Ghosts in Middle-Earth

Eric Schweicher Candidat professeur au Lycée Technique Josy Barthel à Mamer Ghosts in Middle-Earth Lycée Technique Josy Barthel Mamer 2009 Ghosts in Middle-Earth 2 Je soussigné Eric Schweicher, Candidat Professeur au Lycée Technique Josy Barthel à Mamer, déclare avoir réalisé ce travail de candidature par mes propres moyens. Mamer, le 4 mai 2009. Cover picture: The Barrow Wight, John Howe. 3 Eric Schweicher Candidat professeur au Lycée Technique Josy Barthel à Mamer Ghosts in Middle-Earth: Germanic, Norse and AngloSaxon Remnants in Tolkien’s Fictional World. Lycée Technique Josy Barthel Mamer 2009 4 Synopsis : ! ! " # % $ &' 5 Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Dr. Juliette Dor, for her expertise, understanding and patience. She is responsible for bringing to life those draugar in my head. Thank you Madeleine and Eileen for proofreading this research paper. Your help was invaluable and will be rewarded with garden makeover. Many thanks and love to my family for bearing with me while I was in exile in Middle-Earth and walking with the dead. * John Howe’s illustrations appear courtesy of the artist, Sophisticated Games, and Tolkien Enterprises. John Howe’s illustrations appear courtesy of the artist and Harper Collins Publishers. John Howe’s illustration of Beowulf’s Funeral appears courtesy of the artist and Templar Publishing. Ted Nasmith’s illustration appears courtesy of the artist and Harper Collins Publishers. * 6 Table of Contents I. Introduction....................................................................................................... 8 II. Ghosts and Funeral Practices in Early Germanic Literature..................... 12 I. Death and Funerals .................................................................................... 16 II . Norse Draugar and Draugadróttin, their master. ................................ 28 III. Monsters, heroes, and the hoard............................................................ 38 IV. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 42 III. Ghosts in Middle-Earth : Analysis.............................................................. 44 I. Burial Mounds and Funeral Rites ............................................................ 45 II. The Wild Hunt of Dunharrow................................................................. 74 III. The Dead of Dagorlad............................................................................. 96 IV. Ghosts in Dreams................................................................................... 104 VI. Conclusion .............................................................................................. 114 IV. General Conclusion ................................................................................... 116 V. Bibliography................................................................................................. 121 7 I. Introduction [An] equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (…) and for fairystory, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (…) for my appetite. (…) I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (…) in legends of other lands. (…) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story (…) which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. -- J.R.R. Tolkien Letter 131 to Milton Waldman of Collins publishers (1951)1 Middle-Earth, the fictive world that J.R.R. Tolkien created to set the scene for his characters in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, is a literary world like no other. The sense of historical, geographical and cultural depth, and the intricacy of details Tolkien supplied his readers with, is simply staggering. Heroes were given a history, in which their fathers’ history mesh with others, going back to the very beginnings of time and creation in a remarkable literary tapestry. I have decided to dwell on a very limited aspect of his work and to study just one of the ways Tolkien gives his work a sense of cultural and historical identity. Tolkien was not only a writer, but also a renowned philologist, one of the greatest specialists of the Anglo-Saxon language and literature who used to teach at the University of Oxford. Therefore MiddleEarth is not merely the work of an artist, but also the work of an accomplished craftsman, an enlightened scholar who used his knowledge of ancient literature and the ancient world while creating the world and society of Middle-Earth. This research paper will therefore explore Tolkien’s world, and more precisely analyse his recurrent use of ghostly figures. These ghosts are but another way for the author to give his fictional world a sense of “reality,” a quality of detail and depth that contributes to developing a cultural landscape in which his characters evolve. But his ghostly figures are also very much anchored in early English and other 1 Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher, eds. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 144. 8 Germanic literature,2 which he himself had studied and encountered throughout his career. His work of fiction oscillates constantly between pure fantasy and scholarly attempts at giving every detail of his world a sense of past, of belonging to a precise place because of a specific past. And the objective of this research is to demonstrate that ghosts serve that specific purpose in his work. The first chapter will dwell on the significance and quality of ghosts in early English literature, Scandinavian sagas and what survived of the literature of the early Middle Ages by which Tolkien may have been inspired. It will analyse the occurrences of such ghosts in the literature that survived in order to define their nature and their role or symbolism in the society that used to believe in them. I will therefore mainly examine early Germanic sources to keep my research manageable in size and scope, though Tolkien also had more modern influences. This chapter will deal with the notion of death at that time and study some of the funeral rituals of those early Germanic people (page 15); it will introduce the terrifying Norse draugar (page 27), and finally monsters, heroes, and their hoards (page 37). Each of those subjects will be developed using relevant examples from early Germanic literature. My aim is to demonstrate that ghosts, revenants and other such Otherworldly creatures and sometimes monsters were very real for the people who believed in them in early Germanic society, and also to highlight the significance of such supernatural beings in the society of that time. The second chapter will consider the occurrences of ghosts found in Tolkien’ s novels, namely The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Though the number of occurrences might seem limited, the importance of each of these supernatural encounters in Tolkien’s work is very significant. I will begin with instances of funerals and burial mounds in Middle-Earth, dwelling mainly on the example of the Barrow wights (page 44). Then I will move on to Tolkien’s version of the Wild Hunt (page 73), followed by the haunting of the Dead of Dagorlad (page 95), and finally two examples of ghosts in dream-visions (page 103). I will establish correspondences between these ghosts in Middle-Earth with similar creatures recorded in early medieval literature, and complete the examples already mentioned in my first chapter. In my opinion, Tolkien cannot have used such supernatural beings without good reason. First of all, they were part of the early Anglo-Saxon world that he knew so intimately, and, 2 “Germanic literature” will refer to either Old English, Old Norse and Old German literatures in this study. 9 secondly, they fit perfectly in the tapestry of his tale. I cannot be absolutely certain of all of his influences, but we have a relatively precise idea of what his area of expertise was (if only by the quantity of subjects he wrote about, his letters, his biography, his notes, his son Christopher’s notes in the drafts of the stories that he published and other such sources). My aim is not to find the original Norse ghost or dragon for every ghost Tolkien created in Middle-Earth, but to show the similarities between the ancient literature of our real world and his fiction’s, and to show how seriously Tolkien used his knowledge to confer to his world a sense of reality that has appealed to his readers. Catholicism played an important part in Tolkien’s life, and sometimes comes across in his work (which I will point out when it is relevant for my research). But though Tolkien’s world definitely contains Christian themes, symbols and influences, it belongs to a pre-Christian heroic world in the Dark Ages; therefore trying to impose a Christian reading of Middle-Earth would be a terrible mistake. My general conclusion will demonstrate that ghosts, just like languages and alphabets, calendars and histories, races and geography, fit perfectly into Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and help achieve a sense of Otherworldliness for his readers. In the course of my analysis, I will mainly consider published primary material like The Lord of the Rings, but I will also draw upon other sources, such as some of his draft versions of Tolkien’s works that have been published by his son, or extracts from manuscripts quoted in other studies. Tolkien started creating the world of Middle-Earth years before any of his material was published, and even wrote several versions of most of his tales over the years. This illustrates his creative writer’s mental state, namely that of an author who strove to tie up loose ends in his tales, and endeavoured to achieve the creation of a unique world that could stand on its own. It has also been my choice to work with English translations of primary Old Germanic material. I am not sufficiently versed in Old English and Old Norse, for example, to be able to analyse these texts successfully in their original version. I had to rely on the translators’ abilities, though usually compared different editions and translations of several works in the process. Various spellings being used in the names of and quotations from sagas and other ancient texts, I have adopted the simplified alternatives and suppressed the accents. 10 11 II. Ghosts and Funeral Practices in Early Germanic Literature Writing about Middle-Earth in one of his letters, Tolkien stated: I am historically minded. Middle-Earth is not an imaginary world. Its name is the modern form [of] middel-erd, an ancient name for […] the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world, in use specifically opposed to imaginary worlds (as Fairyland) or unseen worlds (as Heaven or Hell). The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary.3 However if we could put Tolkien’s world of Middle-Earth somewhere in human history, it would correspond more or less to a specific period in our “real” history, namely the “Dark Ages,” a heroic pagan world that began with the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the 5th century A.D. and lasted until kingdoms and empires started recording history again. However, the historians of that period were, for the most part, monastic scholars who were about the only people at that time who could claim the title of scholarship, although they could not avoid tainting their perspective of events with a deeply religious point of view. This signalled the end of pagan heroism and the advent of Christianity and its chivalric values. But that does not mean the two are incompatible, as is clearly demonstrated by such works as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This period of the Dark Ages, which lasted longer in some Northern European cultures than in others, is also the time in which Tolkien’s foundation works of heroic pagan literature were first created. Beowulf, Norse sagas and remnants of Germanic, Norse and Anglo-Saxon legendary epic tales were all born in that unlikely time. In my opinion, it is the infinite possibilities of pure heroic glory made possible by this transition age to which Tolkien was so intensely attracted. Modern Tolkien critics have repeatedly argued that since Tolkien had been such a devout Christian, his works could only be very Christian in their themes, symbols and values. A lot of time and energy has been spent trying to impose a Christian bent to the plot, events and characters of The Lord of the Rings, for example. 3 Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher, eds. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981, p. 239 (Notes on W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King). 12 However, although some Christian themes do fit, this study tends to show that using this filtered perspective only allows for a very narrow perception of Tolkien’s world. As pointed out in the introduction, this research will mostly dwell on pre-Christian sources to support analogies with the ghosts that haunt Tolkien’s literary world; firstly because Tolkien, like Snorri Sturluson before him, “was a Christian trying to preserve pagan material for his countrymen and for the cause of poetry;”4 secondly because Tolkien seems to have been profoundly disappointed with later medieval material which had been somehow diluted by Latin or foreign influences,5 and the influence of the Christian religion that clashed at times with the ideals and themes of a heroic age.6 Tolkien’s interests varied greatly, but reading his biography and his letters makes it clear that he was greatly impressed by Northern tales, legends and mythology which fed his insatiable love of epic, while such works as the Finnish Kalevala also awoke an early passion for languages. This vast body of pagan literature provides many examples which must have inspired Tolkien for the creation of his own Middle-Earth. It must be stressed again though that the aim of this research is not to find the “original” ghosts that inspired Tolkien in his work and point them out as such, but to demonstrate how he used ancient models to enrich his fictional world and how he adapted original early medieval beliefs and stories to Middle-Earth to help consolidate the relative “reality” of his world. The kind of ghosts and revenants Tolkien set in his Middle-Earth bear indeed strong resemblances to those haunting old Scandinavian and Germanic texts, together with the superstitions, beliefs, elements of folklore and myths present in these surviving texts. As Tom Shippey explained, Tolkien, “[like] Walter Scott or William Morris before him, [felt] the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by 4 Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-Earth. London: Allen & Unwin, 1982, p. 222. Except for works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which remained true to the old epic tradition of earlier works which Tolkien seemed to have enjoyed so much. 6 Tolkien expressed such views in his letters, for instance. See Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher, eds. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 144: “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its “faerie” is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing; it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion. […] [That] seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth […] but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world.” 5 13 generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left [… to recreate] the ancient world of heroic legend for modern readers.”7 But among these “bits and scraps” Tolkien found enough elements to add another layer of depth to his fantasy world. The examples of revenants analysed in the next chapter represent mere details in his tales, or chance encounters in the quests of his heroes, but they are nevertheless an integral part of Tolkien’s efforts at giving his world a semblance of reality. Similar effects were achieved with maps and names which “give Middle-Earth that air of solidity and extent both in space and time.”8 Ghosts in Tolkien’s works lend solidity to Middle-Earth by adding sometimes a historical perspective. This is illustrated, for instance, by the appearance of ghosts armies that had fought and died in Middle-Earth, thereby opening windows on the past of some places the heroes have to cross (see page 73); sometimes they also allow Tolkien to reflect on the nature of evil (as illustrated by the Barrow-wights in the second chapter of this study, see page 56), or to confront heroes with death and the price of heroism (as in the case of the decaying corpses in the Dead Marshes, see page 95). Moreover, they allow Tolkien to shed some light on the social order of people in Middle-Earth, when for example the ghosts of the Army of the Dead haunt the land to redeem a broken oath (see page 73). As such, ghosts are not just deus ex machina tools or mere additional encounters in his heroes’ adventurous quests. They are also in Middle-Earth because they belong there, they belong to the cultures of the peoples who believe in them, see them, and fear them, just like ghosts belonged to the cultures of our Germanic forefathers. This first chapter will therefore shed some light on the importance given to death in early Germanic societies, and on how the societies of that early pre-Christian time dealt with their departed ones. We shall see that although civilisation as the Romans glorified it had been nearly wiped off the face of Europe, the culture of old Scandinavia and Germania was anything but crude when it came to the rites devoted to the dead. The strong “flesh and blood” reality of ghosts in those societies will also be explained and stressed, because ghosts, and the dead, are the primeval monsters after whom all the Grendels and dragons of folklore and heroic tales were modelled. 7 8 Shippey, T.A. . The Road to Middle-Earth, pp. 54-5. Ibid. p. 79. 14 15 I. Death and Funerals Beowulf’s Funeral, John Howe.9 Death has always exerted great fascination and fear from the living. The burial mounds, standing stones and dolmens that dot the Northern European landscape give us archaeological evidence of early burial rites and of the incredible efforts devoted to paying respect to the dead. In the surviving literature of the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages, we also find ample reference to the rites performed at that time to help the dead pass on to the next realm of existence. Odin set in his land the laws which had formerly been upheld by the Asa folks [group of gods in Norse mythology]; thus, he bade that they burn all the dead and bear their possessions on to the firebale [pyre] with them [the body of the god Balder was burned on his ship in this manner]. He said that every man should come to Valhall with such riches as he had with him on the firebale and that each should use what he himself had buried in the earth. They should bear the ashes out on to the sea or bury them down in the earth; for a renowned man they should build a howe [mound] as a mark of remembrance, and for all men in whom there was some manliness they 9 Beowulf’s Funeral. Copyright © John Howe. In Beowulf, The Legend of a Hero Illustrated by John Howe & Retold by Nicky Raven. Templar Publishing, 2007. 16 should raise standing-stones, and this custom held good for a long time after.10 This extract of the Prose Edda is most explicit: Odin, “Lord of the Ghosts,” set down the rules for proper burials. And the people believing in Odin respected his law. What may seem surprising to our 21st-century minds is that, besides the will to pay respect to the dead, honour them and provide a mourning ritual for the people close to the deceased, all this evidence of burial rites also demonstrates how terrified the living were of risking the return of the dead as ghosts to haunt them. And though, as we shall see, burial practices may sometimes vary, barrow mounds, as prescribed in the Heimskringla still seem to be the most common way of burying the dead. The Ynglinga Saga alone, e.g., has 17 references to ritual burials of kings and leaders in such mounds.11 Before the influence of Christianity (which transformed the solid reality of “revenants” into phantoms, insubstantial spirits and dreams), the people whose stories and lives have been preserved in sagas and isolated surviving works like Beowulf, believed in “fleshy” ghosts which could hurt them and wreak havoc in their communities, slaughter their animals, rip open the roofs of their dwellings, and transform whole regions into dead wastelands, as we shall see in some examples later on. In the sagas, the first victims of these hauntings were the closest relatives or friends of the deceased. This induced a basic feeling of terror which was motivation enough to ensure that the deceased would have a proper burial and would be given every chance to achieve his/her last journey without having to pay unwelcome visits to the living. Fear of the dead was not the only reason for which the living took such great care not to offend the recently departed. There was also a strong belief in the lingering spiritual presence of the dead. This belief was at the heart of ancestor worship, yet another aspect of the beliefs present in Scandinavia and Germania in heathen times. The cult of the ancestors is related to the ancient pagan cult of the genii loci, the landvaettir,12 benevolent spirits that were thought to protect the house, the lands and all the creatures, human or animal, living on it, “beings from lower mythology […,] spirits protecting the land, […] who were quite capable of 10 Extract from the Ynlinga Saga in Monsen, Erling, ed. Heimskringla or The Lives of the Norse Kings. Sturlason, Snorre. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1990, p. 6. 11 Ibid. pp. 1-36. 12 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993, p.186. Simek also states that “there was a law that when approaching Iceland, the dragon heads on the bows of the ship were to be removed so that the landvaettir protecting the island would not be frightened away.” Ibid. 17 harming the farmers if they were angered in any way.”13 When the belief in the landvaettir somehow meshed with the cult of the ancestors, it became important to show respect to the deceased so the newly appointed ancestor and freshly deceased would keep a watchful and protective eye on their kin and lands from the Otherworld. This required a proper burial, but also a proper, decent grave.14 The concept of a decent grave plays a very large role in the equation. Criminals, for example, were not given proper funeral rites. After being executed, their bodies were thrown away by the Romans on the Esquiline Field, where their remains then fell prey to wild animals and witches looking for ingredients for their charms and potions;15 mutilated and given to beasts and crows16 in early Scandinavia, or thrown into the swamps by Germanic tribes, as attested by archaeological evidence and the accounts of authors such as Tacitus,17 which must have been a strong deterrent for the living if they believed in ghosts and some sort of afterlife.18 Both the Romans and the Norse shared the view that the rights of the dead should be respected in funeral and mourning rites if their stations or actions made them deserve it. Abnormal or premature deaths bred the “ill-dead,” and therefore ghosts if the proper “exorcism” rites were not duly observed. Lecouteux notes for example that accidental deaths were a curse for the living and sometimes showed evidence of the gods’ wrath with the deceased.19 If the living could not accomplish it, then it was the deceased’s prerogative to do everything s/he could to “set his/her death right.” Other factors, such as the nature of people when alive, were also material in determining their fate after death as in the example of Glam, who was by no means a very nice person 13 See for more information Lecouteux, Claude. Démons et Génies du terroir au Moyen Âge. Paris: Editions Imago, 1995. 14 See also the example of Hrapp in Laxdaela Saga, who insists on being buried under the threshold of his home so that he can keep a better eye over his house. See Proctor, Robert, tr. Laxdaela Saga. Icelandic Saga Database. February 28, 2009.< http://www.sagadb.org/laxdaela_saga.en2>, chapter 17. 15 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Âge. Paris: Editions Imago, 1986, p. 21. 16 Boyer, Régis, tr. Sagas Islandaises. Paris : Gallimard, « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », 1987, p.178. 17 « Traitors and deserters they hang upon trees. Cowards, and sluggards, and unnatural prostitutes they smother in mud and bogs under a heap of hurdles. » [Italics mine] in Gordon, Thomas, tr. The Agricola and Germania by Tacitus. Internet Medieval Sourcebook. September 1998.<http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/tacitusgermanygord.html> 18 Looting a burial mound was one of the crimes that were considered serious enough to call for the death of the felon who would not get a proper funeral nor a proper grave, refusing him thereby any rest in the afterlife. See Boyer, Sagas Islandaises , p. 212. 19 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Âge. p. 21. 18 while alive and became even worse as a revenant.20 There are therefore several layers of beliefs about death and ghosts, which are sometimes contradictory. This is due in part to the fact that some works belong to different time periods. Some sagas, for example, go back to a very ancient past and were preserved by oral tradition before being recorded to paper. One example for such contradictions is that the fear of ghosts and becoming one served to hold criminals in check, but if a criminal was put to death and not given the proper rites, he was believed to come back and haunt the living, which would not have been such a pleasant perspective for the living, considering that ghosts were always believed to come back for a reason, and revenge being one of them. A further contradiction might be that there was actually a place in the Otherworld for criminals and outlaws, a part of Niflhel “where, far away from the sun, there is a hall with its gate facing north and from whose roof poison drops and in which snakes curl.”21 This might be a later Christian addition (Simek suggests that the details “remind us … of Christian visions of the Other World”22) to find even criminals a place to go after death and to help stamp out the pagan belief in ghosts. But regardless of the contradictions which may sometimes arise, all those beliefs that permeate sagas and other Germanic, Anglo-Saxon or Norse literature were taken extremely seriously by the people living in that troubled past. And therefore so were funerals. The word “funeral” itself indicates that the procedure is meant to “guide the soul towards its eternal dwelling.” 23 The first step for the deceased to reach its next abode is to set forth from the house where s/he lived and find sanctuary in the grave. An interesting account from the Icelandic sagas gives us some details about the proper rites employed to prepare the body for its last voyage. Thorolf Halt-Foot passed away during the night, and his son Arnkell arrived at his father’s house to take care of him: Now Arnkel went into the fire-hall, and so up along it behind the seat at Thorolf's back, and bade all beware of facing him before lyke-help [the ritual of closing the eyes, the mouth and the nostrils of the deceased24] was given to him. Then Arnkel took Thorolf by the shoulders, and must needs 20 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). Translated by G. H. Hight (London, 1914). Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #9. June 1995. <http://omacl.org/ Grettir> 21 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p.228. 22 Ibid. 23 My translation. Mozzani, Eloïse. Le Livre des superstitions, mythes, croyances et légendes. Paris : Robert Laffont, 1995, p. 1156. 24 See translation in Boyer, Régis, tr. Sagas Islandaises, p. 263. 19 put forth all his strength before he brought him under. After that he swept a cloth about Thorolf's head, and then did to him according to custom. Then he let break down the wall behind him, and brought him out thereby, (1) and then were oxen yoked to a sledge, and thereon was Thorolf laid out, and they drew him up into Thorswater-dale, and it was not without hard toil that he came to the stead whereas he should lie. There they laid Thorolf in howe strongly; and then Arnkel rode to Hvamm and took to himself all the goods that were heaped up there, and which his father had owned. Arnkel was there three nights, and nought happed to tell of the while, and thereafter he rode home.25 The purpose of closing every facial orifice is to prevent the “soul”, the spirit of the deceased, from escaping, but also to cover the face of the deceased. Lecouteux quotes one example in which it is recommended to cover the face of a criminal to be executed (which incidentally must be the origin of the custom to cover someone’s eyes before s/he is executed, and attests to the belief in the “evil eye”26), one more way to protect the living from the dead so that the latter could not cast a curse on the executioner(s), or, in the case of Thorolf, on the living taking care of his body. The most striking element though is Arnkell ordering the wall of the house to be demolished to take the body outside, probably so that the deceased does not remember how to get back into the house should s/he decide to return. But that doesn’t seem to be sufficient yet. The deceased is then buried and his grave is covered with a pile of rocks, to keep him in his tomb and to prevent his return as a ghost. One could wonder at this point whether the practice of burying people under a burial mound is not simply another precaution against the return of the dead. “Mound” has an uncertain origin according to the Oxford Etymological Dictionary, but a speculative origin could be derived from Old English mund, meaning “protector, guardian” found in the OE world mundbeorgas, i.e. “protecting hills” and mound meaning “hedge, fence, and boundary,” but also fortification and later “tumulus” 25 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggja Saga). Translated by William Morris & Eirikr Magnusson (Bernard Quaritch, London, 1892). Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #33. January 1998. <http://omacl.org/EreDwellers/chapter33.html> 26 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Âge., pp. 28-9. See also in Grettir’s Saga the curse laid by the draugr Glam on Grettir when the latter looks into the monster’s eyes: Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/ Grettir/gr32-48.html> Part XXXV. The Fight with Glam’s Ghost. 20 (attested in 1635)27. This opens many possibilities for interpretation: the idea of guardianship could reflect the role of the deceased as a benevolent ancestor on the land around his grave. Or is guardianship and protection meant for the hoard placed in the grave? The idea of hedge, fence and boundary could also offer protection against the unwanted return of the deceased, or to keep the living from crossing the threshold to the Otherworld. The example of Thorolf proves that the people who took care of his body believed in (and bewared of) some danger inherent in the deceased at the time when s/he was about to enter a new realm of existence, the danger of being exposed to the dead person’s spirit, if not yet soul. Simek argues that it is “extremely unlikely … that the North Germanic peoples had a dualistic belief, i.e. a distinct division between the decomposing body of the dead person and the further existence of his soul. The extant sources suggest that the concept was rather of the living corpse.”28 But the idea that death releases the soul from the material body predates the coming of Christianity and somehow found its way into pagan funeral rites and beliefs as our example seems to illustrate.29 The story of Thorolf’s death illustrates the burial customs used for the common people in Iceland during the heroic age. Other rites were reserved for Kings and heroes. Archaeology has revealed fascinating discoveries on the burial customs of Anglo-Saxon England when the great mounds of Sutton Hoo, e.g., were excavated.30 In the Anglo-Saxon or Norse world, a dead leader, chieftain, king or hero was placed on his ship; his ship was pushed out to sea and left to drift. Or the leader was laid on the ship which had been transported on land and then set afire, and the remaining ashes were placed in a burial mound sometimes erected on the emplacement of the pyre itself. The symbolism of granting passage to the Otherworld on a ship and through the ceremonial burning of the body is extremely clear. Maybe the customs of letting the funeral ship drift away, as described in the next extract, faced many practical problems (the most serious and obvious one being the weather conditions that might not 27 Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2000. Online Edition. Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 57. 29 Christianity invented the Purgatory to transform pagan ghosts into Christian ones, and replaced ancestor worship with the worship of saints. Even so, ghosts and saints share a similar social significance and function. They both help society set moral examples and serve as guiding principles for the living. However, saints did not find their way into Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Tolkien did create an extensive mythology with gods and angels, the Valar and the Maiar, which are presented at length in The Silmarillion, but this pantheon owes more to Northern and Germanic mythology than it does to Christianity. See Le Goff, Jacques. La naissance du purgatoire. Folio Histoire. Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1981. 30 For more details on the archaeological findings from Anglo-Saxon graves and burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, see http://www.suttonhoo.org/archeology.asp. 28 21 always have allowed the ship to leave the shores, or, even worse, the winds and the currents brought it back, an ill omen for the deceased’s passage to Valhalla) so that a more expedient and reliable way of transport to the Otherworld was found in cremating the dead and with him his ship and hoard, just like in the burial of Beowulf described further on. The wind then conveniently carried the ashes to the heavens and the Otherworld.31 The following extract from Beowulf describes the burial of Shield Sheafson, a Danish warriorking: His warrior band […] stretched their beloved lord in his boat, laid out by the mast, amidships, the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures were piled upon him, and precious gear. I never heard before of a ship so well furbished with battle-tackle, bladed weapons and coats of mail. The massed treasure was loaded on top of him: it would travel far on out into the ocean’s sway. They decked his body no less bountifully with offerings […]. And they set a gold standard up high above his head and let him drift to wind and tide, bewailing him and mourning their loss.32 Shield is laid out for a last voyage on his own ship, and with him a pile of armour and treasure appropriate to his rank is placed on the ship. This is important not only because it shows the respect of his people for their fallen leader, but also because the latter do not simply dispatch him to the Otherworld like a commoner, but as the king that he was, and maybe even to 31 The belief that cremation ensured the dead a safe transport to the Otherworld is further stressed by the example of Brynhild in The Poetic Edda. The fragments of Helreith Brynhildar Brynhild's Hell-Ride tell how Brynhild rides to hell on the wagon in which she was laid and burned at her death. See Bellows, Henry A., tr. The Poetic Edda. Internet Sacred Text Archive. February 26, 2009. <http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe29.htm> 32 Heaney Seamus, tr., Beowulf. London: Faber & Faber, 1999, p. 4. 22 elevate him to the level of a god by imitating the the Prose Edda account of Balder’s funeral (the son of Odin): The Aesir took Balder’s body and carried it to the sea. Balder’s ship was called Ringhorn and it was the greatest of all ships. The gods wanted to launch it and use it for Balder’s funeral pyre […]. Balder’s body was carried out on to the ship, and when his wife, Nanna Nep’s daughter, saw this, her heart burst from sorrow and she died. She too was carried on to the funeral pyre, which was then set on fire. Next Thor stood up and blessed the pyre with Mjollnir [Thor’s hammer]. A dwarf named Lit ran in front of his feet. Thor kicked the dwarf with his foot; it landed in the fire and burned to death. Odin laid the gold ring Draupnir on the pyre. […] Balder’s horse, with all its riding gear, was led onto the pyre.33 Just like Shield, Balder was laid onto his own ship, with treasures, and even his horse (incidentally, skeletons of horses were also found inside the mounds at Sutton Hoo in England). But his wife who dies at the sight of her dead husband was also placed next to him, and an unfortunate dwarf was kicked into the pyre and burned with them as well. This strange detail of the dwarf’s becoming part of the pyre might be linked to the actual human sacrifice that took place during important funerals, the victims being slaves burned with their master on the funeral pyre in Viking tradition. It is worth mentioning here Ibn Fadlān’s account of the funeral of a Rūsiyyah leader,34 during which a slave girl and livestock were sacrificed ritually then burned on the leader’s ship to ease the deceased’s access to the Otherworld. A mound was then built over the ashes of the pyre. There has been a hot debate for decades over the identity of the Rūsiyyah as either the founders of modern day Russia or actual Viking settlers and merchants who had settled down east after exploring the lands upriver on their ships. However, today scholars acknowledge that the Rūsiyyah were true members of the Germanic world. The resemblance of their customs and their description by Ibn Fadlān, ambassador for 33 Byock, Jesse L., tr. The Prose Edda. Sturluson, Snorri. London: Penguin, 2005, p. 67. 34 Montgomery, James E. “Ibn Fadlān and the Rūsiyyah”. Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. III, 2000. Edited by Joseph N. Bell. University of Bergen. October 19, 2007. <http://www.uib.no/jais/v003ht/03-001025Montgom1.htm> 23 the Calife of Baghdâd to the king of the Volga Bulghārs in the early 10th century leaves in fact little doubt about their Germanic origins. Boyer states about the Rūsiyyah: “Il s’agit d’une catégorie limitée des Germains, ceux que les Arabes appelaient les « Rus » (d’où le nom de Russie actuelle, c’est-à-dire les Vikings suédois). […] [Les] « Rus » peuvent, si l’on veut, ne pas représenter tous les Germains. […][Ces] coutumes se trouvent vérifiées, non dans leur ensemble il est vrai, mais point par point tout de même par les textes des Eddas comme par les découvertes archéologiques. “35 The similarity of the funerals of Balder and Shield Sheafson clearly divulges an attempt to raise Shield Sheafson to the divine by bestowing on him the same funeral respect as a god. Another similar ceremony is described in the Gesta Danorum: Gelder, the King of Saxony, who met his end in the same war, was set by [his opponent] upon the corpses of his oarsmen, and then laid on a pyre built of vessels, and magnificently honoured in his funeral by Hother, who not only put his ashes in a noble barrow, treating them as the remains of a king, but also graced them with most reverent obsequies.36 This perfect ritual is closely mirrored by Beowulf’s funeral, except for the burning of the ships described in the preceding examples. For his funeral, Beowulf himself “[ordered] the building of a barrow that would crown the site of his pyre, serve as his memorial, in a commanding position.”37 Wiglaf, a devoted warrior who stayed behind to help Beowulf in his last battle against the dragon when everybody else had fled, reported this as being Beowulf’s last wishes. The type of funeral in which the deceased is laid out on a ship left to drift away would leave little possibility of a memorial such as Beowulf ordered to be built: The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf, stacked and decked it until it stood foursquare, 35 Boyer, Régis & Lot-Falck Eveline, Les religions de l'Europe du Nord. Eddas, sagas, hymnes chamaniques. Paris: Fayard/Denoël, 1974, pp. 49-53. 36 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Danish History by Saxo Grammaticus. Translated by Oliver Elton (Norroena Society, New York, 1905). Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #28b. April 1997. <http://omacl.org/DanishHistory> 37 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p. 97. 24 hung with helmets, heavy war-shields and shining armour, just as he had ordered. Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it, mourning a lord far-famed and beloved. On a height they kindled the hugest of all funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke billowed darkly up, the blaze roared and drowned out their weeping, wind died down and flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house, burning it to the core. […] Heaven swallowed the smoke. Then the Geat people began to construct a mound on a headland, high and imposing, a marker that sailors could see from afar, and in ten days they had done the work. It was their hero’s memorial; what remained from the fire they housed inside it, behind a wall as worthy of him as their workmanship could make it. And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels and a trove of such things as trespassing men had once dared to drag from the hoard. They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure, gold under gravel, gone to earth, as useless to men now as it ever was. Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb, chieftains’ sons, champions in battle, all of them distraught, chanting in dirges, mourning his loss as a man and a king. They extolled his heroic nature and exploits and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear and cherish his memory when that moment comes when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.38 [italics mine] 38 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, pp. 98-9. 25 It is interesting to see that the Beowulf poet actually insists on the fact that the smoke from the pyre is swallowed by heaven, proving the point of the expediency of the deceased’s voyage to the Otherworld.39 It is also important that Beowulf is buried in his great mound with the dragon’s hoard. The concept of treasure and guardian of the hoard will be examined later in this analysis. I quoted the full extract from Beowulf’s funeral also to point out the striking similarity with Tolkien’s depiction of King Théoden of Rohan’s funeral in The Lord of the Rings (see page 52 of this analysis), for which this scene was obviously the model.40 These examples demonstrate the importance of the concept of the dead journeying by ship into another world. It is most relevant in this research because it may have inspired Tolkien for his portrayal of a hero’s funeral, as we shall see further on in this study (see page 106). Now after the funerals we shall move on to what happens to some of the deceased once they were laid to rest in their graves, and discover the nature of Scandinavian draugar. 39 The same idea is expressed by the Rūsiyyah in Ibn Fadlān’s account: “One of the Rūsiyyah stood beside me and I heard him speaking to my interpreter. I quizzed him about what he had said, and he replied, “He said, ‘You Arabs are a foolish lot!’” So I said, “Why is that?” and he replied, “Because you purposely take those who are dearest to you and whom you hold in highest esteem and throw them under the earth, where they are eaten by the earth, by vermin and by worms, whereas we burn them in the fire there and then, so that they enter Paradise immediately.” Montgomery, James E. “Ibn Fadlān and the Rūsiyyah”. <http://www.uib.no/jais/v003ht/03-001025Montgom1.htm> 40 Although this is not the aim of this study, the strong similarity between the scene of King Théoden’s funeral, except for the cremation, and the burial scene of Beowulf in his great mound must be stressed. Tolkien apparently couldn’t resist borrowing the detail of the twelve warriors riding around the grave to portray the customs of his Rohirrim for whom the horse plays such a paramount role : « Then the Riders of the King’s House upon white horses rode round about the barrow and sang together a song of Théoden Thengel’s son that Gléowine his minstrel made, and he made no other song after. (…).” see Tolkien, J.R.R. . The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King. London: Grafton/Harper Collins Publishers, 1991, pp. 141-2. 26 27 II . Norse Draugar41 and Draugadróttin, their master. To understand the nature of the creatures haunting sagas and old Germanic legends, we must first dwell on the nature of the draugar, after whom the most troublesome Norse revenants were modelled. The draugar, who are living corpses, or walking dead, are typical of saga literature, and illustrate a belief that is entirely alien to Christian thought. They might have been given a proper funeral and a decent grave, and in some cases where Christianity had made advances into pagan territory, they may even have even been buried in church. But that still did not prevent them from coming back to haunt the living in the sagas, which seems to attest the power of pagan belief over Christianity in remote Scandinavian (mainly Icelandic in our sources) communities in or around the 13th century when some of the sagas were recorded. Incidentally, this also sheds light on the objectivity of the writers who recorded those sagas and did not modify them to conform to Church doctrine by trying to adapt the nature of the draugar in their writing and make them less tangible. Odin, the most powerful god of the Northern mythology, is also known as Draugadróttin (“the Lord of the [living] dead”, or “Lord of the ghosts”), Valfödr (the “father of slain (warriors)”), and Hlefödr (the “Mound Lord”).42 All these and more attest to the power of Odin over the dead. Naturally, necromancy is also one of his main powers.43 The dead serve him. Therefore all the tales of draugar, these terrifying walking dead physically present in sagas, are ultimately connected to Odin. A tentative hypothesis could be that since some deaths, or rather some hauntings, revealed the god’s wrath with the deceased by denying him/her access to the Otherworld, we could read Odin’s role in the sheer existence of the draugar. Can we assume that the dead are being punished when in fact it is the living who are paying a huge tribute for Odin’s wrath by having to put up with violence from the walking dead every night? Are the draugar accomplishing Odin’s will? If so it would seem the living have incurred the wrath of the god, not the dead who become the instruments of his anger. Another important point to make about Odin is that he was also a necromancer and could contact the dead or bring them back to life. In this case the dead could also come back as spirits and not only as the material, fleshy creatures that will be examined in the following pages, and their hauntings 41 I will use draugar throughout this study as the plural form in Old Icelandic of the noun draugr, though in modern literature draugr has often been simplified into draug. 42 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Âge, p.81, note 35. And De Vries, Jan. Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leiden: Brill, 1958, p. 234. 43 See Lecouteux and Simek for examples of necromancy. 28 could also take place in dreams or visions, which will also find their way into Middle Earth (see “Ghosts in Dreams,” page 103). Let us analyse some examples found in the sagas, and see what motivates the dead to turn into undead creatures attacking anything alive that dares approach their graves. Simek defines a draugr as a “dead person [who] is alive and lives in the grave with full physical qualities. He is directly in touch with the world of the living; he prophesies what will happen in the future, defends his burial mound against grave robbers and terrorises his surroundings. […A draugr] became a threat to both men and animals especially at midwinter. The ultimate death of the draugr was usually achieved by cutting off his head, placing it on the draugr’s buttocks and then burning him. The ash was then buried away from human habitation.”44 First of all, let us have another look at the story of Thorolf Halt-Foot and the Eyrbyggja Saga. After being buried properly by his kin, it soon became clear that something was not quite right. People began to be afraid of being outdoors at night, and they soon discovered that “Thorolf lay not quiet, and men might never be in peace abroad after sunset.”45 The burial itself should have raised the suspicion of the men who took the body to its grave, because “it was not without hard toil that he came to the stead whereas he should lie.”46 A sure sign for the transformation of the dead into the walking undead in the sagas was the sudden and unnatural weight of the dead body which had to be drawn by ox to its grave. We find a similar description for the body of Glam the shepherd in Grettir’s Saga: He was dead; his body was as black as Hel and swollen to the size of an ox. They were overcome with horror and their hearts shuddered within them. Nevertheless they tried to carry him to the church, but could not get him any further than the edge of a gully a short way off. So they left him there and went home to report to the bondi what had happened.47 [italics mine] 44 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, pp. 57-8; 65. Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Story of the <http://omacl.org/EreDwellers/chapter34.html> 46 Ibid. <http://omacl.org/EreDwellers/chapter33.html> 45 Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggja Saga). 47 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/Grettir/gr3248.html> Part XXXII. The Spook at Thorhallsstad. Glam the Shepherd Killed by a Fiend. His Ghost Walks. 29 The unnatural weight of the dead, here associated with a disturbing discoloration of the corpse, is an element that systematically identifies a draugr (an element also found in Beowulf where Grendel’s head is so heavy that four men are required to “bear it under strain” to King Hrothgar’s hall48). Another shepherd killed by the undead Thorolf in the Eyrbyggja Saga was all “coal-blue”49 when he was found dead one morning. When Arnkel ordered to open his father’s grave, the body was found “all undecayed, and most evil to look on.”50 Shepherds seem predestined for ill luck, or maybe it was simply a danger inherent to their job, being alone and outdoors at night, for another one of them in the Eyrbyggja Saga dies after exhibiting strange behaviour and keeping to himself. Even after being buried at the church, he was seen walking again, and then attacked Thorir Wooden-leg, who soon took to bed, “grown coal-blue all over,” and died. Then Thorir was also seen haunting the area with the shepherd. Here the strange “coal-blue” discoloration not only signals that something unnatural is going on, but is also a sign of disease, as is the formation of a new “band” of walking corpses.51 Incidentally, this was an early interpretation or explanation for the outbreak of a plague. Thorolf’s depredations in the countryside were numerous: he killed the cattle, started “riding the houses,” stepping on their roofs at night and banging on them as if seeking to enter the dwellings, maybe as a consequence of not being able to find the door (cf. the rituals performed at Thorolf’s death-bed to keep him from returning to his home after death), then he slayed some of the people in the dale as well, victims who rose in turn after death and became members of his company of draugar.52 Another indication for the physical reality or presence of the walking undead is sometimes found in their appearance or their needs. When Thorod’s party of fishermen who had been lost at sea returned and entered their home at Frodiswater, they were dripping wet, started “wringing their raiment” and sat next to the fire to relieve the cold and the wet, apparently having the same needs as the living.53 48 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p. 53. Cutting Grendel’s head also reminds us of other cases where this practice was used to make sure draugar stop bothering the living. 49 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggja Saga). <http://omacl.org/EreDwellers/chapter34.html> 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. <http://omacl.org/EreDwellers/chapter53.html> 52 This is an early version of the Wild Hunt, where the first walking corpse builds himself a company of followers by taking them into death. It may also be another early explanation for diseases and epidemics. See Lecouteux, Fantômes et Revenants au Moyen Age, p. 100-11). See also the tale of Thorir Wooden-leg mentioned above. 53 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Story of the Ere-Dwellers (Eyrbyggja Saga). <http://omacl.org/EreDwellers/chapter33.html> 30 We have mentioned that the nature of the person when alive could also influence his/her fate after death. We have two specific examples in sagas, the story of Glam in Grettir’s Saga, and that of Hrapp in Laxdaela Saga.54 Glam description is very unequivocal: He [was] a big strong man, but not to everybody's mind. […] He was a big man with an extraordinary expression of countenance, large grey eyes and wolfgrey hair. […]He had a loud hoarse voice. […] There was a church in the place, but Glam never went to it. He abstained from mass, had no religion, and was stubborn and surly. Every one hated him.55 Glam did not seem to be very popular in his community, not the least because he did not attend church. This is one of the rare occurrences of Christian thought in the sagas. Moreover the comment could also indicate that Glam was hated because he was not a Christian, and therefore is to be blamed for what happened to him (it might have been disquieting for other people that he should not be a devout Christian, as if that showed that there was something wrong with him). But his description also contains very precise heathen elements: his grey eyes and wolf grey hair associate him unequivocally with the supernatural, the colour grey being the colour most often associated with Odin and anything supernatural.56 So Glam seemed to be marked for trouble even when still alive. Hrapp does not have a good reputation either. [He] was to most men nowise friendly, and was meddlesome towards his neighbours: he let them know at times that his neighbourhood might be a heavy one for them if they held any other for a better man than he.57 54 It is worth wondering why there should be so many draugar in the Icelandic sagas compared to the body of Scandinavian sagas and tales as a whole. One obvious reason could be that those beliefs survived longer in remote Icelandic communities than in continental Scandinavia, and tales of draugar were less expurgated by Christian influences and zealous editors. 55 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/ Grettir/gr3248.html> Part XXXII. The Spook at Thorhallsstad. Glam the Shephed Killed by a Fiend. His Ghost Walks. 56 See footnote 224 on page 87 about Tolkien’s Odinic wanderer, Gandalf the Grey. 57 Proctor, Robert, tr. Laxdaela Saga. <http://www.sagadb.org/laxdaela_saga.en2>, chapter 10. 31 And the older he got, the more “he grew evil in his dealings”58 with his neighbours and one day he felt he was going to die. So he asked his wife to bury him under the threshold of his house, so that he might keep an eye on his household from the grave. What seems at first very reminiscent of ancestor worship and the belief in the existence and role of the landvaettir does not bode well for Hrapp’s wife and household, because “as ill as he had been to deal with when he lived, then waxed that greatly when he was dead, because he walked much,”59 i.e. he became a draugr (the use of the verb walk refers specifically to Hrapp’s haunting as a draugr, a kenning for the walking undead). He lay waste their home, became even more of a nuisance to his neighbours, and forced his wife to flee to her brother’s. A group of men dug up Hrapp’s body and buried him again “where there was least going of herds near by or faring of men.”60 And so his hauntings lessened or at least troubled the living less. Time went by until his home and lands, which had been empty for years, were taken over by Olaf. And soon the draugr manifested himself again. Olaf had to wrestle with him after trying in vain to put Hrapp down with a spear (there is a similar wrestling scene in the tale of Glam61) and finally Olaf “fared to the place where Hrapp had been put away, and let dig there: Hrapp was even then unrotted. There Olaf findeth his spearhead.”62 The only way to get rid of Hrapp (whose dead body exhibits the clear undecaying signs of a draugr), and indeed the only way to get rid of a draugr in other tales as well, is for Olaf to “[let] build a bale: Hrapp is burned on the bale, and his ashes are flitted out to sea. Henceforth cometh hurt to no man from the hauntings of Hrapp.”63 The detail of Olaf’s spearhead found in Hrapp’s grave is once more evidence of the stark physical reality of the draugar’s hauntings in Scandinavian belief, just like the aforementioned party of drowned sailors who appeared drenched and cold and hungry for food and warmth in Fortiswater. In Grettir’s Saga, extreme measures were also taken to get rid of the draugr of Glam. Glam laid waste to the entire district, riding the roofs of houses at night, and killing yet another shepherd, Thorgaut. And Glam terrified the entire region, attacking the living and even animals: “No one could venture up the valley with a horse or a dog, for it was killed at 58 Ibid, chapter 17. Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga).< http://omacl.org/Grettir/gr3248.html> Part XXXV. The Fight with Glam’s Ghost. 62 Proctor, Robert, tr. Laxdaela Saga, chapter 24. <http://www.sagadb.org/laxdaela_saga.en2> 63 Ibid. 59 32 once.”64 Typically, the hauntings of the draugr seem to lessen in spring when there is more light during the day, only to worsen again in autumn. Draugar are indeed “a threat to both men and animals especially in midwinter,”65 when the weather is most hostile to the living, and the hours of darkness are longer. Night and bad weather become additional attributes of the draugar, and one then wonders whether the draugar themselves do not have the power to create darkness and control the weather. When the hero Grettir fought Glam, “the moon was shining very brightly outside, with light clouds passing over it and hiding it now and again. At the moment when Glam fell, the moon shone forth, and Glam turned his eyes up towards it.”66 So it would seem that bad weather or clouds lent draugar some supernatural strength, apparently the full light of the moon somehow allowed Grettir to slay the monster: He drew his short sword, cut off Glam's head and laid it between his thighs. Then the bondi came out, having put on his clothes while Glam was speaking, but he did not venture to come near until he was dead.67 The only way to effectively “kill” a draugr such as Glam is to decapitate him, and the head must then be placed between his thighs where he cannot reach for it. Then, to complete the process, just like in the tale of Hrapp, “they set to work and burned Glam to cold cinders, bound the ashes in a skin and buried them in a place far away from the haunts of man or beast.”68 Some draugar never or rarely leave their grave, but they are very much “alive” inside their mounds and defend their lairs and sometimes their treasures ferociously. There is one such episode in Grettir’s Saga when Grettir undertakes to dig up the howe of Kar the Old, whose walking ghost has scared away most inhabitants on an island. Grettir appeared early the next morning, and the bondi, who had got all the tools for digging ready, went with Grettir to the howe. Grettir broke 64 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/ Grettir/gr3248.html> Part XXXIII. Doings of Glam’s Ghost. Awful Condition of Vatnsdal. 65 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 65. 66 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/ Grettir/gr3248.html> Part XXXV. The Fight with Glam’s Ghost. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 33 open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent. He tore away the woodwork; Audun implored him not to go down, but Grettir bade him attend to the rope, saying that he meant to find out what it was that dwelt there. Then he descended into the howe. It was very dark and the odour was not pleasant. He began to explore how it was arranged, and found the bones of a horse. Then he knocked against a sort of throne in which he was aware of a man seated. There was much treasure of gold and silver collected together, and a casket under his feet, full of silver. Grettir took all the treasure and went back towards the rope, but on his way he felt himself seized by a strong hand. He left the treasure to close with his aggressor and the two engaged in a merciless struggle. Everything about them was smashed. The howedweller made a ferocious onslaught. Grettir for some time gave way, but found that no holding back was possible. They did not spare each other. Soon they came to the place where the horse's bones were lying, and here they struggled for long, each in turn being brought to his knees. At last it ended in the howedweller falling backwards with a horrible crash, whereupon Audun above bolted from the rope, thinking that Grettir was killed. Grettir then drew his sword Jokulsnaut, cut off the head of the howedweller and laid it between his thighs. Then he went with the treasure to the rope, but finding Audun gone, he had to swarm up the rope with his hands. First he tied the treasure to the lower end of the rope, so that he could haul it up after him. He was very stiff from his struggle with Kar, but he turned his steps towards Thorfinn's house, carrying the treasure along with him.69 This story also provides some details as to what might be found in a mound, besides the draugr laying in ambush. In addition to the treasure and the dead, there were also the bones of a horse, probably owned by the deceased, and echoing again the funeral of Shield Sheafson in Beowulf, and of the god Balder, whose horses were also buried or burned with their masters.70 Again, decapitation seems to be the final and only efficient solution to get rid of a draugr. But 69 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/ Grettir/ gr118.html> Part XVIII. Adventure in the Howe of Kar the Old. 70 Horse funerals are also mentioned in The Lord of the Rings. See pages 51-2 of this study. 34 there is a paradox in this tale, since Grettir’s endeavours “to find out what it was that dwelt [in Kar’s mound]”71 went against Scandinavian law since this could be seen as grave robbing, unless of course the status of a hero fearless enough to battle a draugr in his lair made this action acceptable in the eyes of Icelandic society. After satisfying his curiosity and getting rid of the draugr, Grettir did not think twice about carrying away what treasures he found there. Another interesting example illustrating the nature of draugar is the tale of the foster brothers Asmund and Aswid in Gesta Danorum.72 The two men made an unusual vow “that whichever of them lived longest should be buried with him who died.”73 Then, “Aswid died of an illness, and was consigned with his horse and dog to a cavern in the earth. And Asmund, because of his oath of friendship, had the courage to be buried with him, food being put in for him to eat.”74 This shows again that a dead leader, in this case the son of a king, was buried with his horse and even his dog. What is highly unusual is that someone should be buried alive with him, and not sacrificed like a slave for example. What happened next is that an army that was invading the country came by the burial mound of Aswid shortly after he had been buried there. Driven by greed, which again seems to overcome their fear of the dead, they opened the barrow and were astonished to find Asmund in it: “…when they saw the unknown figure of the man they had taken out, they were scared by his extraordinary look, and, thinking that the dead had come to life, flung down the rope and fled all ways. For Asmund looked ghastly and seemed to be covered as with the corruption of the charnel. He tried to recall the fugitives, and began to clamour that they were wrongfully afraid of a living man. And when Erik [leader of the army] saw him, he marvelled most at the aspect of his bloody face: the blood flowing forth and spurting over it. For Aswid had come to life in the nights, and in his continual struggles had wrenched off his left ear; and there was to be seen the horrid sight of a raw and unhealed scar.”75 Hope of treasures quickly faded away when the invaders thought they had seen a draugr and ran for their lives. Relieved to see that they were dealing with a living man, the warriors were 71 Ibid. Killings, Douglas B., ed. book5II.html> 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 72 The Danish History by Saxo Grammaticus, <http://omacl.org/DanishHistory/ 35 nonetheless horrified when Asmund told them that Aswid’s body had become a draugr who assaulted him every night after devouring the horse and the dog: “Not sated with devouring the horse or hound, he soon turned his swift nails upon me, tearing my cheek and taking off my ear. Hence the hideous sight of my slashed countenance, the blood-spurts in the ugly wound. Yet the bringer of horrors did it not unscathed; for soon I cut off his head with my steel, and impaled his guilty carcase with a stake.”76 Asmund finally dispatched the draugr by the method that seems to have been a standard at the time: decapitating the body. What Asmund repeated to the assembled soldiers three times while telling his tale is interesting: ‘Why stand ye aghast who see me colourless? Surely every live man fades among the dead.’”77 Although draugar are associated with grey or blue as we have seen, the paleness of Asmund who had spent some time in the grave made him look like a ghost, or walking dead, and his repeated statement serves to reinforce the horror of his ordeal, and insists on the sheer helplessness of the living in front of the walking dead, which is consistent with most tales of draugar found in sagas. In conclusion, the draugar are clearly identified by a number of elements that can be found in most examples of their hauntings: they are strange people when still alive; they may be associated with the colour grey when alive, or grey and blue when dying or dead, in that their bodies do not rot. They have some sort of supernatural power at their disposal that allows them to control the elements, and gives them extraordinary physical force. They may build up their own company of undead warriors in imitation of Odin’s Wild Hunt and harass the countryside which becomes lifeless and bleak. Being a draugr also destroys any ties with the living, family ties or friendships alike, which was illustrated by the tale of Aswid and Asmund. Their terrifying destructive nature makes them the ultimate monsters of Scandinavian sagas, as shall be seen later on in these pages. 76 77 Ibid. Ibid. 36 Besides describing another perfect draugr, the “Adventure in the Howe of Kar the Old,”, also exemplifies another aspect of ghosts in Norse and Germanic literature that Tolkien was apparently keen to exploit and adapt in his work: they were supernatural guardians of treasure. They did not walk the night like Glamr or Grendel, but they seemed to be very much alive in their mounds, keeping watch over their treasure. The draugr of Aswid was driven by ferocious hunger to assault his living brother and indeed anything alive in his tomb (just like draugar destroy life in all its manifestations in most occurrences of the walking dead examined in this chapter). However Kar reacted to the presence of the living in his mound to defend his treasure, a new category of grave dwellers and ghosts who were keen to watch and defend their hoard, as shall be seen in the next chapter. 37 III. Monsters, heroes, and the hoard. We have seen in the preceding chapter that in Beowulf or sagas, revenants become mighty opponents of flesh and blood, and sometimes “hide” their true nature behind the mask of monsters such as Grendel. But dragons, draugr and Grendel all have one thing in common: they jealously guard their lair against intruders, and protect their hoard from being stolen by mortals, as illustrated by the tale of Grettir exploring the grave of Kar the Old at the end of the previous chapter. Ghost fighting then becomes the ultimate test of valour in a Norse and Germanic society that seems to breed so many fearless heroes, while fostering a nameless terror of the walking dead. As the analysis of Tolkien’s works will show, he repeatedly used the motif of the hoard guarded in a mound by a draugr or a dragon. Sources for treasure guardians abound in sagas or in Beowulf and must have left a deep impression on Tolkien since he used the theme in both his major works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but also in other works such as his poem The Hoard. Let us examine first Beowulf, a work which offers some examples of hoards being guarded inside a mound or a monster’s lair. Mounds and lairs are strikingly similar at times, which prompts us to raise the following question: when did ghosts become monsters? Did this transformation make them more acceptable by the Church, whose influence grew over the centuries and who preferred to treat the embarrassing walking dead as mere legendary figures? To echo Grettir’s exploration of the grave of Kar and what he found there, I will start with the end of Beowulf’s story. Beowulf had destroyed the dragon, but in doing so suffered lethal wounds, and as we have seen, he asked his companions to offer him a proper burial, burn his body on a pyre, and bury his remains under a barrow so that people might remember him. Beowulf commanded the barrow to be built “on a headland on the coast. […]. It will loom on the horizon […] so that in coming times crews under sail will call it Beowulf’s Barrow, as they steer ships across the wide and shrouded waters.”78 The barrow itself was to become a landmark, and Beowulf wanted it clearly to help sailors of his land navigate safely home, which reminds us of the function of the landvaettir, or the good ancestor watching over his 78 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p. 88. 38 land after death. The interesting twist in Beowulf’s tale concerns the hoard of the dragon, however. Wiglaf, Beowulf’s companion, and the only one of his men-at-arms who did not flee before the battle with the dragon, told the band of warriors that not only had they lost their leader, but that they had gained little in the bargain. In his last breath, Beowulf had asked Wiglaf to bring some of the treasure outside so that he may see what he had earned for his people, and leave the world of men knowing that he had not left his people totally dispossessed. But unfortunately “the high-born chiefs who had buried the treasure declared it until doomsday so accursed that those who robbed it would be guilty of wrong and grimly punished for their transgression, hasped in hell-bonds in heathen shrines.”79 Thus the logical thing to do for Beowulf’s people was to sacrifice the treasure on the pyre with Beowulf’s body, and bury what was left of it with their hero in his barrow. “They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure, as useless to men now as it ever was.”80 In a sense, Beowulf became a treasure guardian in death, but contrary to Kar’s example, the treasure was buried with Beowulf so that his grave might protect his people from the curse laid on the hoard. It was buried to be forgotten, while counting on the people’s respect for (or fear of) the dweller in the barrow to prevent them from trying to dig it up. It is the mixture of “classical” hoard tales and this particular one that might have awakened Tolkien’s keen interest for hoards and the curse of the dragon’s gold that lay on them. As the analysis of Tolkien’s poem The Hoard will show, greed can have dire consequences for men intent on robbing gold from graves.81 The beginning of the tale of Beowulf’s fight against the dragon shows that the dragon was indeed a typical guardian of the hoard, a “deep barrow-dweller”82 and the “mound guard.”83 The dragon rose at night and left its barrow to wreak havoc in the world of men, incidentally attacking the seat of power of the Geats, their great Hall, just like Grendel attacked Hrothgar’s Hall before Beowulf slayed it. But apparently the dragon had been content to lie on his hoard and not bother men until someone entered the underground lair and stole a cup from his treasure. Tolkien borrowed this element for the plot of The Hobbit, when Bilbo Baggins stole a cup to prove that the treasure was there, which had cataclysmic consequences for the people living around Smaug the dragon’s den, and illustrates the effects of greed on men. 79 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p.96. Ibid. p. 99. 81 See pages 65-6 of this study. 82 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p. 89. 83 Ibid. p. 96. 80 39 Another example is found in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum. After Balder was poisoned and died, he was buried in a barrow by his army. Then: Certain men of our day, Chief among whom was Harald, since the story of the ancient burial-place still survived, made a raid on it by night in the hope of finding money, but abandoned their attempt in sudden panic. For the hill split, and from its crest a sudden and mighty torrent of loud-roaring waters seemed to burst; so that its flying mass, shooting furiously down, poured over the fields below, and enveloped whatsoever it struck upon, and at its onset the delvers were dislodged, flung down their mattocks, and fled diverse ways; thinking that if they strove any longer to carry through their enterprise they would be caught in the eddies of the water that was rushing down. Thus the guardian gods of that spot smote fear suddenly into the minds of the youths, taking them away from covetousness, and turning them to see to their safety; teaching them to neglect their greedy purpose and be careful of their lives. Now it is certain that this apparent flood was not real but phantasmal; not born in the bowels of the earth (since Nature suffereth not liquid springs to gush forth in a dry place), but produced by some magic agency. All men afterwards, to whom the story of that breaking in had come down, left this hill undisturbed. Wherefore it has never been made sure whether it really contains any wealth; for the dread of peril has daunted anyone since Harald from probing its dark foundations.84 Here the burial place of the son of Odin displays guardianship qualities. It has been noted before that the draugar may sometimes have some sort of supernatural control over the elements, and this sudden eruption of a torrent dispersing the would-be grave diggers could be the manifestation of the mound dweller protecting his treasure and final resting place. This tale, since it involves the gods, is also an explicit warning story to any prospective grave digger thinking of breaking into a burial mound, and just like the funeral of Balder described in the Heimkringsla served as a model for the funerals of Scandinavian leaders, this tale sends a warning to any would-be thieves to respect burial mounds, least they face a terrible curse and supernatural encounter. 84 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Danish History by Saxo Grammaticus, <http://omacl.org/DanishHistory/book3.html> 40 This repeated mention of burial mounds, their treasures and whatever guardian might be protecting them might have some connection to the belief in the Northern dwarfs, who were reputed to be skilled at working with jewels and gold. Simek even mentioned that “the dwarfs made most of the treasures belonging to the gods” and were “miners and custodians of various treasures.”85 Dwarfs were supposed to live under mountains and in rocks. Furthermore the close association of dwarfs with the dead86 could have escalated the belief in treasure hidden under mounds, and their being guarded by beings from the Otherworld. But the role of the dwarfs and their analogy to the dead and connection with the Otherworld would necessitate a study of its own.87 85 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p.68. They were born as “maggot-like beings in the flesh of the progenitor giant Ymir [and then] endowed with reason by the gods.” Ibid. 87 For a more thorough study of dwarfs and their role in medieval literature, see : Lecouteux, Claude. Les nains et les elfes au Moyen Âge. Paris: Editions Imago, 1997. 86 41 IV. Conclusion The point of this selection of examples of funerals and ghosts that are recorded chiefly in sagas or in texts, such as Beowulf, that have survived, was to suggest what might have inspired Tolkien to add this particular dimension of death, funerals, graves and their dwellers to his world of Middle-Earth. What I wanted to do was not to gather here every single occurrence of funeral practice, draugr haunting or mound guardian in the surviving fragments of Norse or Germanic literature, but enough to provide ample illustration to my point. After this survey of the sources, we will move on to Middle-Earth and examine the ghosts or funeral practices found in Tolkien’s work, and establish some more comparisons with relevant cases found in the same body of surviving Germanic literature. 42 43 III. Ghosts in Middle-Earth : Analysis Tolkien’s Middle-Earth offers its readers a landscape of mountains and valleys and rivers, but it also has a remarkable superstitious and haunted landscape, as we will see in this chapter. My analysis will refer to Tolkien’s use of spectres in Burial Mounds and the importance of burial rites; a very disturbing version of the Wild Hunt; tricksy lights in the marshes, and dreamlike appearances of the freshly departed. The Barrow-Wight, John Howe. 44 I. Burial Mounds and Funeral Rites […Sir Gawain] halted and held in his horse for the time, and changed oft his front the Chapel to find. Such on no side he saw, as seemed to him strange, save a mound as it might be near the marge of a green, a worn barrow on a brae by the brink of water, (…) Then he went to the barrow and about it he walked, debating in his mind what might the thing be. (…) ‘Can this be the Chapel Green, O Lord?’ said the gentle knight. ‘Here the Devil might say, I ween, his matins about midnight!’88 Tolkien’s modern English version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight89 was published in 1975, and as described in this extract, the site where Sir Gawain had to meet the challenge of the Green Knight must have impressed Tolkien. By all appearances, the Green Chapel is a barrow mound, and barrow mounds found their way quite often into his fantasy work. Every example of barrow mounds in Tolkien’s fictive world carries supernatural meaning, sometimes as a place “of mischance90,” sometimes as a symbol of fertility and benevolent ancestor protection, as I will illustrate in the following examples. Fertility of the earth is very often intricately tied to ghosts, and not only in Tolkien’s work, as we have seen in the chapter devoted to the origins of ghosts. In his fictional world Tolkien has reconstructed the link between the dead and the land where they rest. Germanic people believed, for example, that the clearest sign that their ancestors wanted to keep a benevolent eye or presence on the land they used to inhabit was that rich opulent grass grew on their burial mounds, an obvious symbol of fertility.91 Middle-Earth contains similar examples showing the link between the dead and fertility. One of the most striking of these examples found in Tolkien’s Silmarillion is the burial mound of Haudh-en-Ndengin, in the desert plains of Anfauglith, right in front of the main gates of the fortress of Morgoth, the Dark Lord. This 88 Tolkien, J.R.R., tr. and Tolkien Christopher, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo. London: Allen & Unwin, 1985, pp. 70-71. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid, p. 71. 91 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, p. 192. 45 burial mound is the last burial place of the numerous Elven and human warriors fallen in combat during the battle of Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and here is how Tolkien describes it: By the command of Morgoth the Orcs with great labour gathered all the bodies of those who had fallen in the great battle, and all their harness and weapons, and piled them in a great mound in the midst of Anfauglith; and it was like a hill that could be seen from afar. Haudh-en-Ndengin the Elves named it, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears. But grass came there and grew again long and green upon that hill, alone in all the desert that Morgoth made; and no creature of Morgoth trod thereafter upon the earth beneath which the swords of the Eldar and the Edain crumbled into rust.92 The Hill of Slain, Ted Nasmith. 93 92 Tolkien, J.R.R. . The Silmarillion. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1986, p. 237. Ted Nasmith, The Hill of Slain, published in Tolkien Calendar 2009. London : Harper Collins Publishers, 2009. 93 46 This example is very clear: not only does the mound itself stay green in the midst of the desert, but it is also avoided by all evil creatures, because it is the last resting place of thousands of warriors who fought against evil, their rusted swords still stand guard against evil. This mound is also ironically the only victory, if only symbolic, of the allied forces of Elves, Men and Dwarves against Morgoth in the war of the Silmarils. The notion of a burial mound standing guard against the enemies of the fallen warriors is also present in The Lord of the Rings. As they ride to Isengard after their victory at Helm’s Deep, the company of Gandalf, King Théoden of Rohan and Aragorn come across: (…) a mound (…) ringed with stones, and set about with many spears. [Gandalf said] ‘Here lie all the Men of the Mark that fell near this place.’ [To which Eomer replies] ‘Here let them rest! (…)And when their spears have rotted and rusted, long still may their mound stand and guard the Fords of Isen!’94 [italics mine] Note the repeated use of swords in Haudh-en-Ndengin, and the use of spears here at the Fords of Isen to insist on the idea of a vigilant watch kept by dead warriors, who will still defend the fords long after their weapons have turned to dust. The Germanic belief in the watchfulness, or lingering presence of the dead, is clearly very strong amid the Rohirrim. Warriors were buried with their swords and spears in order to remain active, to keep a role in the world of the living in their last watch duty. This function of guardianship and protection offered by the burial mound could also be connected with the symbolism of the circle shape, an impassable magic barrier in Celtic beliefs, or more generally a symbol of the passing of time and a link to the heavens and gods, but also simply a symbol of protection itself, often used to protect cities, temples or graves and prevent enemies, or evil from entering.95 A little earlier in the chronology of events in The Silmarillion, Tolkien uses another less warlike case of sentinels from beyond the grave: 94 Tolkien, J.R.R. . The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, London: Grafton/Harper Collins Publishers, 1991, p. 193. 95 Chevalier, Jean and Gheerbrant, Alain. Dictionnaire des symboles. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990, pp. 192-5. 47 (…) Haleth dwelt in Brethil until she died; and her people raised a green mound over her in the heights of the forest, Tür Haretha, the Ladybarrow, Haudh-en-Arwen in the Sindarin tongue.96 [italics mine] In that sense, Haleth’s grave becomes both a symbol of fertility (a green mound) and the last resting place of a queen who continues protecting her people and her land from her grave in the middle of the forest. The Lord of the Rings provides yet another example of funeral rites similar to those practised by Haleth’s people in Brethil. The Rohirrim, a proud warrior people whose society and culture are essentially centred around their horses, have very sacralised funeral rites for their kings. Of all the peoples Tolkien placed in Middle-Earth, the Rohirrim represent his ideal version of an early Anglo-Saxon society, and so every element he supplies about them is highly significant, especially their dead and their ghosts in the particular case of this study. The following extract describes the graves of the Kings of Rohan lining the way to the main gates of their capital city of Edoras, as if they were guarding the main approach to the city. At the foot of the walled hill the way ran under the shadow of many mounds, high and green. Upon their western sides the grass was white as with a drifted snow: small flowers sprang there like countless stars amid the turf. (…) ‘How fair are the bright eyes in the grass! Evermind they are called, simbelmynë in this land of Men, for they blossom in all the seasons of the year, and grow where dead men rest. Behold! We are come to the great barrows where the sires of Théoden sleep.’97 Just as in the previous examples, we have here a very clear illustration of a people using the graves of their warriors or leaders to shield their lands, which is exactly what Germanic people used to do. For example in The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok98a dead leader, Ivas, is buried so that his grave faces the direction from which enemies will most likely come and so prevent their victory. In The Mabinogion we have a Celtic example when Bendigeidfran asked his kinsmen to cut his head off because he had been poisoned.: 96 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion, p. 177. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 136. 98 Mentioned by Lecouteux in his Fantômes et revenants, pp. 199-200. 97 48 ‘(…) take the head (…) and carry it to the White Mount in London, and bury it with its face towards France. (…).’ And when it was buried, (…) no plague would ever come across the sea to this Island so long as the head was in that concealment.99 The Celtic practice of beheading their enemies, which is attested by archaeology and literature, was also a way for Celtic warriors to acquire their dead opponent’s power or magical properties, and to show their bravery by exhibiting as trophies the skulls of their slain enemies100 The “sires of Théoden” rest in front of the gates of Edoras, where they can both protect the city and guarantee the fertility of the soils the inhabitants cultivate for their needs. The idea of fertility is even more highlighted by the presence of simbelmynë, these small white flowers in the green grass covering the western side101 of the burial mounds of the Rohan kings. But these flowers are also described as “bright eyes in the grass,”102 an additional image to reinforce the notion of watchfulness and protection. Eternity also springs to mind with the image or illusion created by the flowers: their whiteness covers the mounds with a white mantle evoking light and a memento mori motive in their endless blooming. The description of the simbelmynë also evokes the flower “Balder’s Brow,” that is described in the Edda as “the whitest flower upon earth […], because the countenance of the god was snow-white and shining.”103 The comparison between the flowers and stars also emphasises the benevolence of the dead: in Tolkien’s cosmology, stars represent the forces of Good, not Evil. That is also why the name of the Elves, the Eldar, means “people of the stars,” and why their shields in battle, as well as the shields of human armies, are adorned with stars when they fight evil forces, so stars may guide them as they did when Elves and Men first appeared on Middle99 Jones, G. and Jones, T., tr, The Mabinogion. London: Dent and Sons, 1949, pp. 37-40. Green, Miranda Jane. Celtic Myths. London: British Museum Press, 1993, p.71. 101 I will come back to this interesting detail later on in my analysis when dealing with the episode of the Barrowdowns in The Lord of the Rings (see page 56 of this study). The West is traditionally associated with the Otherworld in Celtic mythology, but in Middle Earth it is the direction of the Promised Lands where the gods live and where the Elves sail to when they leave Middle Earth, where all the ring bearers shall sail to at the end of The Lord of the Rings to be finally relieved of their burden and allowed to heal and rest, so the West here represents more goodness and fertility than death, although sailing to the West can be seen as a very positive image for passing on to the Otherworld. 102 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 136. 103 Mackenzie, Donald A. Teutonic Myth and Legend. An Introduction to the Eddas and Sagas. London: Gresham Publications, 1912. Internet Sacred Text Archive. Added October 2003. <http://sacredtexts.com/neu/tml/ tml20.htm> 100 49 Earth. Shippey argues that they stand “for the preservation of the memory of ancient deeds and heroes in the expanse of years.”104 However, there are also occurrences of the opposite function, where the burial mounds and graves in Middle-Earth can also illustrate the absence of fertility as is the case in Scandinavian sagas, as I will argue. Sometimes they also reflect the evilness of the dead, or the tragic circumstances of a death. It is truly a place where “the Devil might say (…) his matins about midnight!”105 Túrambar and Glaurung, John Howe. 104 105 Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-Earth, p. 95. Tolkien, J.R.R., tr. . Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, p. 71. 50 In The Silmarillion, we have unnatural deaths in the story of Túrin Túrambar. The story ends with the tragic tale of the hero’s sister Nienor who commits suicide by jumping into the gorges of the river Teiglin when she discovered the terrible curse that the dragon Glaurung had put on her106: And thereafter no man looked again upon Cabed-en-Aras, nor would any beast or bird come there, nor any trees grow; and it was named Cabed Naeramarth, the Leap of Dreadful Doom.107 These lines show that suicide, which was already considered by both Scandinavian and Roman traditions as a most unnatural death108 (and a near certainty the dead would come back as ghosts, though the tale does not say whether an actual ghost appeared on the premises of Nienor and Túrin’s deaths later on), impregnates nature and every living thing. A curse seems to have been cast on the land where Nienor died. And Tolkien adds a little further: [Túrin ] came to Cabed-in-Aras, and heard the roaring of the water, and saw that all the leaves fell sere from the trees, as though winter had come.109 We cannot hope for a clearer image: the place where Nienor committed suicide has been struck by a wave of frost and death that has transformed so much that people thought they ought to rename it into Cabed Naeramarth. Nothing further is said in the text about it, but the image of an unnatural permanent winter is eloquent enough. It just seems that (contrary to what is found in The Saga of Grettir, in which a whole area is devastated by an evil spirit) nature commemorates a tragedy and the suicide of Nienor. However, in both cases, for Scandinavian people of old and for people in Middle-Earth alike, we have a clear sign of supernatural presence that mostly appears in winter as Norse beliefs would have it, and in this occurrence in The Silmarillion this supernatural presence manifests itself as winter. 106 The dragon made her forget who she was and she fell in love with Túrin, her brother, who did not know her for his sister. Upon discovering this and her death after killing the dragon, he committed suicide as well. 107 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion, p. 270. 108 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, pp. 21 and 141. According to Lecouteux, suicide in Old Rome was also seen as a way to take revenge on one’s enemies by making sure one would come back to haunt them. 109 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion, p. 272. 51 I will not dwell further on Nienor’s suicide. The classic tragic tale of Túrin Túrambar involves treachery, evil, incest, and it would deserve a study of its own. The evil personality of the deceased can also leave a mark where s/he passed away, or was buried, by denying the earth any fertility. Such burial places in Middle-Earth are also rooted in part of their Germanic heritage. A short extract from The Lord of the Rings provides additional evidence of Tolkien’s use of Norse or Germanic tales and beliefs to give substance to the world of Middle-Earth. During the cataclysmic battle of the Pelennor Fields, King Théoden of Rohan and his faithful horse Snowmane are killed by a Ring Wraith110 mounted on a monstrous winged creature. During the ensuing battle, the creature is also killed, as well as its evil rider who disappears into thin air. After the battle, the corpses of both mounts have to be disposed of. And if Théoden’s royal and noble steed whose bravery is greatly admired is buried with a stone and epitaph, the carcass of the ghastly beast is burned (as if men were eager to erase the memory of the monster, to get rid of it permanently, in much the same way as the dragon is pushed off the cliff and into the sea in Beowulf so that its “gruesome and vile”111 carcass doesn’t have to be looked at anymore, and also maybe because men fear that the dead monsters shall rise again112). We are told about the future of their graves in a few words, which is incidentally an interesting way of creating what Deborah Sabo calls “a mnemonic trigger so prevalent in the primary world (…,) the subjective intertwining of place and story that links us with our cultural memories”113 when the narrator makes an aside and looks ahead in a future where a place has become another legendary site: (…) And afterwards when [the battle] was over men returned and made a fire there and burned the carcase of the beast; but for Snowmane they dug a grave and set up a stone upon which was carved in the tongues of Gondor and the Mark [Rohan]: 110 A supreme servant of evil, formerly a king of men corrupted by his hunger for power into becoming a minion of the Dark Lord. 111 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p.95. 112 Ibid, p.98. 113 Sabo, Deborah. Archaeology and the Sense of History in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Mythlore Fall Winter 2007. < http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OON/is_1-2_26/ai_n21130450/pg_12> 52 Faithful servant yet master’s bane, Lightfool’s foal, swift Snowmane. Green and long grew the grass on Snowmane’s Howe, but ever black and bare was the ground where the beast was burned.114 [italics mine] Once again Tolkien makes it very clear: if Snowmane deserves a proper burial that will become a respected place and a symbol of fertility, this is denied to the place where the pyre that destroyed the remains of the evil creature was erected, a place that will forever stay “black and bare.” Deborah Sabo also insists on the similitude between the honours given to Théoden’s steed and the Anglo-Saxon world where horse burials were common (as attested by archaeological sites such as Sutton Hoo or descriptions of the burial of kings in sagas). But although most AngloSaxon horses were buried next to the burial places of their warrior masters, Théoden cannot be buried next to his mount, nor can Snowmane be taken back to Edoras for practical reasons. So Théoden is laid to temporary rest in the Halls of the Kings at Minas Tirith, and then taken back to Rohan when the fight against Sauron the Dark Lord is over, and there in Edoras he is finally laid to rest: (…) he was laid in a house of stone with his arms and many other fair things that he had possessed, and over him was raised a great mound, covered with green turves of grass and of white evermind. And now there were eight mounds115 on the east-side of the Barrowfield. Then the Riders of the King’s House upon white horses rode round about the barrow and sang together a song of Théoden Thengel’s son that Gléowine his minstrel made, and he made no other song after. (…) [T]he words of the song brought a light to the eyes of the folk of the Mark as they 114 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, pp. 141-2. See also Grettir’s Saga, where the body of Glam the revenant is burned and its ashes thrown into a beast skin that is buried where no man or animal goes by. See in Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/Grettir/gr32-48.html> Part XXXV. The Fight with Glam’s Ghost. 115 Eight mounds because Théoden’s mound is the eighth to be built next to the seven mounds of his forefathers. 53 heard again afar the thunder of the hooves of the North and the voice of Erol crying above the battle upon the Field of Celebrant; and the tale of the kings rolled on, and the horn of Helm was loud in the mountains, until the Darkness came and King Théoden arose and rode through the Shadow to the fire, and died in splendour, even as the Sun, returning beyond hope, gleamed upon [Minas Tirith] in the morning.116 [italics mine] In this extract Tolkien gives a detailed account of a typical royal burial in Rohan, and evokes funeral rites of great intricacy, that reflect a great culture and attest to the importance of keeping the memory of the departed intact in Rohan. Théoden’s tomb will become one more barrow lining the main road to Edoras and will in turn protect the land from its enemies. Théoden is buried with his arms, and his barrow will be covered with green grass and simbelmynë just like the others. The barrow is equipped with weapons for guardianship, and natural symbols of fertility and benevolent watchfulness. Note also the recurrent use of words symbolizing light and purity or good in this extract as opposed to darkness and evil. The account of the burial rites of King Théoden also reminds us very clearly of the description of the laying to rest of Beowulf in a great barrow after he has been slain.117 Of course we have to bear in mind that such funerals also evoke England’s Anglo-Saxon rites, though not every detail corresponds to what archaeology has supplied us with.118 But The Lord of the Rings was written in the nineteen forties, and much more archaeological evidence has been gathered since. In spite of the fact that Tolkien’s point was not to provide a scholarly description of such a ritual, it nevertheless bears a striking resemblance with recorded details of funeral practice found in mounds, too much so for it to be a mere artistic exercise. An additional example of funeral practice is the ministering to Boromir’s body, after he died trying to protect the Hobbits in an ambush set by the enemy. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, the remaining members of the Fellowship of the Ring, are faced with the crucial choice of tending to the dead, or hurrying after the Orcs and freeing the captives. Their choice is incredibly difficult at that point, because they do not know whether Frodo, the Ring-bearer, has been taken captive in the ambush or not. And though the fate of their world hangs in the balance 116 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 308. Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p.99. 118 See for more details Sabo, Deborah. Archaeology and the Sense of History in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Mythlore Fall Winter 2007. < http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OON/is_1-2_26/ai_n21130450/pg_12> 117 54 and they need to hurry, they still decide to take care of Boromir’s body before chasing down the band of Orcs, who by the way have a long start. This is definitely revealing of the importance given to ensuring the dead a proper burial in Middle-Earth. They decide to “lay him in a boat with his weapons, the weapons of his vanquished foes (…) [and] send him to the Falls of Rauros and give him to Anduin. The River of Gondor will take care at least that no evil creature dishonours his bones.”119 This river funeral echoes AngloSaxon burial and Viking ship burial traditions as attested in literature and some archaeological findings, as in Beowulf, for example, when Shield Sheafson is laid on a ship and given to the ocean.120 It is for them a logical choice because they do not have the time or the means to raise him a proper mound. But they are close to the river shore and they have a boat they will not need anymore. The different burial practices evoked in The Lord of the Rings so far actually correspond to different periods of time in our history, and we see here that Tolkien makes sure we know that the peoples of Middle-Earth not only have similar ones, but that they know of different ones so that they are able choose one that befits their dead and the circumstances of the burial. Giving the body of Boromir to the river and hence to the sea seems then a logical choice imposed by their situation and their mission. Then follows a precise account of the honour given to Boromir’s body: Now they laid Boromir in the middle of the boat that was to bear him away. The grey hood and elven-cloak they folded and placed beneath his head. They combed his long dark hair and arrayed it upon his shoulders. The golden belt of Lórien gleamed about his waist. His helm they set beside him, and across his lap they laid the cloven horn and the hilt and shards of his sword; beneath his feet they put the swords of his enemies. Then they [drew the boat] out into the water.121 This is no simple ministering to the body of a fallen comrade, but a full funeral rite. Aragorn and Legolas even go so far as to sing an elegiac poem in his memory, while the Orcs are running further away by the hour. What may first seem as an incredible waste of time and 119 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 14. Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, pp. 4-5. 121 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 16. 120 55 energy is in fact a complex duty that the three remaining companions take very seriously. They have an incredible sense of duty and respect for the departed; they cannot simply abandon his body without some sort of funeral rite. And though they do this so that his body may not be dishonoured by any “evil creature,”122 this is also a way of making sure the dead find his way to the Otherworld. As often happens in his work, Tolkien briefly opens a window upon the future and makes sure the burial of Boromir instantly becomes legendary material: The River had taken Boromir son of Denethor, and he was not seen again in Minas Tirith [the capital city of his homeland, Gondor], standing as he used to stand upon the White Tower in the morning. But in Gondor in afterdays it long was said that the elven-boat rode the falls and the foaming pool, and bore him down through Osgiliath, and past the many mouths of Anduin, out into the Great Sea at night under the stars.123 The idea of the body of Boromir being carried by the river on to the ocean very clearly evokes the Anglo-Saxon or Viking burial rites I mentioned earlier on in my analysis (and even the myth of Balder’s death and funeral on his ship pushed into the ocean in Scandinavian mythology), but also the idea of passage to the Otherworld, stressed by the light of the benevolent stars, symbols of good but also of the Valar, the Gods of Middle-Earth. The way Boromir’s body is given proper honour, as has already been said, is imposed by the little time Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas may dispose of if they want to catch up with the Orcs and free their friends. We have not the time or the tools to bury our comrade fitly, or to raise a mound over him. A cairn we might build.124 [italics mine] It seems that Tolkien has taken over the notion that the dead should be given a decent grave in his world, much as heroes in sagas should be buried to make sure first that no carrion beasts 122 Not giving a proper burial can also be seen as punishment for the fallen, as was sometimes the case in Scandinavian sagas. For example after King Ottar of Sweden is defeated in a battle, the “Danes took his body, carried it to the land, laid it upon a mound of earth, and let the wild beasts and ravens tear it to pieces.” in Killings, Douglas B., ed. Heimskringla or The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson. Translated by Samuel Laing (London, 1844, and Norroena Society, London, 1907). Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #15b. April 1996. <http://omacl.org/Heimskringla/ ynglinga.html.> Part 31. Of King Ottar. 123 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 16. 124 Ibid. 56 desecrate his body, but also, and more unconsciously, to make sure the fallen friend does not turn into a nightmarish revenant at night. All the examples I have found so far (except for my aside on Boromir’s funeral) illustrate how close fertility, guardianship and the Otherworld are linked in Tolkien’s world. The Lord of the Rings offers an additional detailed example of that link between guardianship and the Otherworld, namely the Great Barrows on the Barrow-downs and the Barrow-wights, where we find the tell-tale Germanic elements with an original malevolent twist. The Barrow-wights are “evil spirits from Angmar [evil realm in Middle-Earth] who infested the Great Barrows”125 long before the action in The Lord of the Rings takes place. In the episode of the Great Barrows in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien confronts his Hobbits with the Otherworld and ancient dangers lurking in Middle-Earth. The Hobbits, nimble smallsized humans with a taste for good life and certainly none for adventure, eventually have to flee their homeland to become the real heroes of the novel. Their quest will take them to the refuge of the Elves in Rivendell. But to reach it, they have to cross a region of uninhabited hills notoriously avoided because of the evil spirits said to lurk there in the Barrows on top of the hills; they are remnants of a distant glorious past for Men and their kingdoms gone into oblivion. The Great Barrows correspond to the image of burial mounds that Tolkien used repeatedly in his works for burial mounds: they are covered with green grass, which seems to attest to their fertility and a sense of defence duty performed by the dead. However our Hobbits soon discover that the hills on which these mounds are perched are incredibly gloomy and unsettling. No sign of life is to be found in the area, except for the occasional and upsetting bird shriek: There was no tree nor any visible water: it was a country of grass and short springy turf, silent except for the whisper of the air over the edges of the land, and high lonely cries of strange birds.126 125 Foster, Robert. The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth. From ‘The Hobbit’ to ‘The Silmarillion.’ London: Allen & Unwin, 1985, p. 35. 57 An upsetting landscape that becomes truly frightening near sunset when the warm sun is halfhidden by a curtain of thick cold mist that even affects their ponies which “[stand] crowded together with their heads down”127 Indeed the hills which are crowned with barrows and standing stones look malevolent to the Hobbits even in bright daylight: (…) on [the east] side the hills were higher and looked down upon them; and all those hills were crowned with green mounds, and on some were standing stones, pointing upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums.128 The disquieting image of teeth on green gums evokes a monster waiting to trap and gobble up its victims. In the same way as in some Scandinavian sagas, the power of supernatural beings has an influence on the area and landscape which they haunt. Although their power is always at its highest at night, their evil influence can be felt in broad daylight as well if they are powerful enough.129 Of course the Hobbits are trapped when night falls and the wights seem to control the weather to better lure the travellers away from their original route and lead them right to the “jagged teeth” or standing stones marking the entrance to stone circles which have become places of evil. The origin of the Barrow-wights remains obscure, save for references to “evil spirits.” The lands and burial mounds they have seized attest to a very unsettled past which only contributed to make the area deserted. The little we have is supplied by the rambling talk of Tom Bombadil who hosts the Hobbits in his house before they have to cross the Barrowdowns: [The Hobbits] heard of the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was 126 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Rings. London : Grafton/Harper Collins Publishers, 1991, p.187. 127 Ibid. p. 189. 128 Ibid. p. 188. 129 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/Grettir/gr3248.html> 58 victory and defeat; and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight.130 Apparently the little kingdoms of the men who once dwelled on the hills disappeared and left nothing of their glory save the graves of their kings and the ruins of their fortresses, and the gold their “greedy swords” gathered. The fact that the wights came from elsewhere to take over the graves of those kings is completely atypical of Germanic tales and sagas where the spirits of the dead are at large. Tom Shippey also wonders what these Barrow-wights can be: So (…) what is the wight itself, human ghost or alien ‘shadow’ or sediment of death attaching itself to gold like the dragon-spell of avarice in The Hobbit?131 One thing is certain: they were not the original tenants of the Great Barrows. When Tom Bombadil opens up the barrow and saves the Hobbits from a gruesome death, he seems to remember the original dead laid to rest under the mound rather fondly, and they had nothing to do whatsoever with the creatures that later made their homes inside the barrows. Tolkien himself gives us little information about them, he simply wrote that “evil spirits out of Angmar and Rhudaur entered into the deserted mounds and dwelt there.”132 Angmar was the ancient site of an evil kingdom that had disappeared at the time of the events related in The Lord of the Rings, but it is also a chain of mountains north of the Barrowdowns. The evil kingdom of Angmar was ruled by the Witch-king, a Ringwraith sent by Sauron to the North to wreak havoc among the northern kingdoms of Men, an aim that he 130 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Rings, pp. 179-80. Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-Earth, p. 84. 132 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991. Appendix A, p. 1078. 131 59 apparently achieved with perfection. The Witch-king assembled a host of Orcs, but also gathered all sorts of evil creatures under his banner. This could perhaps mean that the Barrowwights were some sort of evil spirits acting for the Dark Lord, which would however totally disagree with the Germanic tradition of ghostly mound dwellers. If the Barrow-wights were originally agents of the Witch-king of Angmar, could they have returned to some more basic state of evil by the time the Hobbits walked upon their threshold, and no longer be under the command of a higher power? That was my original assumption, until I discovered an extract of one of Tolkien’s manuscripts that shed some more light on the nature of the wights. The Hobbits had been fleeing the Ringwraiths when they stumbled upon the Barrowdowns. There was no sign of the Ringwraiths then who seemed to have lost pursuit of the Hobbits. [The Witch-king] [then visited] the Barrowdowns and [stopped] there some days. (…) This [proved] a main error, though in fact it was nearly successful, since the Barrow-wights [were] roused, and all things of evil spirit hostile to Elves and Men [were] on the watch with malice in the Old Forest and on the Barrowdowns.133 [italics mine] Here we are told without ambiguity by Tolkien that the wights were roused by the Ringwraith who used to rule from Angmar as the Witch-king, and that he purposefully toured the countryside trying to set all of his former pet creatures on the alert to intercept the Hobbits if they should come this way. In Unfinished Tales we find another important reference to the nature of their evil: The Witch-king had known something of the country long ago, in his wars with [the kingdoms of the North, and especially] Cardolan, now the Barrowdowns, whose evil wights had been sent there by himself.134 [italics mine] 133 Tolkien, J.R.R., Marquette University Manuscript MSS 4/2/36 (The Hunt for the Ring) quoted in Hammond, Wayne G. and Scull Christina. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London: Harper Collins, 2005, p. 145. Tolkien suppressed this detail in the published version, but it helps us clarify his thoughts at the time he created the Barrow wights. 134 Tolkien, J.R.R. Unfinished Tales. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1984, p. 348. 60 The wights were definitely agents of a greater evil force to begin with, and it took only a visit of the Witch-king to renew their allegiance and set them on the watch for the Hobbits and the Ring. The Witch-King transforms the guardianship function of the mound dwellers; the Barrow-wights are set to watch for the Hobbits, capture them, and possibly kill them. Although this particular aspect of the wights is resolutely unlike anything we find in Scandinavian or Germanic models, where the spirits of the dead are fiercely attached to their graves, except when they become part of the Wild Hunt, there are other elements that are decidedly related to early Norse models. As I have already mentioned, the Barrow-wights have transformed the place of their haunts into deserted, bleak places, and seem to have some control of the elements. The absence of animals also seems to indicate some malevolence at work against anything alive. The fertility of the barrows that is attested by the green grass that grew on them and the sheep eating it in the extract seems to have been negated when the wights took over the burial mounds. The green grass present on the barrows when the Hobbits arrive might be just another way to fool them into thinking the barrows are harmless. At the end of the day, when the Hobbits suddenly awake from an unintentional and risky afternoon nap taken around a standing stone, they realize a trap has been set for them: The Hobbits sprang to their feet in alarm, and ran to the western rim [of the hilltop on which they had stopped for food and rest]. They found that they were upon an island in the fog. Even as they looked out in dismay towards the setting sun, it sank before their eyes into a white sea, and a cold grey shadow sprang up in the East behind. The fog rolled up to the walls and rose above them, and as it mounted it bent over their heads until it became a roof: they were shut in a hall of mist whose central pillar was the standing stone.135 135 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Rings, p. 189. 61 The gates to the Otherworld seem to have opened to let out a sea of fog that imprisons the Hobbits. Night is coming and the rising power of the wights allows them to use the elements to attack the living, just like a Scandinavian ghost can raise a storm or make snow fall.136 Incidentally, creating a snow storm is exactly what we may speculate Saruman (a fallen mage who rallied the forces of evil in The Lord of the Rings) or Sauron himself created using dark magic to keep the Fellowship of the Ring from crossing the mountains later in the tale of The Lord of the Rings.137 Boromir, a member of the Fellowship, then says, speaking of Sauron, Dark Lord and main source of evil in Middle-Earth in the timeframe of The Lord of the Rings (a character that also evokes the evil Norse god Loki who used such supernatural or magical powers as well to achieve his ends): They say in my land that [Sauron] can govern the storms in the Mountains of Shadow that stand upon the borders of Mordor. He has strange powers and many allies.138 None of them seems to know exactly who, if anyone, is behind the supernatural attack. The mountain itself could be responsible for the attack, and is indeed attributed an evil nature if not malevolent intelligence: Caradhras [the mountain] was called the Cruel and had an ill name (…) long years ago, when rumour of Sauron had not been heard in these lands.139 Caradhras has not forgiven us (…) He has more snow yet to fling at us, if we go on.140 [italics mine] In Norse sagas, the mountain is the haunt of spirits, the realm of the dead (and of the dwarfs, who are often associated to the dead and rocks and the Otherworld), thus it is not surprising 136 The draugar Glam is often associated with stormy weather in his hauntings. See Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga). <http://omacl.org/Grettir/gr32-48.html> Part XXXIII. Doings of Glam’s. Awful Condition of Vatnsdal. 137 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Rings, pp. 376-83. 138 Ibid. p. 376. 139 Ibid. p. 377. 140 Ibid. p. 380. 62 that Caradhras as a dark towering mountain should personify that aspect of Tolkienian mythology. As Claude Lecouteux puts it: La montagne [est un] monde intermédiaire entre les hommes et les dieux, sa tête au ciel est voisine et sa base touche à l’empire des morts. Elle a donc un indéniable caractère sacré qui s’explique d’abord parce qu’elle est la demeure des dieux, le lieu de réunion des êtres surnaturels. ( …) A partir du XIIe siècle, la montagne devient le séjour des fées et des démons, en raison de son caractère païen, et plus tard les sorcières y tiendront leur sabbat. (…) [Là] s’affrontent deux mondes diamétralement opposés qui tentent de communiquer par le biais des héros et des élus, peut-être même par le biais des morts.141 During their progression up the mountain and through the snowstorm, the members of the Fellowship experience strange phenomena around them: They heard eerie noises in the darkness round them. It may have been only a trick of the wind in the cracks and gullies of the rocky wall, but the sounds were those of shrill cries, and wild howls of laughter. Stones began to fall from the mountain-side, whistling over their heads, or crashing on the path beside them. Every now and again they heard a dull rumble, as a great boulder rolled down from hidden heights above.142 This eerie atmosphere recalls the mountains described in the Scandinavian sagas, a place haunted by spirits, a realm of the unknown where you cannot trust your senses anymore. Aragorn and Boromir, the two men in the Fellowship, debate what these noises and falling stones may be, and Aragorn says something essential about the nature of evil in Middle-Earth: 141 142 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, pp. 158-9. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Rings, p. 377. 63 There are many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been in this world longer than he.143 In other words, there are things or creatures that show clear hostility towards men in MiddleEarth without being necessarily in league with the forces of Evil. That brings us back to the Barrow-wights, whom I had at first seen as one of these “unfriendly things” haunting MiddleEarth. The description of the trap set for the Hobbits at the Barrowdowns still offers some interesting information to analyse: The sun, a pale and watery yellow, was gleaming through the mist just above the west wall of the hollow in which they lay; north, south, and east, beyond the wall the fog was thick, cold and white. The air was silent, heavy and chill.144 [italics mine] The Hobbits can see the sun in the west, faintly shining through a cloud of mist. This seemingly meaningless detail is critical, because in Germanic beliefs ghosts and revenants fear daylight and fire. And so they try to trick the living out of their houses, away from their fires and lanterns. In the same way, the trap falls around the Hobbits from all sides, except in the west where the sun is still shining. And this element gives credit to the recommendations made by Tom Bombadil to the Hobbits before leaving his house to cross the land of the Barrowdowns: ‘Keep to the green grass. Don’t you go a-meddling with old stone or cold Wights or prying in their houses, unless you be strong folk with hearts that never falter!’ He said this more than once; and he advised them to pass barrows by on the west-side, if they chanced to stray near one.145 [italics mine] 143 Ibid. Ibid. pp. 188-9. 145 Ibid. p. 184. 144 64 Bombadil says two very important things: the Hobbits should stay to the places where grass is growing, and so where the fertility of the earth is not tainted by the evil of the Barrow-wights; and also to stay on the west side of barrows if they come across one, west where the light is stronger, and where the power of the wights apparently lessens (This is reminiscent of the burial rites of the Rohirrim, whose royal barrows are covered with the white flowers of simbelmynë flowering on their western sides). Here two sets of symbols seem join: on the one hand the importance of the West in Middle-Earth as the residence of the gods, symbol of good and light; and on the other hand the West as a benevolent Otherworld, therefore offering both light and security to the Hobbits as opposed to the dark side of the Otherworld and danger posed by the wights. This is confirmed by the scene of the “exorcism” performed by Tom Bombadil to chase away the wight that had captured the Hobbits and make sure the barrow is abandoned for ever: ‘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.’146 Bombadil orders the wight to “vanish in the sunlight,” and to return to whence it had come, “into the barren lands far beyond the mountains.”We cannot but wonder at Tom Bombadil’s powers which seem strangely similar to those of Odin who “understood the songs by which the earth, the hills, the stones, and mounds were opened to him; and he bound those who dwell in them by the power of his word, and went in and took what he pleased.”147 Tom Bombadil is quite a unique character in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, comparable to another Odinic figure, the wandering wizard Gandalf the Grey. Here it is quite clear where Tolkien found the inspiration for some aspects of Bombadil’s figure. Just like Odin, Bombadil uses the power of songs to open the doors to the underground realm just like Odin is supposed to 146 Ibid. p. 195. Killings, Douglas B., ed. Heimskringla or The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturluson. Translated by Samuel Laing (London, 1844, and Norroena Society, London, 1907). Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #15b. April 1996. http://omacl.org/Heimskringla/ynglinga.html; in part 7. Of Odin’s Feats. 147 65 have done. After all, that is why he was called the “ghost-sovereign” or “lord of the mounds.”148 After singing his song of power that chases the Barrow-wight away, Bombadil carries on with his exorcism by taking the hoard out of the barrow: When he [came back out of the barrow mound, Bombadil] was bearing in his arms a great load of treasure: things of gold, silver, copper and bronze; many beads and chains and jewelled ornaments. He climbed the green barrow and laid them all on top in the sunshine. (…) Most of these he made into a pile that glistened and sparkled on the grass. He bade them lie there ‘free to all finders, birds, beasts, Elves or Men, and all kindly creatures’; for so the spell of the mound should be broken and scattered and no Wight ever come back to it.149 By offering the hoard of the Wight to the light of the sun, Bombadil seems to break the spell of the Wight, and the fact that he leaves the treasure there for anybody to pick it up shows that there is a link between the hoard and the wights, even if those wights do not exactly fulfil the image of guardians of the hoard (the light of the sun could therefore help cleanse the hoard from all evil influence or curse, just like the sunlight is supposed to make the wights “vanish” as Tom Bombadil puts it). The hoard in itself is perfectly in keeping with Tolkien’s recurrent theme of avarice in his works. And the idea of a cursed treasure that will draw the greed of men is also fairly common in his works, and seems to stem in this case from a line in Beowulf150 mentioned by Tom Shippey. A line that used to be the title of one of Tolkien’s poems, which he later renamed simply The Hoard. The poem tells the story of a cursed treasure passed down and sometimes taken by force from one character to another, with the constant result for all that 148 Ibid. Ibid. p. 195-8. 150 ‘the gold of ancient men, wound round with magic’ line 3052 of Beowulf quoted in Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-Earth, pp. 67-8. 149 66 their lives were ruined and they were mercilessly slaughtered for their gold.151 The last stanza of the poem mirrors the landscape of the Barrow Downs and the accursed treasures they hide: There is an old hoard in a dark rock, forgotten behind doors none can unlock; that grim gate no man can pass. On the mound grows the green grass; there sheep feed and the larks soar, and the wind blows from the sea-shore. The old hoard the Night shall keep, while earth waits and the Elves sleep.152 [italics mine] This extract from The Hoard echoes the burial of Beowulf by his people, and their burying the dragon’s treasure at his side to honour him but at the same time to make him its new guardian and in a sense protector of his people against its curse, in much the same way as the Nibelungen hoard was sunk in the Rhine, “so that no one would have possession of it.”153 Beowulf’s barrow itself will also apparently serve as a landmark for sailors, but its treasures shall be forgotten.154 Again, we have a mound covered with lush grass that feeds the sheep (absent from the Barrow Downs when the Hobbits travel there), and with the larks and the wind for only background noises, a landscape almost identical (except for the sheep, but Tolkien tells us that they did use to feed in the hills of the Barrow Downs before the wights invaded it and impressed their evil on the land around the mounds155) to the one the Hobbits find themselves into and described in this extract used earlier on in my analysis: There was no tree nor any visible water: it was a country of grass and short springy turf, silent except for the whisper of the air over the edges of the land, and high lonely cries of strange birds.156 151 The Hoard, in Tolkien, J.R.R. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. London: Allen & Unwin, 1975 (first published 1961), pp. 53-6. 152 Ibid, p. 56. 153 Hatto, A.T., tr. The Nibelungenlied. London: Penguin, 2004, p.148. 154 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, pp. 95-8. 155 « Gold was piled on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again” in Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Rings, p.179. 156 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship of the Rings, p.187. 67 Tolkien used avarice as a leitmotiv to explain the downfall of men and other races in MiddleEarth. The Silmarillion is based on the story of the theft of the Silmarils by the Dark Lord, jewels wrought by the Elves and for which war will be waged on a cataclysmic scale until Middle-Earth itself is shattered by it, with both sides driven by greed and pride to their falls.157 Avarice, greed and pride were considered capital sins in the Middle Ages and might have found their way into Tolkien’s works quite naturally from the original works he studied in his career (though it is not the subject of this analysis, it might be interesting to see whether other sins are also present in Middle-Earth, such as gluttony, sloth, lechery). The poem The Hoard perfectly illustrates these sins, with all of the protagonists facing a gruesome death after acquiring their precious treasure, which is exactly what the One Ring itself is after all, gold and power combined and devised to rule the world and trap the souls of all who gaze at it and “in the darkness bind them.”158 The Elves came first, but “their doom fell, and their song waned, by iron hewn and by steel chained;” then an old dwarf who found the Elves’ gold and “died alone in the red fire; his bones were ashes in the hot mire” when a dragon took over his gold, until “a young warrior with a bright sword… tore him, and his flames died.” The young warrior turned into an old king, “of elvish gold,” but little did that help him when “his halls were burned, his kingdom lost; in a cold pit his bones were tossed.”159 Greed and the story of that fabulous treasure also remind us of the treasure of the Niebelungen epic and the path of blood and death it weaves throughout the story, as it does in its Scandinavian version, the Volsungasaga.160 The story of the hoard of the Niebelungs detailed in the Poetic Edda reflects that of Tolkien’s Hoard: the gold was first taken from the dwarf Andvari by Loki, then paid by Loki as financial retribution for the murder of Otr, then acquired by Fafnir the dragon, which Siegfried killed to get the treasure for which he himself died later on.161 Without the timely intervention of Tom Bombadil, the Hobbits would have suffered a similar fate, although the connection to the seemingly accursed hoard of gold present in the Barrow mound where they were taken captive is more complex than just a tale of greed and downfall. Tolkien’s invention of the Barrow-wights is very complex indeed, a warped version of 157 For more on the Fall of men and Elves in The Silmarillion, see Schweicher, Eric. Aspects of the Fall in The Silmarillion, in Reynolds Patricia and Glen Goodknight, eds. Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Conference 1992. Milton Keynes & Altadena: The Mythopoeic Society and the Tolkien Society, 1995, 167-171. 158 Extract from the Ring verse in Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Rings, p.5. 159 The Hoard, in Tolkien, J.R.R. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, pp. 53-6. 160 See Hatto, A.T., tr. The Nibelungenlied; and Byock, Jesse L., tr. The Saga of the Volsungs. London: Penguin, 1999. 161 Lecouteux, Claude. Les nains et les elfes au Moyen Age, p. 67. 68 guardian spirits believed to inhabit Germanic burial mounds that belies the fertility and benevolence usually associated with such places, until Tom Bombadil, in whom Shippey sees the perfect genius loci162 (and even in a way Tolkien’s recreation of the Green Knight), comes and rescues the Hobbits and restores the burial mound to its former function of benevolent watchfulness. That is why even the Hobbits’ ponies return when all evil has been driven out of the dark chamber of the mound, and the grass of the mound again feeds the animals who have sensed that danger has left the area. So Bombadil seems to be the real guardian spirit of the whole area, though he “can’t always be near to open doors and willow-cracks”163 to save unwary travellers. One more strange element that seems to be purely Tolkien’s creation and does not originate in “classical” Germanic or Scandinavian ghost tales is the very curious slaughter ritual orchestrated by the wight who captured the Hobbits inside his barrow, which takes place moments before they are rescued by Bombadil. Though it closely echoes the image of the “vampire” spirit who has to slay any living being present in his grave or burial mound to “survive,”164 the ritual itself is not linked to anything present in the Germanic literary legacy. For this ritual, the wight is ready to use a knife, a special sacrificial blade to slay the Hobbits,165 thereby echoing the Norse beliefs that revenants were physically real and present, not just figments of people’s imagination or a misty figure appearing in dreams. Men in the old Germanic world were threatened physically by corporeal beings that they had to fight with traditional weapons of steel, not by seeking the help and intervention of the local exorcist priest. On the other hand, Tolkien often associates weapons of steel with burial mounds to reinforce the idea of guardianship. It is not the case here, where the metal weapon becomes a tool of sacrifice. However there are 4 swords taken from the hoard by Bombadil and given to the Hobbits, one of which will play a crucial role in the global events depicted further on in The Lord of the 162 Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-Earth, p.82. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Rings, p. 198. 164 The story of Asmund and Asvith illustrates quite nicely that point in the Gesta Danorum. Asmund is buried alive with his dead friend Asvith to respect an oath they had both taken to follow their friend in death. Asvith comes back to life and feasts on his horse and dog that had also been buried in his tomb, before attacking Asmund every night until Asmund manages to behead the draugr and stake its heart. See Troadec, J.P., tr. . La Geste des Danois. Saxo Grammaticus, Saxo. Paris : Editions Gallimard, 1995, pp.216-8. See the first chapter of this study, pp. 32-3. 165 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Rings, p. 193. 163 69 Rings, “blades[…] forged many long years ago by Men of Westernesse: they were foes of the Dark Lord”166 One of these swords will be used to slay the chief minion of Sauron, the leader of the Nazgûl or Ringwraiths, formerly the Witch King of Angmar, who according to a prophecy cannot be slain by the hand of any man. As it happened, he was slain by a woman and a Hobbit, which seems to confirm the prophecy. The blade itself is consumed in the process (exactly like Beowulf’s sword melted away after he had killed Grendel167), but it is interesting to see such an intertwining side story woven into the narrative of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien comments even further: So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-Kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.168 In that sense, the hoard of the burial mound was indeed doubly cursed, for mortals who could fall to its lure and become the prey of the wight, and for evil itself who had not anticipated this unexpected turn of fortune and the fate of one forgotten sword. And in a way the buried blade did offer one last glorious act of resistance against the evil it had originally been made to fight against. Maybe it did belong to a warrior, leader or prince who had been originally buried in the mound with his weapons to protect his land against its enemies, before the wight took over and disturbed his resting place. And somehow the Dead found a way to strike at the enemy, to guard their descendants by offering their sword as the ultimate weapon to defeat evil. It is also interesting to note that Bombadil gives the Hobbits those swords; he is the one who is able to break the spell of the wights, cleanse the hoard from its curse, and pass on the ancient weapons so that they might be used again. The character of Tom Bombadil, part magician (his shaman-like singing magic and other elements relate him to Väinämöinen in the 166 Ibid. p.199. Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p.52. 168 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 141. 167 70 Kalevala169), part landvaettir, but somehow also part Christ-figure through his redeeming qualities is quite complex and would be interesting to analyse in another study. To come back to the ritual of sacrifice performed by the wight, it sang a strange incantation performed before it intended to kill the Hobbits: 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 his hand over dead sea and withered land.170 [italics mine] During this ritual chant, the wight performs a sacrifice that is supposed to bind the victim forever, till the death of light itself and the victory of evil over all live things, till the living world has been ravaged by forces of evil and looks like the haunts of powerful Norse ghosts.171 And the mention of the dark lord seems to confirm that barrow-wights are indeed agents of Sauron and evil forces in Middle-Earth. The presence, and apparently requirement, of gold in the ritual is strange, except if gold is used as the ultimate tool of greed and downfall, gold that seems to feed on the blood and life of the creatures drawn to it). This chant is indeed strange, but then, as Shippey notes, such unconventional elements offer “glimpses of an alien world that defies understanding […,] the special thrill of fantasy beyond study.”172 At the very least, Barrow-wights have proved to be rather an interesting mixture of Old Norse revenant traits, traditional burial mound images, and yet something more, definitely unique to Middle-Earth. Warped guardian-ghost duties, graveless spirits, and a touch of vampirism make Barrow-wights unique in many ways. Though this study focuses on Germanic and 169 See for more information : Silec, Tatjana. Tolkien et le Kalevala. in Carruthers, Leo, ed. Tolkien et le Moyen Âge. Paris : CNRS Editions, 2007, pp. 42-49. 170 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Rings, p.193. 171 See rampaging Glam in Grettir’s Saga. Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong <http://omacl.org/ Grettir/ gr32-48.html> 172 Shippey, T.A. The Road to Middle-Earth, p.84. 71 Norse influences, Tolkien must clearly have had other influences, maybe even more modern ones that helped him create such figures as the Barrow-wights. Vampire stories such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula might have played a role in the creation of those creatures. 72 73 II. The Wild Hunt of Dunharrow Let us now move on to another example of ghosts in Middle-Earth, which is a more “classical” example of medieval ghost beliefs: the Army of the Dead. They haunt Tolkien’s most Germanic people in Middle- Earth, the Rohirrim, whose existence I already brought up when dealing with the burial rites of King Théoden of Rohan. Army of the Dead, John Howe. 74 It has been mentioned earlier how much energy and care Tolkien put into bringing to life this particular people of Middle-Earth, who are so reminiscent of an early Anglo-Saxon golden age. In a letter to the Houghton Mifflin Company (his American publishers), he said: I came eventually and by slow degrees to write The Lord of the Rings to satisfy myself: of course without success, at any rate not above 75 percent. But now (…) certain features of it, and especially certain places, still move me very powerfully (…), but I am most stirred by the sound of the horses of the Rohirrim at cockcrow. 173 Tolkien’s passion for his horse lords might explain why so many details are given about their lives, their traditions and their beliefs. We have already seen how elaborate their funeral rites were (see page 52 in this study), and how definitely Anglo-Saxon they seemed, or at the very least at the time of migrations towards Great-Britain when Beowulf was written. Their ghosts are very powerful figures as well, so much so that even the fierce Rohirrim warriors fear them. And Tolkien does not give us just one lonely ghost but a whole army of them, a whole people: the Dead Men of Dunharrow, also called “the Dead, the Sleepless Dead, the Grey Host, the Shadow Host, the Shadow-Men, the Shadows, the Shadows of Men and the Men of the Mountains.”174 We have already seen the significance of Mountains associated with the dead in Norse literature in previous pages. The abundance of nouns created by Tolkien for the Army of the Dead seem to attest that these dead have been able to rest in peace yet, and have a very real presence in Tolkien’s fictive countryside. There are many similarities between the Army of the Dead and the traditional Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt is an interesting group of ghosts that haunts most Northern European medieval literatures. Usually, it appears as a group of ghostly figures following a leader, riding the night to an unknown destination and seeking expiation for their sins in a sort of itinerant Purgatory in the world of the living (the original pagan Wild Hunt provided a very useful moral tool for the Church which found in them an ideal way to make people think twice about committing sins), appearing as a ghost army to the lonely travellers who reported seeing them. Originally, the Wild Hunt was also a way to explain epidemics, in which case one dead man, a draugr in Norse literature, would kill other people at night and they joined him until they formed a group of draugr haunting 173 174 Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher, eds. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 221. Foster, Robert. The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, p. 83. 75 the countryside.175 In Old Norse mythology, Odin himself sometimes appears as the leader of the Wild Hunt.176 We shall see more details and elements identifying the Wild Hunt in the following pages. Before analysing the ghost army of Dunharrow, a mountain region between the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor, and also a refuge for the people of Rohan in times of war, I have to summarize their story, how and why the “Men of the Mountains” became such vehement revenants. When the realm of Gondor was founded in Middle-Earth, the people of Dunharrow swore allegiance to the first Gondorian king, Isildur. When Isildur called all his allies together to fight Sauron in the Last Alliance, the Men of the Mountains, who apparently had been corrupted by Sauron before the creation of Gondor, broke their oath to Gondor and remained in their mountains instead of marching to battle. Because of this “they were condemned to remain in and near the White Mountains as spirits, until called to fulfil their oath by the heir of Isildur.”177 (…) the oath that [the Dead Men of Dunharrow] broke was to fight against Sauron, and they must fight therefore, if they are to fulfil it. For at Erech there stands yet a black stone that was brought, it was said, from Númenor by Isildur; and it was set upon a hill, and upon it the King of the Mountain swore allegiance to him in the beginning of the realm of Gondor. But when Sauron returned and grew in might again, Isildur summoned the Men of the Mountains to fulfil their oath, and they would not: for they had worshipped Sauron in the Dark Years. Then Isildur said to their king: “Thou shalt be the last king. And if the West prove mightier than thy Black Master, this curse I lay upon thee and thy folk: to rest never until your oath is fulfilled. For this war will last through years uncounted, and you shall be summoned once again ere the end.” And they fled before the wrath of Isildur, and did not dare go forth to war on 175 See page 29 in this study. Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 242. 177 Ibid 176 76 Sauron’s part; they hid themselves in secret places in the mountains and had no dealings with other men, but slowly dwindled in the barren hills.178 From the moment they became oathbreakers, they hid in the mountains and eventually disappeared as a people after a couple of generations. But the places where they had lived then became “barren” places avoided by the living, because the “Sleepless Dead”, an army of ghosts, started haunting their former land, and spread terror wherever they were seen. This idea of desolation on the land is also something found in Old Norse sagas or even in Beowulf.179 What is most interesting in this example is the fact that oathbreaking was considered by old Scandinavian law as one of the highest crimes. And the punishment for oathbreaking is closely connected to ghosts.In Fantômes et Revenants au Moyen-Âge, Claude Lecouteux quotes an interesting example of punishment reserved for a common law criminal by Germanic law: if the criminal is found guilty, he can be offered “aux bêtes et aux corbeaux”180 (to beasts and crows, my translation), which must have had a rather effective social function. In Germanic and Scandinavian beliefs, such a death irrefutably condemns the dead to have no grave or worse to be thrown into the swamp, as archeological evidence suggests,181 and so to come back as a ghost. This must have been quite an effective crime deterrent! In the example of the people of Dunharrow, a whole nation is condemned to everlasting haunting, until it can finally accomplish its duty and break the curse by serving Aragorn, the direct heir of Isildur, at the time of the events depicted in The Lord of the Rings, and thereby find peace and rest at last. Tolkien even mentions “the words of a seer” that foretell the breaking of the curse: Over the land there lies a long shadow, westward reaching wings of darkness. 178 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 59. See for example in Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p. 57. Grendel is said to have “laid waste to the land”, much as the ghost of Glamr in Grettir’s Saga. See page 31 in this study. 180 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, p. 34. 181 The discovery of the perfectly preserved body of the Man of Tollund, killed and thrown into a swamp, tends to indicate that the swamp was an honourless resting place for the Norse dead, or a place where people were sacrificed to gods following the ritual of the “threefold death,” whereby the victim (sometimes with his/her consent) was hanged, poisoned and wounded all at once to commemorate Odin’s sacrifice. This ritual is also accounted for in Celtic belief. See for more information Amt Aarhus, ed. The Tollund Man. A Face from Prehistoric Denmark. Silkeborg Museum and Amtscentret for Undervisning. 31 August 2008. <http://www.tollundman.dk/et-lig-dukker-op.asp>. See also Simek for more information on death penalties and sacrifices. 179 77 The Tower trembles; to the tombs of kings doom approaches. The Dead awaken; for the hour is come for the oathbreakers; at the Stone of Erech they shall stand again and hear a horn in the hills ringing. Whose shall the horn be? Who shall call them from the grey twilight, the forgotten people? The heir of him to whom the oath they swore. From the North shall he come, need shall drive him: he shall pass the Door to the Paths of the Dead.182 [italics mine] It is interesting to find in this extract formal “ubi sunt” questions (see my italics) that traditionally evoke the nostalgia for a bygone past in Old Norse songs, for example.183 Here Tolkien uses them to wonder about the future, but he does use this literary style elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings in keeping with the tradition of a heroic society in which the hierarchy between lords and vassals was paramount.184 Oathbreaking was truly regarded as an abomination in the early Middle Ages, a fact illustrated for example in a text from the 11th century, the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos [Sermon to the English by Wulfstan], studied by John Holmes in relation to Tolkien’s Oathbreakers.185 When listing the worst sins committed by the English, Wulfstan lists oathbreaking at the very top, above even “pillaging and murder.”186 The tradition of oaths given to kings in the Lord of the Rings can be compared to scenes found in heroic poetry as, for instance, Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon where “an earl on the battlefield [reminds] his men of the oaths they swore and that [it is time] to redeem those pledges,”187 which is exactly what Aragorn, the future king, does when he summons the Shadow Host to renew their allegiance. 182 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, pp. 58-59. Here is an example from Killings, Douglas B., ed. Heimskringla or The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway.. <http://omacl.org/Heimskringla/ harfager.html> Harald Harfager’s Saga, part 31: Halfdan’s Haleg’s Death. "Where is the spear of Hrollaug? Where Is stout Rolf Ganger's bloody spear! I see them not; yet never fear, For Einar will not vengeance spare.” 184 Tolkien, J.R.R. . The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, pp. 136-7: “Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?” And compare also to the elegiac song to honour Boromir’s Death in Ibid. 17-18. It illustrates one of Tolkien’s creative methods which would be worth a research of its own. 185 Holmes, John R.. “Oaths and Oath Breaking. Analogues of Old English Comitatus in Tolkien’s Myth,” in Chance, Jane, ed. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth. A Reader. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004, 249-61. 186 Ibid, p. 251. 187 Ibid. p. 252 183 78 Another example indicating that Tolkien himself considered oathbreaking as one of the very worst crimes is found in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings prequel, the Silmarillion. An Elven leader, Fëanor, created marvellous jewels, the Silmarils, which were then stolen by the Dark Lord, Melkor. Full of rage at this theft and the killing of his father, Fëanor and his sons swore an oath to “pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the World”188 any who would take possession of the precious jewels. And Tolkien declares: (…) and many quailed to hear the dread words. For so sworn, good or evil, an oath many not be broken, and it shall pursue oathkeeper and oathbreaker to the world’s end.189 [italics mine] This describes exactly what happened to the Men of the Mountains. They broke their word, did not answer King Isildur’s summons when he needed them in battle, and so were cursed not “to the world’s end,” but until someone could release them from the curse and allow them to fulfil their oath, which is exactly what Aragorn undertakes in his hurried quest to save the land of Gondor from total annihilation at the hands of evil forces. The infamous “Dead Door” is the entrance to a world forbidden to the living, a supernatural underground kingdom in the Mountains. Aragorn decides to ride the “Paths of the Dead”, a narrow eerie road leading through the mountains from the “Dead Door” in Dunharrow in Rohan to Erech in Gondor, together with a small company of warriors. He has a double purpose: to reach Minas Tirith as swiftly as he can to help the city fight the armies of Sauron; and to fulfil the above-mentioned prophecy by summoning the Army of the Dead to help him in the coming battle. They depart at dawn, taking leave only of the Lady Éowyn of Rohan, who tries first to dissuade them from taking that haunted road, then asks Aragorn to let her accompany them, both requests being denied. When she turns away from them “stumbling as one that is blind”190 after their passing in the shadows of the Dwimorberg, the Haunted Mountain,191 Tolkien states that: 188 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion, p. 97. Ibid. p. 98. 190 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 64. Éowyn is stunned by Aragorn’s decision to take the road none of her people would ever contemplate taking, so fierce is their terror of the Dead Men in the mountains, and so deep her despair at losing the man she was falling in love with. 191 Foster, Robert. The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth., p. 101. 189 79 none of [Éowyn’s] folk saw this parting, for they hid themselves in fear and would not come forth until the day was up, and the reckless strangers were gone. And some said: “They are Elvish wights192. Let them go where they belong, into the dark places, and never return. The times are evil enough.”193 The Rohirrim are not afraid of Aragorn and his company, but rather of what the night under the shadow of the Haunted Mountain might bring. They are afraid of what the “reckless strangers” who would not listen to their warnings might awake or bring forth into their world. Such is the potency of fear caused by the lingering reality of the Dead Men of Dunharrow that even a whole army of Rohirrim shrinks at the thought of what Aragorn and his men are about to do, some sort of futile suicide, and some of them even call them fools for doing so. One of the Rohirrim leaders, Éomer, even says about Aragorn’s decision to take the Paths of the Dead (a name that already serves as a warning to anyone foolish enough to use that road): Alas that a fey mood should fall on a man so great-hearted in this hour of need! Are there not evil things enough abroad without seeking them under the earth? War is at hand!194 And he thereby reflects the feeling of his people and warriors. For them seeking out the paths haunted by the Dead is sheer madness and a senseless waste of human life. They are convinced that taking the Paths of the Dead means certain death, and can only be accomplished by men gone “fey”… Éomer, as a leader, also has to consider the loss of a man of valour like Aragorn and his party of Rangers in the upcoming battles which he considers worth dying for, as opposed to Aragorn’s foolish enterprise. We see that even the mere mention of Aragorn’s taking the passage through the mountain brings fear into the heart of the Rohirrim warriors, as if the name itself was taboo among these battle-hardened fighters: ‘The Paths of the Dead!’ said Théoden, and trembled. ‘Why do you speak of them?’ Éomer turned and gazed at Aragorn, and it seemed (…) that the 192 This is quite a derogatory comment. As we have seen previously, wights are evil creatures, but what is interesting is the association of wights and the adjective « Elvish ». Elves are the pinnacle of culture and fairness in Middle-Earth, but here the adjective calls back to an early meaning of the word in Scandinavian mythology where elves were little better than dwarfs, creatures linked with the Otherworld. 193 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 64. 194 Ibid. p. 80. 80 faces of the Riders that sat within hearing turned pale at the words.195 [italics mine] The very aptly-named “Men of the Mountains” spread fear in their realm long after they have disappeared as living beings from the lands of Middle-Earth. The Haunted Mountain where they used to live becomes a place of terror where no living being dares to tread. According to King Théoden himself, the Rohirrim in Harrowdale ( the vale beyond Dunharrow), say that: Dead Men out of the Dark Years guard the way and will suffer no living man to come to their hidden halls; but at whiles they may themselves be seen passing out of the door like shadows and down the stony road. Then the people of Harrowdale shut fast their doors and shroud their windows and are afraid. But the Dead come seldom forth and only at times of great unquiet and coming death.196 [italics mine] It is interesting to see again a Tolkienian twist to the ghost tales: not only do we have an army of ghosts controlling the passage to their dark domains, but also shadows of them haunting the world of the living at special times of need (see page 88 for more details), which is very typical of a renowned band of ghosts from our world, the Wild Hunt. It is definitely clear, though, that the Dead Men guard their former territory most fiercely, thereby conforming to Germanic and Norse patterns of guardian ghosts. They “suffer no living man to come to their hidden halls.” Another important detail is that the people of Harrowdale do not just stay indoors when the Dead Men come out into the valley where the living dwell, they “shut fast their doors and shroud their windows” as if there was actual physical danger, as if the ghosts were more than just shades, had a physical reality and could enter the dwellings of the living to harm them. This again reminds us of Norse revenants who resort to hand and weapon to harry the living, but also, for example, of the Sluagh, an Irish manifestation of the Wild Hunt which had a tendency to try to enter the houses of the dying to steal their souls (The Sluagh Sídhe, or army of Síd, the dwellers in the mound,197 is a Celtic form of the Wild Hunt that haunts the living on a specific day, Samhain, today All Souls’ Day). King Théoden also mentions a story passed from father to son in the royal house of Rohan: 195 Ibid. pp. 55-6. Ibid. p. 79. 197 Lecouteux, Claude. Chasses fantastiques et cohortes de la nuit au Moyen-Age. Paris : Imago, 1998, p. 23-4. 196 81 It is said that when the Eorlingas came out of the North and passed at length up the Snowbourn [river in Rohan], seeking strong places of refuge in time of need, Brego and his son Baldor climbed (…) and so came before the [Door of the Dead]. On the threshold sat an old man, aged beyond guess of years; tall and kingly he had been, but now he was withered as an old stone. Indeed for stone they took him, for he moved not, and he said no word, until they sought to pass him by and enter. And then a voice came out of him, as it were out of the ground, and to their amaze it spoke in [their] tongue: the way is shut. Then they halted and looked at him and saw that he lived still; but he did not look at them. The way is shut, his voice said again. It was made by those who are Dead and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut. And when will that time be? said Baldor. But not answer did he ever get. For the old man died in that hour and fell upon his face; and no other tidings of the ancient dwellers in the mountains have our folk ever learned.198 It is obvious that his story relates the meeting with the last seen living Man of the Mountain, and Tolkien alludes to his having been a king of his people, now “withered as an old stone,” becoming part of the Mountain that his people used to inhabit. There is a hint of the prophecy in the words of the old man as well. “The way is shut (…) until the time comes” (the time of redemption at the hand of Aragorn who will release them from the curse cast by his ancestor Isildur). But first they have to serve the living one more time, unlike in some early medieval accounts of the Wild Hunt where it is the living that have to help the dead.199 We thus have redemption through military service, contrary to anything we find in traditionnal occurrences of the Wild Hunt. Tolkien also supplies us with another example from local legends to show that these ghosts do mean harm, a story that involves Baldor again: 198 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 80. Sinex, Margaret A. “Oathbreakers, why have ye come?” in Chance, Jane, ed. Tolkien the Medievalist. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008, p. 158. 199 82 If these old tales speak true that have come down from father to son in the [Royal House] then the Door under Dwimorberg leads to a secret way that goes beneath the mountains to some forgotten end. But none have ever ventured in to search its secrets, since Baldor, son of Brego, passed the Door and was never seen among men again. A rash vow he spoke, as he drained the horn at [a feast in Edoras] , and he came never to the high seat of which he was the heir.200 This occurrence is the sort of examples Claude Lecouteux lists throughout French, German or Norse folk tales when studying the Wild Hunt.201 In accounts or legends where the gruesome Wild Hunt appears, there is often some brash youngster or drunken fool who defies the local belief in ghosts or the rules that no one should violate when it comes to ghosts, and pays the price. And in the case of Baldor the penalty is death. When Aragorn and his company have crossed the Dark Door under Dwimorberg, they soon come across the remains of a man inside the caves under the mountain, apparently a man of high social status among the Rohirrim by the quality of his gilded armour, and Aragorn is quick to join legends with facts, and recognizes the lost heir to Rohan’s throne, Baldor, son of Brego: He had fallen near the far wall of the cave, as now could be seen, and before him stood a stony door closed fast: his finger-bones were still clawing at the cracks. A notched and broken sword lay by him, as if he had hewn at the rock in his last despair. Aragorn did not touch him, but after gazing silently for a while he rose and sighed. ‘Hither shall the flowers of simbelmynë come never unto world’s end,’ he murmured. ‘Nine mounds and seven there are now green with grass, and through all the long years he has lain at the door that he could not unlock. Whither does it lead? Why would he pass? None shall ever know! For that is not my errand!’ he cried, turning back and speaking to the [ghostly presence behind the company]’Keep your hoards and your secrets hidden in the Accursed Years!202 Speed only we ask. Let us pass, and then come! I summon you to the Stone of Erech!”203 200 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 79. Lecouteux, Claude. Chasses fantastiques et cohortes de la nuit au Moyen-Age. 202 This is probably a reference to the Dark Years when the Men of the Mountains served the Dark Lord. 203 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, pp. 66-7. 201 83 Aragorn makes a clear reference to the lost son of the House of Eorl, founder of Rohan, by mentioning the burial mounds of Baldor’s house. Baldor’s punishment for defying the ghosts and exploring their former realm was death, but he was also prevented from being buried in a proper grave along his family and ancestors, which could indicate that he too, had become a likely candidate for haunting the Mountain.. The light of simbelmynë on his burial mound was denied to him, he was been sentenced to eternal darkness, figuratively and literally. We might speculate on Tolkien’s use of the name “Baldor,” so reminiscent of the name of the Norse god Balder, who symbolized innocence, light, and the colour white which is denied to Baldor, together with his throne and acts of valour since he died so young, just like Balder died alone of all the gods before the Ragnarok. Aragorn also appears to speculate lightly on why Baldor would come there, but then declares openly to the following host that it is not his intent to investigate Baldor’s death, nor to look for treasures, and tells the ghost people to keep their hoards (he also has to follow his mission, and move on to accomplish his destiny, and has no time for solving Baldor’s mystery). This attitude is contrary to Tom Bombadil’s openly displaying the hoard of the wight’s barrow mound outside for anyone who should be interested in taking it, and thereby it follows the tradition of the Germanic guardian ghost whose hoard should not be disturbed lest the wrath of the dead and deathly sentry is awakened. The death of Baldor is clear evidence of the potency of the accursed hoard, the power of the guardians, and one more example in Tolkien’s work of the price to pay for avarice. Baldor’s story also echoes the tale of King Sveig ir who follows a dwarf into a stone or a rock (which could be a mountain as well) and never returned, and Baldor’s fate is again oddly similar to the story of King Herla who disappears after following a dwarf into a cave.204 Similar indeed, except for the dwarves, who have a very special place in Tolkien’s world as an independent race. But dwarves in Scandinavian literature are often associated with the dead, or with evil revenants.205 Could Tolkien have drawn on these early examples to insert the tale of Baldor’s demise in his story? And Tolkien’s description of the passage of the 204 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, p. 212. Ibid. pp. 109-10. According to Lecouteux, dwarfs “were victims of christianism which saw them as pagan demons [and came to represent the] evil dead” [my translation] 205 84 Company through the Paths of the Dead as seen through the eyes of Gimli the Dwarf could be the author’s way of making ironical references to his Scandinavian sources: [The Company followed Aragorn through the Dark Door, the entrance to the Paths of the Dead]. And there stood Gimli the Dwarf left all alone. His knees shook, and he was wroth with himself. ‘Here is a thing unheard of!’ he said. ‘An Elf will go underground and a Dwarf dare not!’ With that he plunged in. But it seemed to him that he dragged his feet like lead over the threshold; and at once a blindness came upon him, even upon Gimli Góin’s son who had walked unafraid in many deep places of the world.206 The Dwarf’s apparent fear of the Otherworld, the world under the mountain, is rather paradoxical, first in Middle-Earth where Dwarves have established their kingdoms deep under the mountains and are thus accustomed to living in the dark, then in comparison to “traditional” Scandinavian and German folklore where dwarves should be quite accustomed to the dead, as scary as the latter can be.207 Gimli’s description of his experience under the Mountain of Dunharrow is interesting in many ways. First of all, the host or ghostly presence that follows Aragorn’s company in the Paths of the Dead is given more substance as they move forward: [Gimli] could see nothing but the dim flame of the torches; but if the company halted, there seemed an endless whisper of voices all about him, a murmur of words in no tongue that he had ever heard before. Nothing assailed [them] nor withstood their passage, and yet steadily fear grew on the Dwarf as he went on: most of all because he knew now that there could be no turning back; all the paths behind were thronged by an unseen host that followed in the dark. 206 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 65. In The Niebelungenlied, Siegfried quite naturally gives the guardianship of the Niebelung treasure to Alberich the dwarf, who will watch over it under the mountain. See Hatto, A.T., tr. The Nibelungenlied, pp. 28 and 71-2. 207 85 (…) a rumor came after him like the shadow-sound of many feet. [Only when the Elf, Legolas, looks back does the ghost host get more substance:] ‘The Dead are following,’ said Legolas. ‘I see shapes of Men and horses, and pale banners like shreds of cloud, and spears like winter-thickets on a misty night. The Dead are following’208 If the Wild Hunt in its multiple versions209 tends to be either completely silent, or to make as much noise as an army on the march or in combat, the ghostly host that follows Aragorn’s company starts with whispers, gaining substance as they move along the Paths of the Dead. Fear is omnipresent, and the noise of whispers is soon completed by “an unseen host” with the sound of many ghostly feet. And when Legolas looks behind them,210 he sees a tattered army of revenants following them, which does not conform to most descriptions of the Wild Hunt, according to which the ghost companies seen at night are made out of people who look very much alive and are dressed in good looking clothes and armour, sometimes dressed as they were when they died. They look so normal that the witness of their apparition sometimes has to talk to them to find out they are dead. But there are examples of tattered bands of ghosts in Lecouteux as well,211 forbidden to find rest as long as they have not expiated their sins. Tthe Wild Hunt of Dunharrow is a combination of pagan and Christian themes: the broken oath dooms them to eternal haunting according to Norse and Germanic laws and beliefs, but the notion of Christian sin is very much there too, which might stem from Tolkien’s deeply Christian background, and also from the numerous examples of the Wild Hunt appearing as a group of dead sinners seeking expiation for their sins and a way out of purgatory. After all, the Men of the Mountains were originally punished for not answering the summons of their king, because they had turned from the light and good in years past. They are still trying to redeem themselves for their evil ways and for serving evil, they are haunting the countryside in a form of permanent purgatory on Middle-Earth. But overall it seems that the tale of the Shadow Host has more to do with power and “monarchic ideology” than “moral theology”212 because after all the King of the Men of the Mountain originally had to choose where his 208 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, pp. 65-8. See Lecouteux, Claude. Chasses fantastiques et cohortes de la nuit au Moyen-Age. 210 Elves in Middle-Earth are famous for their remarkable sight, which might explain why he is the first to actually see the host of Dead Men take shape. 211 Lecouteux, Claude. Chasses fantastiques et cohortes de la nuit au Moyen-Age, p. 42. 212 Sinex, Margaret A. “Oathbreakers, why have ye come?,” p. 156. 209 86 allegiance lay: with the Kings of Gondor or the Dark Lord, the two main political powers in Middle-Earth, besides the obvious opposition between good and evil. And the Shadow Host episode is less used to illustrate a moral point than to actually assert Aragorn’s claim to the throne of Gondor for the first time, and dissociate him from his image of a lonely Ranger of the North213 guiding the Fellowship of the Ring. According to Lecouteux,214 most occurrences of the Wild Hunt show trapped souls haunting the world of the living until they can be released from their curse, or find a way to redeem themselves. Only in pre-Christian sagas do we find another story. There the ghosts are not trying to redeem themselves; they are just trying to be as much of a nuisance for the living as they can be. But the Wild Hunt is also sometimes said to be composed of criminals, and as has already been pointed out, oathbreaking is the ultimate crime in Norse society. All important oaths are taken on Odin’s Table, just as the oath of allegiance of the Men of the Mountain is taken at the Stone of Erech; a symbol of the power of the king that carries so much importance that Aragorn’s summons to the ghost army has to take place there to allow the curse to be lifted. In an early version of The Return of the King, Tolkien wrote: (…) all about [the Hill of Erech] the land is empty, for none will dwell near [it], because it is said that at times the Shadow-men will gather there, thronging about the ruined wall, and whispering. And though their tongue is now long forgotten, it is said that they cry “We are come!” and they wish to fulfil the broken oath and be at rest. But the terror of the Dead lies on that hill and all the land about. (…) And [one of the Dúnedain in the Grey Company] blew his silver horn (…). Nothing could we see (…), and yet we were aware of a great host gathered all about us upon the hill, and of the sound of answering horns, as if their echo came up out of deep caverns far away.215 Again we have sound, not a silent host, and the clear will of the ghost army to fulfil their oath at last. 213 a name given to the surviving descendants of the kingdoms of men in the North of Middle-Earth, whose graves and ruins cover the hills of the Barrow Downs, and who still try to offer protection and assistance against evil to whoever should need it. 214 Lecouteux, Claude. Chasses fantastiques et cohortes de la nuit au Moyen-Age. p. 42. 215 Tolkien, J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien, ed. The War of the Ring. The History of The Lord of the Rings, part 3. London: Harper Collins, 2002, pp. 410-11. 87 The few details we are given about their appearance are really interesting: they are “shapes,” not defined clearly, with “shadow” feet. They carry “pale banners like shreds of clouds,” an image of cloudiness and haze reinforced by the idea of “misty night.” The Dead have almost no substance in the world of the living, they have just enough physical presence to frighten the living, but that is more than enough to instil fear in the most battle-hardened warriors. Their misty appearance is also reflected in the predominant colour of their mad quest. Aragorn and his party leave Lady Éowyn’s company to ride to the Dead Door when “the light was still grey;”216 then come out of the mountain path into Gondor, and “all was grey in that hour, for the sun had gone.”217 When they reach the Dark Door, “fear flowed from it like a grey vapour”218 [italics mine]. Then later on Legolas speaks of their hurried ride to save Gondor: Green are those fields in the songs of my people; but they were dark then, grey wastes in the blackness before us.219 [italics mine] Tolkien named the chapter containing this episode of The Lord of the Rings “The Passing of the Grey Company.” By “the Grey Company,” Tolkien seems to refer first to the party of the sons of Elrond, and the 30 Dúnedain rangers of the North come to support Aragorn in the coming war.220 Grey is the colour of the rangers’ cloaks, with “their hoods [cast] over helm and head”221 Later on as they pass through the Dead Door, the Grey Company (including Gimli the Dwarf and Legolas the Elf) suddenly grows much larger, as they are joined by the ghost army. Or rather Aragorn’s company takes some of the attributes of the Dead, if only the colour and silence. It becomes the “Grey Host” later on in battle.222 Grey is a symbol of the supernatural always associated with revenants in Norse tales, 223 together with night and some unexplained natural phenomena like storm or mist. In Scandinavian mythology, grey is 216 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 64. Ibid. p. 68. 218 Ibid. p. 65. 219 Ibid. p. 180. 220 Ibid. p. 52. 221 Ibid. p. 54. 222 Ibid. p. 180 and 182. 223 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, p. 100. 217 88 always associated with Odin,224 Valfödr, “the father of warriors fallen in battle”, but also Draugadróttin, “the Lord of the living dead or ghosts.”225 It is also the colour of Odin’s eightlegged horse, Sleipnir.226 In Middle-Earth, the Grey Host itself is compared to an impressive natural phenomenon: And suddenly the Shadow Host that had hung back at the last came up like a grey tide, sweeping all away before it.227 [italics mine] And the colour grey is predominant again, “save for a red gleam in [the Dead Men’s] eye”228 that makes them look like a demonic army out of hell. Incidentally this may be Tolkien’s only concession to Catholicism and the transformation of the original Wild Hunt of revenants into a band of demons accompanied by fire. The image of a storm catching the enemy and sweeping it away is in accordance with some attributes of Norse ghosts, who caused mayhem in their rampage and called up the elements against the living. Lecouteux goes as far as to wonder “whether the Wild Hunt, an army of ghosts, is not frequently a personification of the storm” [my translation]229 The prophecy of the oathbreakers that I quoted earlier also uses the same colour applied to the Dead Men: Who shall call them from the grey twilight, the forgotten people?230 [italics mine] 224 Lecouteux, Claude, Dictionnaire de mythologie germanique. Paris : Editions Imago, 2005, p. 179. The name Tolkien chose for his Odin-like powerful mage and one of the main characters of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, “Gandalf the Grey” is therefore not accidental. Gandalf and Odin share other characteristics illustrated in some more names given to Odin: “Gangleri,” he who walks; “Sídhhöttr,” he who has a wide brimmed hat; “Hárbardhr,” he who has a long beard. (see for more names associated with Odin: Guelpa, Patrick. Dieux et mythes nordiques. Paris : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998). Gandalf and Tom Bombadil both have Odin attributes that could be the subject of further research. 225 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, p. 81. 226 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 293. And Sleipnir could also be compared to Gandalf’s horse, Shadowfax, in The Lord of the Rings. 227 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 181. 228 Ibid. p. 182. 229 Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age, pp. 102-5. 230 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 59. 89 Now time also plays an important role in the Dead Men’s haunting. Twilight and night are quintessential for the apparitions of the Wild Hunt of Dunharrow. Special conditions have to be met to prompt their appearance: (…) [It] is said in Harrowdale (…) that in the moonless nights but little while ago a great host in strange array passed by. Whence they came none knew, but they went up the stony road and vanished into the hill as if to keep a tryst.231 [italics mine] We know this to be a re-enactment of the summons at the Stone of Erech to “keep the tryst” imposed on them by Isildur first, and promised fulfilment by Aragorn. The ghosts experience a strange compulsion to haunt the place of their promised redemption, hoping that redemption will eventually come for them. Again, twilight, night and especially darkness seem to be the favourite haunting times for the Wild Hunt of Dunharrow. “Moonless nights” also seem to be important, which remind us of the tale of the draugr Glam in Grettir’s Saga (see page 32 for more details). When Aragorn has to summon the Dead Men before riding to the aid of Gondor: (…) just ere midnight, and in a darkness as black as the caverns in the mountains, they came at last to the Hill of Erech.232 [italics mine] This is in total accordance with most examples of the Wild Hunt that only seems to appear in the dead of night. Midnight is the time ‘par excellence’ when supernatural forces are about, when the dead open their eyes, when demons and witches meet, and when these forces are at their strongest.233 It is the right time for an army of spirits to awaken and roam the land. Traditionally, the Wild Hunt is seen at certain times of the year (Christmas/Yule, All Hallows Eve, winter, etc234), when the doors to the Otherworld are thrown wide open. The Wild Hunt also rides at times of turmoil (in its form of ghost army foretelling coming battles235). In the case of the Dead Men of Dunharrow, we have similar circumstances dictating the time of the 231 Ibid. p. 79. Ibid. pp. 68-9. 233 Mozzani, Eloïse. Le Livre des superstitions, mythes, croyances et légendes, pp. 1138-9. 234 Rager, Catherine. Dictionnaire des fées et du people invisible dans l’occident païen. Turnhout : Brepols, 2003, p. 156. 235 Ibid. p.420. 232 90 ghosts’ nightly visits. When the Grey Company finally reaches the Stone of Erech “in the dead of night,”236 we are told about the Hill of Erech: Long had the terror of the Dead lain upon that hill and upon the empty fields237 about it. For upon the top stood a black stone, round as a great globe, the height of a man, though its half was buried in the ground. (…) None of the people of the valley dared to approach it, nor would they dwell near; for they said that it was a trysting-place of the Shadow-men, and there they would gather in times of fear, thronging round the Stone and whispering.238 [italics mine] Again we have that element of fear which shall be dealt with further on, but also the information that Tolkien gives us about the times when the Wild Hunt of Middle-Earth is prone to haunt the land: “in times of fear.” It seems that the Dead Men know that they have a role to play in the history of the world, and expect to be summoned to honour their oath and earn their rest at last every time history looks grim and the times are unsettled, as if they could feel the fear that awakens then in the living. But time plays a very special role in some stories from our “real” world. The story of King Herla,239 which illustrates one of the various versions of the Wild Hunt, mentions that the time he and his companions spent in the Dwarf King’s cave is very different from the actual time outside the mountains. When they left the Dwarf wedding to which they had been invited to return to their world, they discovered that the 3 days of celebration in the caves had lasted 3 centuries outside. There is no Rip van Winkle element in Tolkien’s story, just a very peculiar mention in the text telling us more about Gimli’s uncanny experience in the realm of the Dead Men. Just as the Company emerges from darkness on the other side of the mountain, (…) the company passed through another gateway, (…) an a rill ran out beside them; and beyond, going steeply down, was a road between sheer 236 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 69. the empty fields clearly indicate the absence of fertility associated with the evilness of the Dead Men. They guard their hoards, and try to redeem themselves by waiting for the summons of the heir of Isildur, but they are not protectors of the living in this case, nor of the lands they prowl. 238 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 69. 239 Rager, Catherine. Dictionnaire des fées et du people invisible dans l’occident païen. Turnhout : Brepols, 2003, p. 440. 237 91 cliffs, knife-edged against the sky far above. So deep and narrow was that chasm that the sky was dark, and in it small stars glinted. Yet as Gimli after learned it was still two hours ere sunset of the day on which they had set out from Dunharrow; though for all that he could then tell it might have been twilight in some later year, or in some other world.240 [italics mine] Some critics have argued that Tolkien was trying to express his belief in a phenomenon called ‘chimney effect,’ which enables viewers at the bottom of a deep gorge to see stars in the daylight sky, a phenomenon proved impossible by science.241 But that does not explain the end of the extract where Tolkien clearly makes a reference to a time discrepancy between the world of the ghosts in the mountains and the world outside. He even uses the words “in some other world,” which I do not believe to be incidental. Gimli seems to have trouble coping with re-entering the “real world” of Middle-Earth. He appears to be completely disoriented and asks “Where in Middle-earth are we?”242 as if awakening, which is exactly what he tells us later on, when Aragorn dispels Isildur’s curse by declaring the Shadow Host’s oath fulfilled: (…) swiftly the whole grey host drew off and vanished like a mist that is driven back by a sudden wind; and it seemed to me that I awoke from a dream.243 [italics mine] This might be a reference to medieval dream visions in which the living actually met the dead, which is exactly what Gimli experienced, except for the dreaming part! The Dead Men of Dunharrow are an original Northern Wild Hunt, for which Tolkien remained true to his ancient models in literature. A Wild Hunt that still remains what it was supposed to be in the old sagas: lost souls of the dead looking for a final rest, haunting the world of the living to fulfil an oath or expiate a crime or sin, a transposition of Purgatory on earth. This is the only Christian background element that was introduced in this particular example of Middle-Earth ghosts, together with the red demonic eyes that appeared very briefly in the tale. 240 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 67. Hammond, Wayne G. and Scull Christina. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London: Harper Collins, 2005, p. 534. 242 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 68. 243 Ibid. p. 182. 241 92 Some other interesting features include the Dead Men joining arms with the living, much as in some examples quoted by Lecouteux where the Wild Hunt goes forth to battle the Saracens to redeem themselves.244 It is interesting to consider the army of the Dead Men of Dunharrow as a ghost army fighting alongside the living,245 fighting one last time to redeem them-selves. According to Catherine Rager,246ghost armies or troops of ghost warriors are also part of folklore and appear in literature throughout history, even though not necessarily as the Wild Hunt or an emanation thereof, but mainly to re-enact past battles, or foretell difficult times, or other battles. That element of foretelling in the Dead Men of Dunharrow has been evoked, illustrated by their struggling to meet at the sacred place every time the world is in turmoil. But there is more: Tolkien gives us some elements to explain how exactly the Dead Men, after they have been summoned by Aragorn, fight for the forces of Good, as immaterial as they are. Gimli’s description of the Grey Company crossing the Dwimmorberg Mountain already tells us that their main weapon is sheer fear. The account of their assault on the enemies of Gondor gives us more details: And suddenly the Shadow Host that had hung back at the last came up like a grey tide, sweeping all away before it. Faint cries [Gimli] heard, and dim horns blowing, and a murmur as of countless far voices: it was like the echo of some forgotten battle in the Dark Years long ago. Pale swords were drawn; but I know not whether their blades would still bite, for the Dead needed no longer any weapon but fear. None would withstand them.247 [italics mine] What is important in this passage is that like the ghost warriors of folklore, we can see, again, that the ghost army of Dunharrow is not just a silent misty apparition, and the din of their battle cries can be heard. They are compared to “the echo of some forgotten battle,” just as what ghost armies are supposed to be. The oddness of their ghostly appearance and the dim echo of their passing makes them all the more frightening. However, they actually charge the enemy, and not just some other ghost army in the sky, but the real flesh and blood enemy of 244 Lecouteux, Claude. Chasses fantastiques et cohortes de la nuit au Moyen-Age. pp. 118-9. « (…) icy sont les ames des chevaliers et autres gens qui me servoient. Nous allons nous combatre sur les mescréans Sarrasins et ames damneez pour notre pénitence faire ». 245 something that is also found in Norwegian folklore with the Huldrefolk (a ghostly, mist-loving fairy people believed to live in nature) taking arms against the enemies of Norway. See Rager, Catherine. Dictionnaire des fées et du people invisible dans l’occident païen, pp. 476-8. 246 Ibid. pp. 420-2 247 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King. p. 181. 93 the free peoples of Middle-Earth. Tolkien pictures them with drawn swords, and again the image of a tattered army of the dead is evoked when he wonders whether their blades can still bite, but says clearly that weapons of steel are not needed, which is in complete opposition to the role of the steel weapons of the deceased guarding the mounds of the fallen warriors, as we have seen beforehand. Much as the Dead Men had Gimli the Dwarf grovel in the dark during the crossing of the Paths of the Dead, they caused terror among the living whenever they came out of the mountains, a terror again reinforced by their appearance, as mentioned beforehand. During the assault of the enemy ships along the Anduin River, Tolkien does not mention any hacking to pieces at the hands of the Shadow Host: To every ship [the Shadow Host] came that was drawn up, and then they passed over the water to those that were anchored; and all the mariners were filled with a madness of terror and leaped overboard, save the slaves chained to the oars.248 [italics mine] All that the Dead Men do is go (Tolkien uses “flow” in another version of the scene249) from one ship to the other, driving the crew to jump off in sheer terror of the Ghost army. So there is no actual fighting, but fear can be a very deadly weapon. In conclusion, we can say that Tolkien made a unique contribution to the world of ghosts in Middle-Earth when he created the Shadow Host, an army of revenants that is real enough to make hardened warriors flee for their lives, perhaps because they cannot be fought or destroyed with blade and steel. We have gathered enough evidence, a piece here, a piece there, to be able to say that Tolkien’s Dead Men of Dunharrow were clearly fashioned with elements from folklore and remnants of ancient literature that Tolkien must have been familiar with in his work as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and a lover of anything Northern in literature from the moment he could read. His sources must have included the Wild Hunt, mixed with Old Norse elements. 248 Ibid. Tolkien, J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien, ed. The War of the Ring. The History of The Lord of the Rings, part 3. London: Harper Collins, 2002, p. 413. 249 94 95 IV. The Dead of Dagorlad Contrary to the previous examples of ghosts found in Tolkien, some dead in Middleearth have neither a proper, decent grave, nor a chance to redeem themselves. There was a cataclysmic battle between the forces of good and evil on the plains of Dagorlad, a dreary place in front of the main gates of the land of Mordor where Sauron rules. Elves and Men fought alongside against the monstrous armies of Sauron under the leadership of King Isildur, among others. Because they failed to heed the summons, the people of Dunharrow were cursed as we have seen in the preceding pages. After the fight, the dead of both camps were buried on the spot. However, their graves were progressively invaded by the waters of a huge swamp that came to be called the “Dead Marshes,” with dreadful consequences. Dead Faces, John Howe. 96 In the Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins is entrusted with the enormous quest of having to carry Sauron’s ultimate tool of power and corruption, the One Ring, into the seat of evil to destroy it by throwing it into the lava of a volcano where it had originally been forged. During his journey, Frodo and his companions have to cross the Dead Marshes: It was dreary and wearisome. Cold clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.250 [italics mine] And later we find an additional description of the swamps: There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grassblades trembling in small airmovements that they could not feel. ‘Not a bird!’ said Sam mournfully.251 [italics mine] From the moment Frodo sets foot in the Dead Marshes, the tone is given. All the adjectives Tolkien uses to describe the swamp evoke a feeling of despair, fear and death. Though he writes in one of his letters that “the Dead Marshes (…) owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme,”252 of which Tolkien had had intimate experience during the first World War as a British officer posted in the trenches, he also relates to William Morris in the same letter, whose savage Hun characters are said to have first lived in the swamps.253 But the mythological influences are clearly there too. Fenrir, the savage wolf of Norse mythology that will eat Odin at the Ragnarok, the battle at the end of the world, has a name that means “fen- or marsh-dweller,”254 an appropriate name for a monster if marshes are seen as the natural habitat of evil and its spawn. In Beowulf, the lair of the monster attacking King Hroðgar’s hall and warriors is the marshes.255 In Norse folklore, marshes, bogs and swamps 250 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 289. Ibid. 252 Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher, eds. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 303. 253 Ibid. 254 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993, p. 81. 255 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p.6 “Grendel, haunting the marshes, marauding around the heath and the desolate fens;” p. 27 “Grendel was driven under the fen-banks […] to his desolate lair;” p. 28 “marsh-den.” 251 97 are associated with evil supernatural forces. The Celts revered the swamp and bogs, “because of their watery nature but also perhaps because of the element of danger and treachery associated with them.”256 Archeological evidence suggests that the Celts offered sacrifices of objects and sometimes humans to the marshes, much like what was happening in Scandinavia, though there the evidence suggests the marshes were also used as a post-mortem penalty for those who had committed crimes.257 The penalty of death was associated with dumping the body of the criminal into a bog to refuse him, or her, a proper resting place. And as stated earlier in this analysis, marshes were also used as a place of sacrifice to the gods (sometimes following the triple death ritual, see footnote 181, page 76), maybe because the aquatic environment made bogs a gateway to the Otherworld in Celtic or Germanic beliefs, a place where the Danes, e.g., made human sacrifices or sacrificed their booty in the marshes in return for victory until at least the 6th century A.D.258 Though this defilement of graves may happen by accident in Tolkien, we have to take into consideration that Tolkien may also have been influenced by his Norse readings. And he must have been aware of such discoveries as that of the body of the Man of Tollund in a Danish bog,259 which might have inspired the scene of Frodo’s discovery of what lies in the pools of the Dead Marshes, together with Tolkien’s trench warfare memories: They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.260 The bodies of those fallen in battle at Dagorlad are still visible under the water, mysteriously preserved into a semblance of life by the water of the swamp, when in fact, much to Frodo’s and Sam’s horror, they really are the rotting corpses of Elves, Men and Orcs fallen in battle (contrary, for example, to the Man of Tollund whose body was mummified in the peat bog). It 256 Miranda Jane Green. Celtic Myths, pp. 52-3. “What is clear from the majority of the approximately 1,000 bog people found so far (…) is that they met a violent end before ending up in the bogs. Many were stabbed, strangled, hanged or otherwise brutally assaulted.” Maclay, Kathleen. Bog bodies in art and literature. UC Newsroom. August 24, 2008. < http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/8875> 258 Ellis Davison, H.R. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. London: Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 55-6. 259 The body of the Tollund Man was discovered in a peat pit in Denmark on May 8th 1950. See Amt Aarhus, ed. The Tollund Man. A Face from Prehistoric Denmark. <http://www.tollundman.dk/et-lig-dukker-op.asp> 260 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 291. 257 98 is interesting to see that the bodies of the fallen in both camps seem to rest (or rather rot) together in Dagorlad, when we have seen so many examples of the pains the Riders of Rohan or the Elves took to make sure all their fallen comrades were buried with honour under the same mound,261 and sometimes were given the duty to guard the place where they had fallen for eternity. Tolkien gives us no detail about the funeral rites performed after the Battle of Dagorlad, but since the forces of Good prevailed, we can only assume, based on other examples in Tolkien’s works (see pages 44-6 in this study), that Men and Elves had plenty of time to honour their dead by burying them in mass graves separated from the bodies of their enemies. We then also have to assume that the marshes invaded all graves and somehow dispersed the bodies. Or did the mixing of bodies from both sides somehow corrupt the decent funerals of Elves and Men through the power of evil? We shall come back to that issue later on. Contrary to the “physical” revenants haunting the preceding chapters of my study, the Dead of Dagorlad haunt the site of their desecrated graves only as revolting images of their rotting bodies. They are not aggressive per say, but do represent a danger for the unwary travellers who come across the marshes. Particularly so at night when the marshes are haunted by what Gollum262 refers to as “tricksy lights:” ‘Yes, they are all round us,’ he whispered. ‘The tricksy lights. Candles of corpses, yes, yes. Don’t you heed them! Don’t look! Don’t follow them!’263 What is now commonly accepted as “a normal chemical phenomenon prone to happen in summer on the surface of the water in marshlands” [my translation],264 was the source of folkloric and superstitious tales throughout the medieval world. Will-o’the-Wisp265 is only one of its most famous manifestations or interpretations, but illustrates the main theme of a 261 We find examples of this throughout the works of Tolkien and his history of Middle-Earth: the burial mound of Haudh-en-Ndengin, the mounds of the Rohirrim fallen at the siege of the Hornburg, the battle of the Pelennor Fields, the Fords of Isen, and the burial of King Theoden. 262 A former hobbit who has been corrupted so thoroughly by his possession of the One Ring that it extended his life and made him but a shadow of what he was. He serves Frodo and Sam as a guide on their way to Mordor, though his personal motivations are strictly centered on reacquiring the One Ring, his “Precious,” to quench his thirst for its incredible power. Gollum is yet another example of and warning against avarice and the hunger for power. 263 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 290. 264 Rager, Catherine. Dictionnaire des fées et du people invisible dans l’occident païen, p. 339. 265 With Jack o’Lantern, Will-o’the-Wisp is the traditional English elemental spirit that is believed to haunt marshes in folklore, and other places haunted by the souls of the dead. Ibid, pp. 338-41. 99 cunning spirit using this strange floating flame at night to trick the living away from the safe path. It seems harmless when the aim is to get the lonely traveller lost, not when it leads to the victim’s death by drowning. And death has often been associated with these strange lights dancing in the wild at night. They have been called Corpse Light or Corpse Candle, and their function in this chapter of The Lord of the Rings is rather interesting. Margaret Sinex266 points out that the whole chapter of “The Passage of the Dead Marshes” evokes by its language and its landscape a sense of despair, which could allow Frodo to give up his quest and lie to rest. But that rest can only be achieved in death and suicide. Frodo realizes at that point that he might not survive his quest, and the temptation to follow the “tricksy lights” and light one of his own, thereby escaping from the cares of the world is very strong. This is a new trial for Frodo on his way to Mordor, a thin line he has to walk through the marshes, between life and death, fire and water, a perilous place of paradoxes. The question of how bodies could be preserved in the pools in the middle of the swamp many centuries after the battle of Dagorlad remains a mystery. Sam, Frodo’s faithful companion in this hopeless quest, marvels himself at the fact: ‘But that is an age and more ago,’ said Sam. ‘The Dead can’t be really there! Is it some devilry hatched in the Dark Land?’ ‘Who knows? Sméagol doesn’t know,’ answered Gollum. ‘You cannot reach them, you cannot touch them. We tried once, yes, precious. I tried once; but you cannot reach them. Only shapes to see, perhaps, not to touch. No precious! All dead.’ Sam looked darkly at him and shuddered again, thinking that he guessed why Sméagol had tried to touch them.267 Gollum’s perpetual hunger had led him to eat very questionable food before, so it may not come as a surprise that the dead bodies in the swamp water could have tempted him to a cannibal meal much to the horror of Sam at this revelation. After all, there doesn’t seem to be any source of food or any kind of prey in the marshes. And Gollum did look. 266 Sinex, Margaret A. “’Tricksy Lights’: Literary and Folkloric Elements in Tolkien’s Passage of the Dead Marshes?” in Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D.C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger, eds. Tolkien Studies. An Annual Scholarly Review.. Volume II, 2005. Morgantown. West Virginia University Press, 2005. 267 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 292. 100 ‘No […] birds,’ said Gollum. ‘Nice birds!’ He licked his teeth. ‘No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,’ he ended sadly.268 Only “nasty” things seem to live there,269 no other animals or encouraging sign of life that could help the hobbits better cope with this dreary landscape, a fact that reinforces their despair. “Snakeses” and “wormses” and “lots of nasty things” reinforce the image of the marshes as a breeding ground for evil abject creatures and monsters, creatures lurking around gates to the Otherworld (in Beowulf, Grendel’s lair, a mere in the marshes, is also described as “infested with all kinds of reptiles”270). And the promise of spring, if it is “some haggard phantom of green spring”271 brings but little life and little hope. So if the dead bodies of the fallen warriors cannot be reached, what are they really? Like the Army of the Dead (see preceding chapter), their appearance gives them a semblance of reality and life that they do not really have. How is this possible? Sam’s reaction at the discovery might give us a possible explanation. ‘The Dead can’t be really there! Is it some devilry hatched in the Dark Land?’272 Gollum speaks of “shapes to see, perhaps, not to touch.”273 Is it possible that Sauron had a hand in this? Was some devilry of his created in Mordor, the Dark Land, and used in the marshes of Dagorlad? Tom Shippey thinks “that Sauron, though defeated in battle, has somehow managed to take his revenge on the dead, and now holds them in his grip; perhaps, worst of all, that all the dead are hostile to the living,”274 and that the dead warriors are “an illusion […] intended […] to cause fear and demoralization.”275 Would it be wrong to assume that Sauron, who has posted watchful creatures throughout Middle-Earth to find and catch the Hobbits and recover his ring, and to guard every entrance into Mordor, couldn’t have ignored the passage of the Dead Marshes and created some sort of 268 Ibid. pp. 289-90. Interestingly, much as Coleridge used the « Death-Lights » in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the comparison doesn’t stop there between Tolkien’s marshes and Coleridge’s dead sea. When the mariner’s ship is stranded as a sort of punishment for his killing of the albatross, the bird in this story, the only living things to be seen in the ocean were “slimy things [that] did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea.” Another possible source of inspiration for the episode of the Dead Marshes? Wain, John, ed. The Oxford Anthology of Great English Poetry. Vol. II. Oxford: OUP, 1996 (first published 1986), p. 109. 270 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, p. 47. 271 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 296. 272 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 292. 273 Ibid. 274 Shippey, T.A. J.R.R. Tolkien. Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins, 2000, p. 217. 275 Ibid. p. 218. 269 101 barrier there as well? The “fell light”276 in the eyes of the dead rotting in the water could indicate just that. Just enough unexplained hostility of the dead for the living to indicate an intervention from Mordor. Another detail that supports this theory is the sudden extinguishment of the lights in the marshes when a Ringwraith appears in the sky, riding a serpentine abomination in the light of the moon, as if the tricksy lights recognized an evil greater than themselves to which they showed fealty by dimming and going out in the rush of wind of the Ringwraith’s passing.277 The unexplained mixing of bodies from both camps discussed earlier in this study could also be Sauron’s revenge on the dead warriors that had been victorious on his armies and robbed him of much of his power for so long. This would then be a voluntary desecration of the tombs of the fallen to rob them of a proper grave, to defile their honour and punish them for their victory, and another way for Sauron to desecrate nature, a perversion of reality that only adds up to the dreary influences of the marshes and has a profound despairing effects on the Hobbits. And as Margaret Sinex wonders, could the rotting dead warriors be yet another representation of the “Restless Dead”278 in Middle-Earth? “Under mounds, under mountains and […] under marsh the unquiet dead await the living,” as she puts it, a clear reminder of Tolkien’s being influenced by Old Norse “murderous, meaty revenants.”279 In a sense, and though they seem to be rotting as opposed to the draugar in sagas whose bodies are found to be “undecayed,” though usually bloated and “coal-blue” in their graves, the Dead of Dagorlad still should have decayed a long time before the Hobbits found them, and so like the draugar they are “all undecayed, and most evil to look on.”280 If we check Tolkien’s early versions of the chapter, we discover that Tolkien mentions the following in an outline of the Passage of the Dead Marshes chapter : Pools where there are faces some horrible, some fair – but all corrupted. Gollum says it is said that they are memories (?) of those who fell in ages 276 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 291. Ibid. p. 293. 278 Sinex, Margaret A. “’Tricksy Lights’: Literary and Folkloric Elements in Tolkien’s Passage of the Dead Marshes?”, p. 107. 279 Ibid. 280 Description of Thorolf Halt-Foot’s body, a notorious draugr in Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Story of the EreDwellers (Eyrbyggja Saga). <http://omacl.org/EreDwellers/chapter34.html> 277 102 past in the Battle [of Dagorlad]. In the moon if you looked in some pools you saw your own face fouled and corrupt and dead.281 [italics mine] And a couple of pages later, Tolkien himself wonders in his notes about the dead bodies: “But are they really there?”282 A thought that would indicate that the Dead of Dagorlad are indeed one of Sauron’s devilries put there to daunt and discourage the people of Middle-Earth from approaching his lair. In this particular example, we see a mixture of Scandinavian and Celtic beliefs about the supernatural character of marshes and swamps, but also a very Germanic belief in their being a breeding ground for evil or fell creatures. Tolkien added a measure of punishment and the desecration of graves to the description, all insisting on the power of corruption and evil. What is most striking is the apparent use by Sauron of the glorious fallen in battle as guardians of his northern border, inanimate ghosts of untouchable rotting flesh that strike fear and despair in the hearts of Tolkien’s heroes, where original Old Norse or Anglo-Saxon undead act of their own volition and serve no clear master. 281 Tolkien, J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien, ed. The War of the Ring. The History of The Lord of the Rings, part 3, p. 105. 282 Ibid. p.109. 103 V. Ghosts in Dreams Elven Boat, John Howe. 104 Before moving into the analysis of another category of hauntings present in MiddleEarth, it is important to stress the ambivalence of the dead in Old Norse literature . Régis Boyer states that: […] les anciens Scandinaves avaient deux perceptions centrales du mort, privilégiant soit sa réalité physique soit son âme immortelle. […] Le mort est un esprit, il a une âme immortelle […] susceptible de s’évader de son support corporel afin d’agir pour son propre compte. La nécromancie est amplement attestée dans l’Edda. Les morts reviennent sous forme de visions, de rêves ou d’apparitions, tout à fait en accord avec les usages chrétiens. Odin est alors le dieu des morts vivants, le maître-magicien […].283 So according to Boyer, the living dead we have seen in previous chapters would illustrate the first perception of the dead, whereas the following examples would rather illustrate the second perception, which has not yet been dealt with in this study. For this particular example of Middle-Earth ghosts, I will first delve into one particular storyline from The Silmarillion. When Beleriand, a large area of Middle-Earth, was mostly taken over by evil after the disaster of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad battle, some men managed to form a pocket of resistance in the forests of Dorthonion and fight a guerrilla war against the armies of the then Dark Lord, Morgoth. They were led by Beren and his father Barahir (the founders of the line of Men from which Aragorn is the last descendant in The Lord of the Rings). Gorlim, one of their 10 companions, still believed that he could find his wife in the lands devastated by the enemy. When searching the remains of his house “plundered and forsaken,”284 he was ambushed by the captain of Morgoth, Sauron, and taken captive. Sauron and his hunters tortured him to learn the whereabouts of the lair of Barahir and his band. At the end, Sauron tricked Gorlim into believing his wife was still alive and Gorlim could join her in return for the information, and then killed him after obtaining what he seeked. And then Sauron and his forces: 283 284 Boyer, Régis. Héros et dieux du Nord. Paris : Flammarion, 1997, p. 104. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. p. 194. 105 … surprised the Men of Dorthonion and slew them all, save one. For Beren son of Barahir had been sent by his father on a perilous errand to spy upon the ways of the Enemy, and he was far afield when the lair was taken. But as he slept benighted in the forest he dreamed that carrion-birds sat thick as leaves upon bare trees beside a mere, and blood dripped from their beaks. Then Beren was aware in his dream of a form that came to him across the water, and it was a wraith of Gorlim; and it spoke to him declaring his treachery and death, and bade him make haste to warn his father. Then Beren awoke, and sped through the night, and came back to the lair of the outlaws on the second morning. But as he drew near the carrion-birds rose from the ground and sat in the alder-trees beside Tarn Aeluin [a lake], and croaked in mockery. There Beren buried his father’s bones, and raised a cairn of boulders above him, and swore upon it an oath of vengeance.285 [italics mine] Beren’s dream starts with foretelling pictures of a slaughter symbolised by the carrion-birds with blood-dripping beaks, and gets more interesting once the “wraith” of Gorlim appears. Apparently Gorlim’s ghost intruded upon Beren’s dream to warn him of his betrayal and the imminent disaster threatening Barahir and his companions. Too late though this warning came, it is nonetheless interesting for this study because it opens yet another door on the world of ghosts in Middle-Earth, the dead visiting the living in their dreams, which seems to have been commonly believed to be possible in the Middle Ages. Lecouteux identifies several categories of dreams in the Germanic world: allegorical dreams, prophecy dreams, visits in dreams by living people, and visits from the Otherworld.286 The example of Gorlim belongs to the last category, the only one present in Middle-Earth. The ghost of Gorlim itself is not clearly described, except by the word wraith that plays a large role in The Lord of the Rings, where it is used mostly in connection with the Ringwraiths, and while the latter are “bent” and “twisted”287 shadow beings mostly driven by hatred and anger, here Gorlim crosses the threshold from the Otherworld, coming to Beren “across the water,” as an omen of death. The dream also occurred to Beren “in the forest,” which together with water and orchards are contact points to the Otherworld (e.g. Heurodis is visited by two knights from the Otherworld 285 Ibid. p. 195-6. Lecouteux, Claude. Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Âge, pp. 84-6. 287 See interesting analysis of the word “wraith” in Shippey, T.A. J.R.R. Tolkien. Author of the Century, pp.121-8 286 106 while sleeping in an orchard in Sir Orfeo288). The “mere” which Gorlim crossed to speak with Beren in Beren’s dream symbolises the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It can be compared with the stream in the elegiac poem Pearl across which the narrator of the poem sees the ghost of his lost daughter, and which might have inspired the scene to Tolkien who published a modern English translation of Pearl.289 The wraith of Gorlim could also be driven by guilt at his betrayal of Barahir and his men, or anger at his being captured and tricked by Sauron. Either way it felt the urge to warn Beren of the impending danger. One might wonder why the spectre of Gorlim chose to warn Beren when the latter was too far away to be able to do anything about the attack, and not another member of the band, except if one considers that Gorlim’s wraith realized it was too late to do anything to save Barahir, or that it was necessary for Beren to get the information so that he could recover his father’s ring in time before it is taken to Sauron? After burying his father and swearing his oath of vengeance,290 Beren pursued the Orcs that slaughtered Barahir’s group, killed their captain and recovered his father’s hand291 and the ring that was still on it before they could be brought to Sauron as proof of Barahir’s demise. The importance of that ring is obvious as a precursor to the One Ring that will appear in The Lord of the Rings. It has no power of its own, does not give its bearer supernatural might, but is important in attesting the heroic quality and lineage of the bearer, as it will identify Aragorn as the lawful heir to the throne of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings, ages after Beren had disappeared. It is a token of good and resistance that will again be worn by guerrilla fighters when Aragorn and his rangers kept a semblance of peace in lands abandoned by the kings in Middle-Earth at the time of the plot of The Lord of the Rings. We can find another example of ghostly apparition in somebody’s dream in The Lord of the Rings. I have already described the burial rite performed by Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli to honour their fallen comrade Boromir, who was put in a boat with his belongings and 288 Tolkien, J.R.R., ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, p. 118. Tolkien, J.R.R., ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, p.84. 290 Again, Tolkien’s heroes feel compelled to give their comrades a proper grave, even when the success of their mission (here the avenging of Barahir and the recovery of his ring) is thwarted by the time spent building a cairn, for example. And life-binding oaths are taken. It is their duty to pay proper respects to the dead. 291 Later on in the tale of The Silmarillion, Beren loses his right hand, bitten off by a Fenrir-like creature defending the entrance to the Dark Lord’s lair (p. 218). And most of his epic adventures end then until his death, as if he had lost his heroic powers. In the Celtic world, the king who loses his right arm and/or hand cannot reign anymore because he has lost his balance and has too much negative potential resting in his sole left hand (Chevalier, Jean and Gheerbrant, Alain. Dictionnaire des symboles, p. 601). Compare also with the myth of Tyr, who in Norse mythology sacrificed his arm to emprison the wolf Fenrir and save Valhalla (Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 337) 289 107 the weapons of the enemy he had slain, and given to the river Anduin and ultimately to the sea, a procedure that is obviously connected to Viking tradition, and is reminiscent, for example, of the burial at sea of Scyld in Beowulf,292 though there was no dream involved there. First of all, it is worth mentioning that though the death of Boromir happens in the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, it finds its way back in the tale again both in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The extract in The Return of the King tells of the wizard Gandalf arriving with one of the Hobbits in the capital of the Kingdom of Gondor, Minas Tirith, and meeting with Denethor, the Steward of the King (at the time of the events related in The Lord of the Rings, there hasn’t been a king in Gondor for generations, and Stewards have long assumed authority until someone with the right lineage can be found). Although Gandalf wanted to keep the news of Boromir’s death from his father, Denethor, for political and strategic reasons, he soon realises news of Boromir’s fate has reached Minas Tirith before him: ‘I have received this,’ said Denethor, and laying down his rod he lifted from his lap the thing that he had been gazing at. In each hand he held up one half of a great horn cloven through the middle: a wild-ox horn bound with silver. […] ‘I heard it blowing dim upon the northern marches thirteen days ago, and the River brought it to me, broken: it will wind no more.’293 The horn of Boromir was heard when he blew it to warn the rest of the Fellowship of the Ring of the attack by evil forces, and its cloven pieces were found and brought back to Denethor. In a scene reminiscent of Roland blowing his horn at the Pass of Roncevaux to warn Charles the Great of an attack on the rearguard of his army,294 Boromir also sent a desperate call for help to all who could hear the sound of his horn and recognize it for what it was. Charles the Great recognized the omen of death when hearing his nephew’s horn blowing, and so did Denethor and also Faramir in The Lord of the Rings when they heard Boromir’s final horn call. In The 292 Heaney Seamus, tr. Beowulf, pp. 4-5. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, pp. 25-6. 294 ‘The count Rollanz has nobly fought and well, But he is hot, and all his body sweats; Great pain he has, and trouble in his head, His temples burst when he the horn sounded; But he would know if Charles will come to them, Takes the olifant, and feebly sounds again. That Emperour stood still and listened then: "My lords," said he, "Right evilly we fare!This day Rollanz, my nephew shall be dead: I hear his horn, with scarcely any breath.’ in Douglas B. Killings, ed. The Song of Roland, Translated by Charles Scott Moncrief (London, 1919). Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #12. August 1995. <http://omacl.org/Roland/>, verses 2099-2108. Like Roland’s, Boromir’s horn is broken in the fight, and though Boromir’s sword is broken too, Roland tries hard to break his sword Durendal so that it will not fall into enemy hands, but dies trying. 293 108 Two Towers we can read Faramir’s own account of hearing the horn blast. Faramir is Boromir’s brother and is in charge of Gondorian forces along the Anduin River to guard the kingdom against an attack from Mordor. His meeting with the two questing Hobbits, Frodo and Sam, happened two days before Gandalf reached Minas Tirith with another Hobbit and met Faramir’s father: ‘[…] eleven days ago at about this hour of the day, I heard the blowing of [Boromir’s] horn: from the northward it seemed, but dim, as if it were but an echo in the mind. A boding of ill we thought it, my father and I, for no tidings had we heard of Boromir since he went away, and no watcher on our borders had seen him pass’295 Like Count Roland, Boromir is in great pain and desperately blowing his horn to call for help. In both cases help came too late. And Faramir deemed the sound of the horn “a boding of ill,”296 an omen that could only mean ill news for his brother.297 Interestingly, Faramir added that he heard the sound of the horn “dim, as if it were but an echo in the mind.” This is especially important when we read the account of Faramir’s strange subsequent experience: ‘And on the third night after another, a stranger thing befell me. I sat at night by the waters of Anduin, in the grey dark under the young pale moon, watching the ever-moving stream; and the sad reeds were rustling. So do we ever watch the shores nigh Osgiliath, which our enemies now partly hold, and issue from it to harry our lands. But that night all the world slept at the midnight hour. Then I saw, or it seemed that I saw, a boat floating on the water, glimmering grey, a small boat of a strange fashion with a high prow, and there was none to row or steer it. An awe fell on me, for a pale light was round it. But I rose and went to the bank, and began to walk out into the stream, for I was drawn towards it. Then the boat turned towards me, and stayed its pace, and floated slowly by within my hand’s reach, yet I durst 295 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 341. Lecouteux associates the horn of the Wild Hunt to the horn of Death hunting its prey, a sound that foretells death. See Lecouteux, Claude. Chasses fantastiques et cohortes de la nuit au Moyen-Age, p. 77. 297 In The Return of the King, we have another example of horns being blown to announce battle and death (p.132-3): “[Théoden] seized a great horn […], and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains.” 296 109 not handle it. It waded deep, as if it were heavily burdened, and it seemed to me as it passed under my gaze that it was almost filled with clear water, from which came the light; and lapped in the water a warrior lay asleep. A broken sword was on his knee. I saw many wounds on him. It was Boromir, my brother, dead. I knew his gear, his sword, his beloved face. One thing only I missed: his horn. […] Boromir! I cried. Where is thy horn? Whither goest thou? O Boromir? But he was gone. The boat turned into the stream and passed glimmering on into the night. Dreamlike it was, and yet no dream, for there was no waking. And I do not doubt that he is dead and has passed down the River to the Sea.’298 [italics mine] Did Faramir dream the encounter or did he really see the funeral boat of Boromir? Although he insists in the text that “there was no waking” and therefore no sleep, all the other clues indicate that Faramir was in a dream-like state. Ghosts do not necessarily have to speak in dreams to carry a message to the living, and seeing an image of his dead brother was clear enough for Faramir. The vision occurred at night, of course, and “by the waters,” “the ever moving stream” of the Anduin River, a place of choice for a meeting between the living and the dead crossing over from beyond the grave. It was also an auspicious time for supernatural apparitions: Faramir sat “in the grey dark” [italics mine] and under the light of the “young pale moon,”299 with the “sad reeds” rustling in an almost hypnotic fashion (the reeds and the rest of the scene also remind us of the setting of the Dead Marshes when Sam, Frodo and Gollum were confronted by the apparitions of the dead warriors). It was midnight, another favourable condition for an encounter with revenants, and “all the world slept,” so why not Faramir as well, who doubts himself and says “it seemed that I saw.” The apparition in itself was impressive, the boat is “glimmering grey,” “a pale light” is around it” and Faramir was in awe of this ghost ship containing another sleeping warrior. As he walked to the boat, literally or in his dream, and “drawn towards it” by a mysterious force, Faramir saw more details about its contents. His dead brother, his broken sword, the many wounds inflicted on Boromir in his last battle, but not his horn, which was found and ends up in Denethor’s hands sometime in the next two days. And the missing horn seems to unsettle Faramir almost as much as the fact that his brother lay dead in this boat on the river. The missing horn is a detail 298 Ibid. pp. 341-2. The Moon is the symbol of the passage from life to death, and from death to life. See in Chevalier, Jean and Gheerbrant, Alain. Dictionnaire des symboles, p. 590. The young moon also symbolizes the beginning of a new cycle. 299 110 that would tend to indicate that Faramir really saw something, but then it might just be another way of stressing the disappearance of Boromir and everything that he was, the ancestral horn having become part of who he was, and now lying broken in his father’s lap. The absence of the horn is disturbing to him because the blast of the horn was the last clue Faramir had of his brother’s existence before having this vision, and this is a bad omen. Faramir ends the description of his strange encounter by saying that he is sure that his brother is dead (though he has not really seen him on the river), and also that Boromir must have “passed down the River to the Sea,” yet again another possible image for death. This metaphor is clearly stressed by Tolkien in the elegiac song sung by Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli as they honour Boromir and push his funeral boat into the river: I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey; […]’Ask not of me where he doth dwell – so many bones there lie On the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky; So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing Sea.’ […]’And Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, bore him upon its breast.’ ‘O Boromir! The Tower of Guard [Minas Tirith] shall ever northward gaze To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of days.’300 The song describes Boromir’s last journey on the river, both the Anduin and the River that separates the dead from the living, and insists on the importance of the falls of Rauros as the last place where he will be remembered, not the sea, where he will not be found because he will be lost in the multitudes that took the same journey before him across this Middle-Earth version of the Styx. In my opinion Faramir was indeed visited in his dreams only by the ghost image of his dead brother, for although the boat craft of Elves is renowned in Middle-Earth for making unsinkable ships that protect their passengers, it is difficult to imagine that the funeral boat of Boromir could have survived unscathed the formidable Falls of Rauros on the River Anduin and losing only the horn in the process, even though there was a legend later in Gondor that the boat did survive the Falls.301 But then again, there is a strong element of magic in 300 301 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Two Towers, p. 17-18. Ibid. p. 16-17. 111 Tolkien’s world which cannot be ignored but would necessitate a whole study of its own. This example also presents similarities with some details found in Pearl, even more so than the story of Gorlim’s ghost. The character who was visited by a ghost sat by a flowing stream, and saw something from beyond the world of the living, images on the water. Faramir entered an altered state of consciousness that allowed him to envision his brother’s death, and his voyage to the Otherworld. Under the light of moon, he saw the dead but peacefully at rest, “asleep,” under a curtain of water, just like the dead warriors Sam and Frodo saw in the Dead Marshes. Could the latter have been under the spell of the moon, the mists, and the water as well and entered another state of consciousness that allowed them to establish visual contact with the dead? The Passage of the Marshes, as we saw earlier on in this study, is different in its setting to Faramir’s Dream in that evil had a hand in the visions visiting the Hobbits in the water of the mere, offering them not warriors lying at peace but visions of horrific rotting bodies with an evil light in their eyes. 112 113 VI. Conclusion Before moving on to the general conclusion of this study, it is interesting to have one last look at all the ghosts found in Tolkien and ascertain the nature of their deaths, to check whether their subsequent transformation into visitors from the Otherworld was due to an “abnormal” death. The warriors slain in battle in Middle-Earth and given a decent grave, albeit a mass grave, seem to be content with guarding their resting places with their rusting swords (Elves and Men buried under Haudh-en-Nirnaeth), unless evil somehow manages to corrupt their death and transform them into visions of horror to discourage the living (episode of the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings). Dying in battle seems a fair way to die, assuming the grave is not disturbed or the funeral rites have been properly observed, as is also the case with Boromir, whose death was heroic, but who nevertheless felt compelled to visit his brother Faramir in death to warn him of his fate (and also perhaps to confirm that he had died a noble death, as his wounds and gear seemed to show). Death in battle was always a very honourable way to die in old Scandinavian society and ensured the warrior entrance into Valhalla (the etymology of Valh ll in Old Norse “derives from valr ‘those slain on the battlefield’ and holl ‘hall’ and was understood […] as ‘hall of the slain’302). Dishonourable deaths, such as the one of Gorlim who committed treason and was killed by the enemy with no chance to redeem himself, led the dead to go to great length to undo and redeem their mistakes or crimes. Gorlim appears to Beren in a dream vision too late to save Beren’s father, but it allows Beren to recover his precious heirloom in time. The Army of the Dead died a dishonourable death in that they remained hidden in their mountain dwellings after their perjury of an oath made to their overlord, and dwindled to total extinction without having a chance to redeem themselves either on the battlefield. They had to come back and haunt the living as one army until a chance was offered to them to expiate the ultimate crime of ancient society, their oathbreaking, and fulfil their oath so that they could finally rest in peace. The Barrow wights are strange creatures, spirits of unknown origin that invaded the graves of noble Men. They are beyond the categories of abnormal deaths recognized by Northern European peoples in the early Middle Ages, except maybe that they fell under the dominion of evil, regardless of what they were to begin with, and if they did, they certainly show no intent of expiating whatever 302 Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 347. 114 sin or oathbreaking they committed, or of seeking revenge for their plight. They are devoted entirely to evil, and, like draugar in sagas, it takes a courageous hero like Frodo with a magic weapon or a powerful mage like Tom Bombadil to wound them or exorcise their haunting place. They are a pure product of Middle-Earth, but they also show many attributes of the revenants found in sagas and other ancient tales that might have inspired Tolkien. 115 IV. General Conclusion Ghosts were definitely not the only element that Tolkien found the inspiration for throughout Germanic mythology and literature. In my opinion, however, they are highly representative of how Tolkien was influenced by literary and mythological relics of the ancient world, and subsequently adapted the borrowed elements for his fictional world of Middle Earth. This process lends his world of fiction considerable authenticity. It contributes to develop a sense of mythology, superstition and beliefs in the peoples of Middle-Earth, and hence, as this analysis has demonstrated it, gives his creation an additional dimension through the intricacy of details he supplied. Many attributes of Germanic draugar and myths are present in Tolkien’s work, but these elements were always transformed somehow into something definitely typical for the peoples and history of Middle-Earth. The examples investigated in this study reveal how, for instance, the myth of the Wild Hunt, which was extremely popular and recurrent in early Germanic literature, was adapted by Tolkien for Middle-Earth in the guise of the Dead Men of Dunharrow, and retained some of its original qualities while it simultaneously became an unmistakable item of history and “reality” in Tolkien’s world. The Army of the Dead rode out at similar times as its Germanic models, choosing to haunt the world of the living at night, always in periods of turmoil, and also seeming to be bent on a specific errand to redeem themselves from a past crime, namely their unforgivable oathbreaking, which seemed to have damned them for eternity. Everything in their appearance raised fear in the living, just like their medieval counterparts. They reeked of the supernatural and their rusted swords were pale weapons compared to the terror their presence instilled among those unfortunate enough to witness their passing. However, their silent haunting meshes with Middle-Earth history, and allows Tolkien to link Aragorn, the heir to the throne of Gondor, to his ancestors, thereby giving credence to his claim and confirming his lineage. Their eerie charge into the unsuspecting hordes of the enemy, accompanied by dim calls to battle blown on their phantom horns, echoes the real charge of the army of the Rohirrim, again linking Middle-Earth past and present, lending hope to the forces of Good by showing them that not all that seemed to be evil was completely and hopelessly enslaved to the will of the enemy, and that hope stems from the most unlikely sources. Their redemption at the hands of Aragorn signalled a turn of the tide in the war that was destroying Middle-Earth. Although the Army of the Dead is but a detail in Tolkien’s 116 work, it played an important role in the larger scheme of events in Middle-Earth. As a brief survey of the roles of all the other ghosts in that larger scheme of events will show, the Wild Hunt of Dunharrow is no exception. The episode of the Barrow Downs in The Fellowship of the Rings also illustrates the broader role of Tolkien’s ghosts in his epic tales. If the Hobbits had not run across the trap set for them in the old burial mounds by the Barrow wights, they would not have had to be rescued by Tom Bombadil, and therefore they would not have been presented with the ancient swords retrieved from the exorcised burial mound, one of which became the instrument of the WitchKing’s demise at the end of The Return of the King303. In a sense, the Hobbits’ sinister encounter with the draugar-like creatures haunting the Barrow Downs ensured a later victory for the forces of Good in Middle-Earth. The dreadful rotting corpses of a long-gone battle in the Dead Marshes of Dagorlad stood a malevolent watch on one of the paths leading into the stronghold of the enemy, but they also serve a higher purpose. Not only do they help open another window on the past of MiddleEarth, thereby adding a dimension of time to the narrative of The Lord of the Rings, but they also open a vista on a future in which war and possibly a victory by Sauron have transformed Middle-Earth into a huge battlefield filled with rotting corpses. While the enticing “tricksy lights” offer Frodo, the Ring-carrier, a chance to walk off his path and his quest to find everlasting relief in death by joining the dead warriors, the episode also helps bolster the Hobbits’ resolve to carry on and resume their quest, because it gave them a glimpse of what evil could do to the world and its people, even going as far as to corrupt the dead. Even the ghosts enticed by dream-visions in Middle-Earth have a higher significance than just adding another thrilling element to the tale. Gorlim’s redemptory warning of Beren in the latter’s dream alerts Beren to Gorlim’s treason of Barahir and his band of warriors, but also gives him a chance, as pointed out before, to retrieve his father’s ring before it is utterly lost to the enemy. While this might not be very important in the plot of The Silmarillion, the significance of the ring’s retrieval is revealed in The Lord of the Rings when it appears that Aragorn is the descendant of Barahir,304 as he can attest by the ring he is wearing, the very ring that Beren retrieved from the enemy in a distant past. In the same way as Aragorn’s 303 304 Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The Return of the King, p. 141. Ibid. Appendix A, p. 417. 117 freeing of the Ghost Host, the ring of Barahir is one of many clues in the plot of The Lord of the Rings that confirm Aragorn’s claim to the throne of Gondor as the rightful king. Even the vision by Faramir, possibly in his dreams, of the passing funeral boat of his brother Boromir served a higher purpose in the order of things in Middle-Earth. First of all, it let Faramir know that his brother had died an honourable death in battle, which has great import for the peoples of the novel’s fictive world. But it also alerted Faramir to the fact that he was then the last heir to the stewardship of the realm of Gondor, and that the future of the latter would rest on his shoulders once his father had passed away (at that point, he still had no idea that a rightful heir to the throne was on his way). While the news of Boromir’s death contributed to driving his father Denethor305 mad and nearly contrived to the victory of the enemy, it also carried a message of hope for all warriors of Middle-Earth: if they should die doing the right thing, they would pass on “to the ocean” and reach the equivalent of MiddleEarth’s Valhalla. It was also certainly instrumental in Faramir’s heroic deeds against the enemy in the following events of The Return of the King, maybe simply because of a need for revenge that made Faramir strike harder at the enemy (though his courage in battle might also have stemmed from a sense of despair at the loss of his brother and from having to assume the responsibility of the future of the realm). Therefore we can assume that all the ghosts created by Tolkien carry greater meaning than just offering another monster encounter in the plot of his books. They are fundamentally linked to the main plot of the saga of the One Ring, while being intricately woven into the author’s fantasy world. This study has also opened new perspectives for further research. One of these potential topics would illustrate the particular process of borrowing and rewriting used by Tolkien, and would not concern ghosts, at least not directly. I was struck by the recurrent appearance in Tolkien’s fiction of ancient, semi-magical weapons306; family heirlooms passed down from generation to generation or discovered in the lairs of vanquished monsters. The original magic swords of Roland de Roncevaux, Beowulf and Grettir seem to have inspired 305 Denethor is the Stewart of Gondor at the time of the plot of The Lord of the Rings, “proud and wise, yet [… fearing] that Gandalf and Aragorn were plotting to supplant him; [… he] became fixed in pride and despair.” Foster, Robert. The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth, p. 85. 306 See on the subject of magical weapons in Tolkien : Bouteille, Cécile. ‘Armes et armures dans Le Seigneur des anneaux.’ in Carruthers, Leo, ed. Tolkien et le Moyen Âge. Paris : CNRS Editions, 2007, pp. 175-189. 118 Tolkien, who then worked them into his tales almost obsessively. The most obvious use of this motive is without doubt the One Ring in The Hobbit, found by chance by Bilbo Baggins under the mountains (realm of the Dead by excellence) in the lair of another typical Grendelderived monster, Gollum. But Bilbo’s sword “Sting” that held Gollum at bay was found in the lair of defeated Trolls, together with an Elvish sword that allowed Thorin to slay the king of the Goblins in the Misty Mountains. Bard’s family heirloom, the only arrow left from the golden age of the city of Dale, is the one weapon that can slay Smaug the Dragon and take symbolical revenge for its victims. The swords that Tom Bombadil gave the Hobbits after saving them from the Barrow Wight were found amid the treasures in the mound, and one of them will be the only weapon capable of slaying the Witch King in The Return of the King, again forged long ago by Men he had defeated, giving them a sort of poetic justice. Tolkien used fragments of beliefs and some details, like the ghosts of the Wild Hunt or the walking dead guarding the mounds in Norse sagas, which fit perfectly into his neo-heroic Germanic world. The legend of heirlooms or magical weapons found in the lairs of monsters by a hero are recorded in Beowulf, for example, when the hero discovers in Grendel’s lair the only sword that can defeat its mother. Similarly in Grettir’s tale of battle with the Giant in his lair under the waterfall (a tale which bears close resemblance to Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel), Grettir sees a sword hanging on the wall in the Giant’s lair.307 Another area of research to pursue, this time more in relation with the supernatural and revenants, is the role of Sauron as a necromancer in Middle-Earth. I do not think it accidental that Tolkien actually gave Sauron the disguise of the Necromancer of Dol Guldur in the plot of The Hobbit. Sauron perverted the Dead of Dagorlad, controlled the Barrow wights, and of course his nine servants, the Nazgûl or the Ringwraiths who also have some attributes from the Otherworld, and therefore shares unique characteristics with Odin, master necromancer in Norse mythology. As far as Odin is concerned, I have already stressed the many similarities linking him with the character of Gandalf the Grey. These are but random examples of some avenues of research that are suggested by my essay on Tolkien’s works. Ghosts in Middle-Earth illustrate Tolkien’s technique as a writer, but they also testify to the vast body of legends and literature that he drew on to craft his unique fantasy world. This paper has merely focused on a very minor detail of his creation, but that detail has revealed 307 Killings, Douglas B., ed. The Saga of Grettir the Strong (Grettir’s Saga) <http://omacl.org/ Grettir/ gr6481.html> Part LXVI. Grettir Slays a Giant. 119 much in terms of the intricacy of influences as well as the minutiae of his achievements. It does not certify that Tolkien actually reached his aim of creating a mythology for England, but it certainly did contribute to (re)acquaint the readers of the father of modern fantasy literature with a very rich literary heritage. * 120 121 V. Bibliography Books : Primary Material : Alexander, Michael, tr. Beowulf. 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