The Standing Stone

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Priya

Hello Huinesoron

Those links were very much appreciated. The one of Mayburgh Henge is, as you say, a great match - and I quite agree.

By the way, is there a ‘real’ English region (with a capital D) called the Barrow-Downs?

There is not, but it's definitely there anyway. I have previously described driving and walking across the Berkshire/North Wessex Downs, which are exactly the countryside Tolkien described. It's positively eerie how horizonless they are; the land is just this smooth rolling surface in all directions. And it is absolutely studded with barrows; every hilltop seems to have either a barrow or two, or a line of trees. I'm utterly convinced this is what Tolkien was describing when he talked about the Barrow-Downs.

(From Oxford, he would cross them going south, for instance if travelling to Stonehenge. In that thread I compare the northern edge of the Berkshire Downs to the exit from the Barrow-Downs; nothing is perfect.)

Originally Posted by Priya

The Historic Hill of Tara, County Meath, Ireland [/center]

[...]

The Tara stone does have a finger-like shape. Though I’m perplexed as to how anything finger-like could be termed ‘shapeless’.

Okay, Tara is a strong find. It's one of very few Irish locations I could name, and the only one I know is associated with a battle, so it has the cultural presence to show up in Tolkien's works. The fact that merging the two perfectly creates the hollow-and-stone is very nice. And the stone is both finger-like and shapeless - or rather unshaped, as in not carved or worked. It may not be right, but it's a good possibility.

Originally Posted by Priya

But what exactly is a fairy mound? And why a standing stone in its midst?

And fairy-mounds are, folklorically, based (at least partly) on barrows. It's far from the only entry into the hollow hills in Tolkien: Menegroth, Nargothrond, and Mirkwood are all classic "the Elves live underground, and mortals who enter emerge changed and enchanted" fairy-mounds, and it's hard not to see the same DNA in Amon Rûdh, Henneth Annûn, or even Bag-End. (I have to exclude the various dwarf-mines and burrows and fortresses of evil... the Paths of the Dead, the gates of Gondolin, the Glittering Caves... wow, Tolkien really put a lot of stuff underground!) The Great Barrow isn't even the only one that puts the characters to sleep, either - Bilbo's fall does the same, leading to his encounter with Gollum, and there's magical sleep associated with both Mirkwood (the river) and Menegroth (Beren).

But as far as I know, there's no particular association of fairy-mounds with standing stones on them... probably because that isn't a thing in England, as I discovered last post (to my surprise!).

hS