The Dead and The Undead

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

I am familiar with the connection Tolkien makes between the Dead Marshes and Northern France. I believe in the letter he briefly writes the plot doesn't represent the World Wars, but perhaps the landscape did.

Which is the interpretation that made the most sense to me, because I think the descriptions of the landscape through the entire story are perhaps the most fascinating. The land has a "character" of its own, influenced by the people (or unknown things) who lived there.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I have read (and been published on) both The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains and I'm unsure what Tolkien means, unless his syntax is getting mixed up and he's referring to his writings more generally. It's possible that he is saying that the desolation of the marshes is influenced by Morris's depiction of the Romans and the Huns as marauders who laid waste to the natural environment (as opposed to his nature-loving Goths) and left it in ruins for years to come.

Interesting! (I own the Morris books but don't remember them, so am very glad of Zigûr's expertise!) It really does sound like Tolkien drew a distinction between the physical appearance of things (Dead Marshes = the Somme), and their character (approach to Mordor = like the worlds of the Huns and Romans) - and that, unlike what would be my first instinct, he viewed the character as the true "inspiration".

That ties in with the way he doesn't seem to much care what his characters look like, assigning them physical traits only when they can sound properly Old English Epic (tall, bright eyes, hair like shadow following). I think he attributed the same kind of distinction to the Noldorin language-masters, who insisted Quenya was more like Primitive Quendian than Telerin was, even though Telerin kept the sounds more faithfully: they considered the nuances of grammar more significant than what it actually looked/sounded like.

Struggling to remember the Morris books... Zigûr, I know there's a wood-sprite type figure in one of them (shades of Goldberry), but is there anything spooky enough to be a thematic source for any of the undead, such as the Marshes?

hS

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Huinesoron

is there anything spooky enough to be a thematic source for any of the undead, such as the Marshes?

I'm sadly not familiar with all of the prose romances of Morris; they deserve a topic and then some in themselves. The enormous influence Morris had on Tolkien cannot be understated, and yet is often under-recognised — or, at least, that is my conjecture in some of my academic writings.

That being said, while not 'spooky', one element that does come to mind is the three men, two old, one melancholy, who come to Cleveland, home of the House of the Ravens, in the opening of The Story of the Glittering Plain, seeking the "Land of Living Men" aka "The Acre of the Undying". Morris had concerns with "death and the desire for deathlessness" too, but he believed in the pursuit of a better way of being in this world, not any world to come.

[Mithadan]

Getting a bit far afield from the original topic, but years ago there was a thread arguing that Sauron was misguided (a polite lawyer term) in permitting a pockmarked and cratered field that allowed anyone to hide to exist before his front gate. This thread touched upon the imagery as well and included a debate regarding whether the desolation before the Gates reflected the battlefields of France during WWI.

I don't think that the Dead Marshes were specifically discussed. I would agree that the visions in the Dead Marshes were images and nothing more; not dead or undead. The images likely were placed there for shock and horror value by Sauron to make them even more difficult to traverse.