The Barrow Wights

[Andorinha]

A general topic for discussions involving the inhabitants of the tombs of Middle-earth.

[Andorinha]

Wight Light is Green, Dilly-dilly...

In the Norse tradition, a burial mound that contained an active draugr or haugbui, the "walking dead," would sometimes be marked with a glowing light, a foxfire, willow-the-wispish sort of stuff. Once inside the tomb, this pale, ghastly light would become ever brighter. This tale may in fact have a strong basis in reality as tombs are ideally damp/ dark places that encourage the growth of foxfire, bioluminescent fungi. The eerie "green" glow of this fungus can be viewed at

inamidst.com/lights/foxfire

Most burial mounds in Europe were oriented along an east-west axis, and most frequently the doors to the long barrows were located on the eastern sides of the mounds. This orientation probably was constrained by the common belief that the sun dies in the west, and is reborn each day in the east. Therefore, human "rebirths" from the grave would be lined-up so that the corpse could receive the invigorating rays of the new born sun, and share in its rebirth. Consequently, when Bombadil warns the hobbits to pass the barrows on the west, he may not be referring to any Middle-earth association of the direction east with evil, but simply giving them some common sense advice: "When sneaking past a house, do so on the side opposite the doors and windows, thus, you are less likely to be seen by whatever inhabits the place."

[Stormrider]

Scientific explanation for the eerieness of the barrows!

Tolkien sure had a wealth of knowledge and he was skilled in adapting it to his stories. No wonder he is such a good read!

[Andorinha]

Some of the Norse barrow wights could influence the weather in the vicinity of their mounds. They could especially call up fogs to confuse the unwary and ambush their victims. Here, Tom Bombadil may be slightly mistaken when he says that nought going upon two feet may master the weather?

The West Kennet Long Barrow, first scientifically excavated in the 1850s, was in the news again in 1929 when another dig removed some of the tomb's contents. 1929 would be a perfect time for influencing JRRT's thoughts as he developed Middle-earth, and he could easily have had this particular barrow in mind once he wrote LotR nearly two decades later.

www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/wiltshire/featured-sites/the-west-kennet-long-barrow.html

[Stormrider]

Your link stated:

The mound is traditionally visited by a white spectral figure accompanied by a white red-eared hound at sunrise on Midsummer's day. There is a slim possibility that this tradition is a folk memory of a ritual event or at least a time thought to have been significant in the use of the barrow.

I wonder how they know this? Was there some tome or writing on the walls of this legend or was it passed down thru the ages for 3,000 years?

Did you see the link at the bottom of your link about occult activites having taken place RECENTLY? (August 1985) according to the author of this link article.

[Andorinha]

No, alas, no writing at all in Great Britain for almost 2000 years after the barrows were constructed...

I primarily used this url for its good pictures of the barrow, but the texts accompanying the photos are a bit more "exuberantly psychic" than sober archaeology would allow. There is no objective way of connecting the 18th-19th-20th century tales of spectral visions to the ancient days of the barrow's construction, but I think the mood of such modern tales is in keeping with Tolkien's use of the eerie folklore that the hobbits had heard around their fires when tales were told at night...

The fact that barrows still elicit such tales of current ghostly activity underlines the connection between the present population (English and tourists alike) and the traditional peoples of the past. Whatever the "truth" regarding the barrows, they do provoke in many visitors a sense of "otherness," an ancient dread of those places we associate with the rotting dead. I felt myself, a pleasant sort of chilling/ tingle when I visited this site some 15 years ago, and, although I'm enormously skeptical, it was actually fun to let the imagination run free for a while. Visiting such mounds -- it is hard not to fall in with the romances of these hoary memorials, almost thought I heard Frodo crying out in the darkness... grin.

Tolkien, like many Victorian-Edwardian English, enjoyed playing about with the occult, though he never became quite so credulous as Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) who accepted some very fake photos as being real evidence of the existence of thumb-sized pixy-elfs. JRRT was highly impressed with a "ghost story/ time travel tale" told by two English school mistresses who claimed to have found a path at the Petit Trianon that led them, briefly, back into the 18th century of Louis 16th. He even started his own time travel tale based on this stimulating episode. I think for Tolkien, ghosts were real, though he never claimed, to my knowledge, that he had actually met any.