|
This is "our" chapter! Actually, back in the early days of the forum, The Barrow-Wight used its title for the site's newsletters.
I must say, even after repeated readings, I find the atmosphere that Tolkien creates here eery, spooky, and creepy. It seems such a short time between the Hobbits' cheerful start in the morning to the events on the Downs. I wonder - on the next day they notice that they could not have reached the road within that one day. Was their encounter with the Wight inevitable? Did Tom realize that and allow it to happen for some reason?
After MovieFrodo's rapid deterioration into helplessness, it's refreshing to see BookFrodo's courage here. He relinquishes the passivity that envelopes him at first and is now the person who saves the others - as Sam was in the Old Forest. Later in Rivendell, Gandalf says to him, "You have some strength in you, my dear hobbit! As you showed in the Barrow. That was touch and go: perhaps the most dangerous moment of all." And that was after Weathertop!
The LotR Reader's Companion has a number of interesting and informative tidbits in the accompanying chapter. For example, it compares the "Cold be hand" poem to the oath of the Orcs of Morgoth in the Lay of Leithian, beginning: "Death to light, to law, to love!" It also points out a severed, sinister hand and arm in Tolkien's picture Maddo, illustration #78 in JRRT: Artist and Illustrator, which has no contextual connection with this story at all. Did Tolkien draw upon personal nightmares in this passage?
__________________
'Mercy!' cried Gandalf. 'If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?' 'The whole history of Middle-earth.. .'
|