Are the Barrow Wights still guarding the tombs?

[BalrogRingDestroyer]

Supposedly he put them there to guard the tombs and keep the realm from being retaken (or something like that). But if it's his evil magic alone keeping the wights as undead, then upon his death in the Battle of Minas Tirith, the wights should have all perished.

 

[gentleDrift]

I don't think that the Barrow-wights perished, though there might not be a way to know. This is because as I understood the text, the barrow wights were not simply bodies kept undead by some spell of the Witch-king, but rather inhabited by some "third party" spirits. In Appendix A it says that

It was at this time [during the Great Plague 0f 1636] that an end came of the Dúnedain of Cardolan, and evil spirits out of Angmar and Rhudaur entered into the deserted mounds and dwelt there.​

That certainly sounds like the "evil spirits" acted quite independently from the Witch-king and were not necessarily created by him or even directly commanded by him. In Unfinished Tales, The Hunt for the Ring, it is stated in an alternative version that

The Witch-king... had known something of... the Tyrn Gorthad of Cardolan, now the Barrow-downs, whose evil wights had been sent there by himself.​

Here it is made clear that the Witch-king actually sent the Barrow-wights to the Barrow-downs (so many hyphens ), but still they seem to be separate entities from himself.

Note also the poem Tom Bombadil uses to rescue the Hobbits from "their" wight:

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.​

Especially the last two lines certainly sound to me as if Tom were not merely banishing the wight from that particular barrow, but "pushing" him outside the world through the Doors of Night like Melkor at the end of the First Age. This would suggest that the Barrow-wight was actually a minor Maia-spirit.

That last part is really only speculation, but I think it is quite clear that the wights were spirits independent from the Witch-king and therefore not bound to him like for example the foundations of Barad-Dur were bound to the One Ring. So I see no reason why they should have perished at his death.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Good points, gentleDrift. Although those last lines are ambiguous, and open to interpretation. "Darker than the darkness" could be descriptive, i.e. "[You are] darker than the darkness".

Or it could be curse or command: "[Let you be] lost and forgotten, [even] darker than the darkness where" etc.

I'd hesitate to ascribe to Tom the power to personally banish any being through the Gates of Night; that would make him a very powerful character indeed. Of course, there have been arguments made that he is a Maia himself, or even one of the Valar. I disagree with those arguments, but who knows?

In any event, the concensus seems to be that the Wights couldn't survive in sunlight, so breaking open the barrow itself appears to be enough to banish them.

BTW, IIRC there is at least one reference to "Maiar and lesser spirits" in the Silmarillion, in which case, the wights might number among these.

 

[Vardarianna]

I don't think that the Barrow-wights perished, though there might not be a way to know. This is because as I understood the text, the barrow wights were not simply bodies kept undead by some spell of the Witch-king, but rather inhabited by some "third party" spirits. In Appendix A it says that

It was at this time [during the Great Plague 0f 1636] that an end came of the Dúnedain of Cardolan, and evil spirits out of Angmar and Rhudaur entered into the deserted mounds and dwelt there.​

That certainly sounds like the "evil spirits" acted quite independently from the Witch-king and were not necessarily created by him or even directly commanded by him. In Unfinished Tales, The Hunt for the Ring, it is stated in an alternative version that

​

The Witch-king... had known something of... the Tyrn Gorthad of Cardolan, now the Barrow-downs, whose evil wights had been sent there by himself.​

Here it is made clear that the Witch-king actually sent the Barrow-wights to the Barrow-downs (so many hyphens ), but still they seem to be separate entities from himself.

Note also the poem Tom Bombadil uses to rescue the Hobbits from "their" wight:

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.​

Especially the last two lines certainly sound to me as if Tom were not merely banishing the wight from that particular barrow, but "pushing" him outside the world through the Doors of Night like Melkor at the end of the First Age. This would suggest that the Barrow-wight was actually a minor Maia-spirit.

That last part is really only speculation, but I think it is quite clear that the wights were spirits independent from the Witch-king and therefore not bound to him like for example the foundations of Barad-Dur were bound to the One Ring. So I see no reason why they should have perished at his death.

I happen to agree that some of the wights among the Barrows were independent undead spirits that may have been directed to Tyrn Gorthad by the Witch-king, but also felt that many of the wights were the actual undead spirits of those who were laid to rest in the Barrows, be they from the 1st age migration of men to Beleriand, or the Dunedain who were lay to rest there in the 2nd and 3rd age. This is basically my 'head-canon' and not necessarily backed by any of Tolkien's writings.

 

[wondering]

I don't think Bombadil is banishing the Wight out of Arda (or Ea), just out of his own country:
"like the winds go wailing,
Out into the barren lands far beyond the mountains!
Come never here again!"

The barren lands far beyond the mountains might be Rhovanion, or maybe someplace even farther out like the Withered Heath - but it does sound like a place within Middle-earth.

The part about "darker than the darkness" seems to be following up on "Lost and forgotten be", so I think it's likely about the Wight's cursed state, not the place where it is being sent. Bombadil is, as I read it, essentially cursing it to be *more* forgotten/lost/dark than things in the Void (assuming the "Where doors stand for ever shut" phrase is modifying "the darkness", nlt the Wight itself).

--

I think the Barrow-wights are not the spirits of the actual people buried in the barrows, but external spirits animating the corpses. I don't think Sauron would have access to the spirits of Men who died died, as opposed to fading into wraiths like the Nazgul, and the people in the barrows appear to have been Dunedain who opposed Sauron on top of that. They could be very minor Maia spirits, like the Orc - form Maiar becoming "poltergeists" on bodily death Tolkien mentioned in one of the Morgoth's Ring Orc essays; but I think that idea is later. In the context LOTR was written in, I think spirits of dead Orcs (thought at the time to be of Elvish origin) or "non-ring" wraiths made by Morgul-blades (like what Frodo would have become if Elrond hadn't healed him) are more likely.