are its enemies, and against the songs of Tom Bombadil it had no power.

Frodo in the barrow

On 28 September 3018 the four hobbits, riding out of Tom Bombadil's house, were caught by fog on the Downs. Separated in the mist, Frodo heard a cold voice and was seized by a wight, and woke in a barrow beside Merry, Pippin and Sam, who lay clothed in white and circled with gold, with a long naked sword across their necks. A hand crept toward the sword-hilt. Frodo hewed it off with a sword from the hoard, and then remembered the rhyme Tom had taught them and sang it. Tom came, sang the wight out of the barrow into the light, and broke the spell. He laid the treasure out on the grass to break the wight's hold, and from the hoard gave the hobbits the long knives of Westernesse, forged in Arnor for the wars against Angmar, that Merry later drove into the knee of the Witch-king.

Legacy

The barrow-blade that Merry carried was work of the very people the Witch-king had destroyed, made with spells against him, and it was the wight's plunder that put it into a hobbit's hand. The hobbits' fear on the Downs was the first taste of the Enemy's world outside the Shire. The wights themselves are not recorded again; after the fall of Sauron the Barrow-downs were still a place of ill name, but the wights were creatures of Angmar and the Shadow, and their power presumably passed with it.

A wight was seen as a tall dark shape against the stars, with pale luminous eyes and a grip as cold as death. Inside the barrow it manifested as a long pale arm creeping on its fingers toward a sword-hilt, and when Frodo cut off the hand the arm writhed and the light in the tomb went out. It had no fixed body of its own.

The wights performed a mockery of the ancient burial rites of the Men of the North, laying victims in the tombs in white robes with treasure and a sword, and chanting a spell of cold and endless sleep. They kept the hoards of the mounds untouched.

Spirits of evil, perhaps lesser beings drawn to Sauron and the Witch-king, sent into the barrows of Cardolan in the seventeenth century of the Third Age to make the Downs a place of dread and to guard the borders of the North against the Dúnedain.

The wight of the great barrow was driven out into the sunlight by Tom Bombadil and its house broken. The fate of the others is not recorded.