Overview
Barrow-wights are wraith-like creatures in J. R. R. Tolkien's world of Middle-earth. In The Lord of the Rings, the four hobbits are trapped by a barrow-wight, and are lucky to escape with their lives; but they gain ancient swords of Westernesse for their quest. Tolkien derived the idea of barrow-wights from Norse mythology, where heroes of several Sagas fight undead beings known as draugrs. Scholars have noted a resemblance, too, between the breaking of the barrow-wight's spell and the final battle in Beowulf, where the dragon's barrow is entered and the treasure released from its spell. Barrow-wights do not appear in Peter Jackson's film trilogy, but they do feature in computer games based on Tolkien's Middle-earth.
Origins
, Grettir (pictured) fights Kárr, an undead who guards his own barrow. A wight, from Old English: wiht, is a person or other sentient being. There are tales of wights, called vǣttr or draugr, undead grave-spirits with bodies, in Norse mythology. In Norway, country people in places such as Eidanger considered that the dead went on living in their tombs as vetter or protective spirits, and up to modern times continued to offer sacrifices on the grave-mounds. Tolkien stated in his "Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings" that "barrow-wight" was an "invented name", rather than one like "orc" that existed in Old English.
The Grettis Saga further links the defeat of the barrow-wight to the recovery of an ancient treasure, which comes to the sight of the heir of the house to which it had once belonged: Barrow-wights have appeared in Scandinavian literature in the modern era, for instance in the Swedish poet Carl Michael Bellman's 1791 song no. 32 Träd fram du Nattens Gud ("Step forth, thou god of night"), whose second stanza runs (translated): Both the barrow-wight and the character Tom Bombadil first appeared in Tolkien's writings in his poem The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, published in the Oxford Magazine of 15 February 1934.
Lord of the Rings narrative
, the dolmen at Locmariaquer, Brittany. The chamber is a passage with wider places for burials and grave-goods. of the Late Bronze Age in Europe. Evil spirits were sent to the Barrow-downs by the Witch-king of Angmar to prevent the restoration of the destroyed Dúnedain kingdom of Cardolan, one of three remnants of the Dúnedain Kingdom of Arnor. They animated the dead bones of the Dúnedain, as well as older bones of Edain from the First Age, which still were buried there.
Analysis
The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that it is a "great moment" when Merry awakens in the barrow from the wight's spell and "remembers only a death not his own". He observes that Merry has taken on the warrior's personality, not that of the wight, since Tom recalls the dead with affection. That leaves, Shippey writes, the question of who or what the wight was as a mystery. The deathly-white robes, the writhing hand, the hobbits arrayed for death, give the thrill of fantasy, but this is given solidity by being tied into a wider history which is at least hinted at.
In contemporary media
Peter Jackson omitted barrow-wights from his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. The humanities scholar Brian Rosebury argues that the removal is acceptable to reduce running time, because the episode does not fundamentally change the story. On the other hand, the Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff notes that, since the Hobbits failed to acquire ancient blades from the barrow-wight's hoard, they awkwardly receive their swords from their travel-companion Aragorn on Weathertop as the party is threatened with imminent attack; he coincidentally happens to be carrying four Hobbit-sized swords with him, despite only expecting to meet Frodo and Sam. Despite their omission from the film trilogy, Barrow-wights appear in games such as The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game.
A barrow-wight features in the low-budget 1991 Russian adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, Khraniteli, apparently the first moving picture to include the character. Barrow-wights have appeared in the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. VFX supervisor Jason Smith described their adaptation as "ancient, reanimated heroes, acting for evil against their will." Smith further noted that their character design would reflect their noble status in life as " k ings, queens, high-ranking officials", contrasted by their "glowing blue eyes, piercing through the dark". The Rings of Power VFX team took the opportunity to reflect on Tolkien's writings, with Smith stating, "The feeling the passages give you is of a doom that is approaching, not by speed but by being indefatigable....
It's a menace that is just going to encroach an inch at a time until you have nowhere to go and you die."