LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 08 - Fog on the Barrow-Downs

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

This chapter, on re-read, was much creepier than I remember. And here I thought I remembered.

I liked this chapter for its insight into the Middle-Earth history and lore, a glimpse of the history of the old kingdoms that had been there before, it gives a sense of space, or rather time and its vastness. Angmar and Carn Dûm are mentioned, places whose names are just amazing and I always found their history fascinating. And imagine, Merry actually had a vision of encountering men of Carn Dûm and being stabbed by one!
I like the dark description of the darkness that comes with the Barrow-Wight, I also like the description of the Barrow-Wight and its eyes, I like even more the sunny feel afterwards when the hobbits had been saved and I love the "dealing out the treasure" that Tom does, and the remark about the unknown wielder of the beautiful brooch with blue stones. Tom clearly knows much, and in surprising detail.

What I never liked about this chapter was how Tom rebukes the Hobbits for doing something when there wasn't really a better option for them. It's a common trope in many fairy-tales, I recall, and it has always annoyed me since childhood: some wise old man or seeress says "oh, you should have known better, young one," while there was no way the young one would have known. Now, I am not referring to the Hobbits becoming lazy and resting near the standing stone, or even worse, on the wrong side of the stone: that is a justified rebuke. But Tom does not stop there and says:

Originally Posted by Fog on the Barrow-Downs

"Here are your ponies, now!" he said. "They've more sense (in some ways) than you wandering hobbits have - more sense in their noses. For they sniff danger ahead which you walk right into; and if they run to save themselves, they run the right way."

Right! But the ponies were no better in figuring out the danger beforehand (before they stopped for lunch), and afterwards, once the fog had fallen, well, what was Frodo (and the others) supposed to do? His pony threw him off and ran away. After that, Frodo only tried to find his friends, who got lost in the darkness, so he could save them - certainly the right thing to do! Tom is just speaking from his high and mighty position of someone who knows everything, but once the trouble started, I think Frodo especially should be praised for his courage and for saving the others. (And like I said in the discussion about the Shadow of the Past, this was his first significant deed; and also the time when he was tempted to put on the Ring and just run away - and he didn't. And that counts for something, in my book, if not in Tom's.)

One last thing, a bit of deeper lore, if I may. There is the famous chanting of the Barrow-wight. I would like to know what people think about its last verses. (Or maybe that should be a separate thread.)

Originally Posted by Fog on the Barrow-Downs

Cold be hand and heart and bone,
and cold be sleep under stone:
never more to wake on stony bed,
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.
In the black wind the stars shall die,
and still on gold here let them lie,
till the dark lord lifts up his hand
over dead sea and withered land.

I call your attention to the last two lines. I always understood it as either something poetic which does not really refer to any actual point in presumed future, or that it is kind of a "wishful thinking in hope that evil shall prevail". As in, that the Barrow-wight here means "you're going to lie here until Sauron claims Middle-Earth again, which is going to happen eventually, mwahaha". But, of course, there is a more logical explanation, and that is, that this is talking about some time in the future... remember, the point of this "sleep" is that the hobbits are supposed to sleep there, well, "forever": so we are talking about the "end of times"... and there... regardless how the Barrow-wight may or may not think it will end, eschatologically... we are looking towards Dagor Dagorath, when Morgoth (the Dark Lord) will come back and "lift up his hand over dead sea and withered land", huh? I am not sure if I am not projecting too much into this, but it is about the only logical explanation that fits in here, and it fits perfectly.

And if so, then we have the only one occasion (as far as I know) where in LotR (or almost in anything, including the Silmarillion if I am not mistaken!) there is a reference to Dagor Dagorath. Which would be quite cool, and typical for Tolkien (like how originally all casual remarks about "the Necromancer" or "Moria" in the Hobbit were also just thrown in "by chance").

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

I call your attention to the last two lines. I always understood it as either something poetic which does not really refer to any actual point in presumed future, or that it is kind of a "wishful thinking in hope that evil shall prevail". As in, that the Barrow-wight here means "you're going to lie here until Sauron claims Middle-Earth again, which is going to happen eventually, mwahaha". But, of course, there is a more logical explanation, and that is, that this is talking about some time in the future... remember, the point of this "sleep" is that the hobbits are supposed to sleep there, well, "forever": so we are talking about the "end of times"... and there... regardless how the Barrow-wight may or may not think it will end, eschatologically... we are looking towards Dagor Dagorath, when Morgoth (the Dark Lord) will come back and "lift up his hand over dead sea and withered land", huh? I am not sure if I am not projecting too much into this, but it is about the only logical explanation that fits in here, and it fits perfectly.

That's my view of the wight's incantation: almost a prayer for the vision of Sauron's ultimate goal to come to pass. Since Sauron portrayed himself as a god to his servants, this would not be out of keeping for the spirit (pun intended) of such a view.

But contrast that with Bombadil's "banishing" song:

Get out, you old Wight! Vanish in the sunlight!
Shrivel like the cold mist, like the winds go wailing,
Out into the barren lands far beyond the mountains!
Come never here again! Leave your barrow empty!
Lost and forgotten be, darker than the darkness,
Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended.

With the last two lines of Tom's song, he seems to send the wight the future way of the Witch-king, Sauron, and Saruman: doomed to a lonely, impotent existence in the waste.

And finally, Tom mentions a 'mending', which appears to be a quite different version from the wight's. Tom sees the world's end as it should (shall) be, and in his overcoming the wight, seems to confirm his is the right one.

[Morthoron]

Lost and forgotten be, darker than the darkness,
Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended.

Perhaps this is a Tolkienesque allusion to the Door of Night, behind which Morgoth is shut until the end of days, the Dagor Dagorath, and the recreation of the world. Bombadil would know this because he was, of course, not of Middle-earth and had read a few revisions of Tolkien's early Silmarillion works whilst hanging out in the wilds of Oxfordshire:

But Morgoth himself the Valar thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void; and a guard is set forever on those walls, and Eärendil keeps watch upon the ramparts of the sky.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

With the last two lines of Tom's song, he seems to send the wight the future way of the Witch-king, Sauron, and Saruman: doomed to a lonely, impotent existence in the waste.

And finally, Tom mentions a 'mending', which appears to be a quite different version from the wight's. Tom sees the world's end as it should (shall) be, and in his overcoming the wight, seems to confirm his is the right one.

Great observation, Zil. That is indeed how I saw it at first, or basically, all the time until now when the other possibility occured to me.

However, now what you said just further strenghtens my belief that it is possible to successfully argue for the Dagor Dagorath scenario. Because Tom is actually saying the same thing, then, and in "my" version, it is not that what Tom says invalidates the Wight's wish into being a mere wish, but actually they would both be right.

Like this: if the "end of times" means that Morgoth will return and all evil will come together for the final battle, that's what the Wight is talking about. But afterwards, we know that the world will be remade, and that is what Tom is talking about. It's such an absolutely wonderful example of how losing hope works - interpreting a positive thing in a negative way by overshadowing the hope, like a tunnel vision with the Wight intentionally obscuring the light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, it is also the way the word "apocalypse" has been twisted in our culture to effectively mean "destruction", even though the point of all apocalyptic literature has always been to bring hope to those who were in the middle of chaos and destruction. Imagine any story with a happy end, of course the heroes have to go through all the danger. But what the Barrow-wight does is to cut the story just at the worst moment, and tries to pretend that there is nothing afterwards. Tom actually reveals (ha! Apocalypsis - revelation - indeed!) that there is something after, the good end, when "the world is mended". Huh, some really deep eschatology in this, actually.

Incidentally, that also means that even if the Hobbits ended up "never waking 'til..." as the Wight intended, there would be awakening for them, afterwards. Because there is afterwards. (But of course, that is outside the scope of the story of the Ring. Nonetheless, I think interesting.)

[Formendacil]

A question that comes up earlier in the thread is about the nature of Merry's dream or memory of the soldier of Cardolan who died speared by the men of Carn Dûm--this is something Verlyn Flieger talks about in one of her books (A Question of Time, I am 98% sure--it's been the better part of a decade). I remember none of the specifics, and do remember thinking that some of her thinking was conjecture, but where she made comparisons within Tolkien's work, it's hard to complain.

And there are definite comparisons in Tolkien's work, most notably his Lost Road and Notion Papers fragments, where the modern day protagonists having dreams of ancient happenings are a major element. Within The Lord of the Rings itself, we have Faramir's dream of the sinking of Númenor--fascinatingly, an actual autobiographical detail from Tolkien himself.

It's notable to me that Merry dreams/remembers one of the Dúnedain of Cardolan: this syncs him up with Faramir (a Dúnadan remembering a specifically Númenórean event) as well as the Lost Road--this dream memory business seems to be a specially Númenórean thing. This is especially interesting to me because this is the first place in the book where the legend of the Númenóreans gets attention and focus (it DOES get exposure, I admit, in "Shadow of the Past," but that is just one in a laundry list of historical references and not made central).

By the way, it's fascinating to me that we, as fans, generally say "Númenor," no doubt following the overall lead of the Appendices, Unfinished Tales, and the rest of the Middle-earth corpus, which makes it the overwhelming term of usage for Tolkien--but in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings itself, the term doesn't edge out Westernesse by all that much prominence, and Westernesse is definitely the word I remember learning first (I couldn't tell you which is encountered first).



On a more general note, I love "Fog on the Barrow-downs." I love most chapters and I generally give a little extra love to the chapters that the movies passed over solely because my mental images were never distorted, but "Fog on the Barrow-downs" still holds a special place to me. It's far and away the best Bombadil chapter, beautifully atmospheric, full of all the best ficto-archaeology (not just the Barrow-downs, which I always remember, but Arthedain's dike, which I never used to notice), and ends on a perfect anticipatory moment of moodiness to lead into the Bree chapters and the next stage of the story.

[Inziladun]

I wonder why, before their deaths, the hobbits had to be clothed in white. And how did Frodo escape that?

For the first question, was it a deliberate mockery on the part of the Wight; a sacrifice made to the lord Sauron, whose "negative resurrection" he refers in his incantation?

For the second, I can only posit that Frodo both was not reclothed, and was not made to stay unconscious, because of the Ring.

Unfinished Tales, in The Hunt for the Ring, says that the Witch-king went to the Barrow-downs before Frodo and co. arrived. Did he tell the wights about the Ring? Was the wight simply to hold Frodo there until the WK returned?