The Undead and Shades

What the category holds

In Tolkien's world death is the gift of Ilúvatar to Men, and the undead are those to whom it has been denied or who have refused it. Three kinds appear in the histories. The Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, were kings and sorcerers of Men who took the Nine Rings from Sauron and were drawn wholly into the unseen world, neither living nor dead, and enslaved to the One Ring. The Barrow-wights were evil spirits, sent from Angmar and Rhudaur, that entered the ancient burial mounds of Cardolan and animated the bones there. The Dead Men of Dunharrow were the Men of the Mountains, cursed by Isildur for breaking their oath and kept from rest until an heir of Isildur called them to fulfil it.

The wraith-world

Behind all these lies the idea of the unseen world, which the Ring reveals. When Frodo put on the Ring at Weathertop he saw the Nazgûl as they were, pale kings in grey, and they saw him; had the Morgul-knife reached his heart he would have become a wraith like them, a lesser thing under their command. Sauron's mastery of this shadow-realm is the root of his title of Necromancer, borne when he hid in Dol Guldur, and the barrow-wights and the dead of the Downs are part of the same art. The Dead of Dunharrow are different: their case is a curse and an oath, not Sauron's sorcery, and they were released by the fulfilment of the oath rather than by the destruction of the Ring.

Not undead

Some things that look like the dead are not. The faces in the Dead Marshes are images of the slain of the Last Alliance, seen in the pools, which cannot be reached or touched; Gollum insisted they were only a trick of the marsh. The Watcher in the Water, the Balrog, the Nameless Things, and the shadows of the Barrow-downs' mounds themselves are creatures or places, not shades. And the Elves who fade are not undead either; they pass into the unseen world by nature, not by curse.

Fate

The Nazgûl were consumed when the One Ring was unmade on 25 March 3019. The Dead of Dunharrow had already been released by Aragorn at Pelargir on 13 March. The Barrow-wights are not mentioned again after Tom Bombadil broke the one that took the hobbits; with the fall of the Shadow they presumably faded, but the Downs kept their evil name.

The undead are in general invisible or half-seen: the Nazgûl have no visible bodies and wear cloaks and armour to give themselves shape; the Barrow-wight was a shadow with a cold hand and pale eyes; the Dead of Dunharrow appeared as grey shapes and shadows with the glimmer of eyes and old weapons. All bring a cold that is felt in the body and in the heart.

The Nazgûl retained the hierarchy of a court under their Lord, the Witch-king, and the manners of kings. The Barrow-wights kept a horrible parody of burial rites, laying their victims in the tombs with gold and swords and chanting over them. The Dead of Dunharrow kept the memory of their kingship and their oath, and answered when the rightful summons came.

The wraiths were made by the Nine Rings; the wights were sent into the barrows by the Witch-king after the Great Plague; the Dead were cursed by Isildur when they failed him in the war against Sauron.

All three kinds ended, or were released, in the year of the War of the Ring.