wights

WIghts

SEe, it's still doing it! Webmasters never answer your problems....

I am looking into "wights." What are "wights" you ask?

They only appear in one place in literature that i can find,

legendary beings from Norse or Celtic literature.

The place i've seen them is in that segment of

The Fellowship of the Ring dropped out of the 

mega film version of the Lord of the Rings. 

It happens early on, when Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry

meet Tom Bombadil. They ride off into the mist with the 

mysterious tale of the barrow wights in their heads.

 We aren't really told the body of this tale, and fog descends,

 the travellers get separated, and each one of the hobbits is taken prisoner

  and brought near to death by a shadowy form, which isn't 

really described, but Frodo kills with a nearby sword blade.

The word "wight"is middle saxon, really

There is an original  anglo saxon  word 'wiht,'

 which means "a being, something, anything"

I Suspect that this got mixed up with an old norse word 'vigr'

which meant "warlike," which entered saxon as 'wight', as well,

which the dictionaries say had the

meaning "swift, nimble, courageous and strong"

Hence you get a hostile, powerful being of a spiritual nature,

And this came to be a 'spiritual entity'

The creature is a creature of the dead and darkness, and 

probably in some way connected to all of those legends,

like the one telling how King Arthur and the knights 

of the Round Table would emerge from their hill to save

England when its people were in mortal peril.

Obviously there must be something, which will emerge from a hill

as well, to create  mortal peril.

In the Lord of the Rings, the suggestion seems to be that the hobbits

 were nearly drowned.......? And rescued by Tom Bombadil.

It's really vague and a peculiar episode, and 

I can't say that I'm surprised that the film

 makers chose not to include it.

One of my missions is to keep alive tales of spiritual 

beings, which are too good to lose.

And ghosts of the long barrows are so important to English mythology.