The Barrow-downs

The downs

East of the Old Forest the ground rises into a line of bare, rounded hills running roughly north and south between the forest and the Great East Road. They are green and treeless, ridged with old turf, and on nearly every summit stands a mound or a ring of standing stones. Some of the barrows are low and grassed over; others are great domed heaps with stone doorways facing west, and the largest of them have single tall stones set upright above them like teeth. In fine weather the downs are open and beautiful, with wide views west to the Forest and east to the Road; but fog gathers on them quickly, and travellers who lose the sun among the mounds are seldom seen again.

The Dúnedain called the hills Tyrn Gorthad. They lie inside the old borders of Cardolan, and after that kingdom fell the mounds were the only monument left of the people who had ruled there.

The wights

The Barrow-wights are evil spirits, sent by the Witch-king from Angmar, that took up their dwelling in the empty tombs. They are neither ghosts of the buried dead nor living creatures, but something that inhabits the old bones and gold, grips with a cold hand, and chants over a captive before killing him. Their power is strongest by night and in fog, and their tombs are full of the hoarded treasure of the dead, which they guard without using.

Sacred ground

The hills were a burial-ground before there were kingdoms in Eriador. The forefathers of the Edain, moving west toward Beleriand in the First Age, raised the oldest barrows, and when the Dúnedain settled the land in the Second and Third Ages they buried their princes there in turn. The last prince of Cardolan fell on the downs in T.A. 1409 when the Witch-king's armies swept down over Rhudaur and Cardolan, and after that the Dúnedain of Cardolan dwindled among the hills, still keeping some of the old mounds.

The haunting

The Great Plague of 1636 killed most of what remained of Cardolan's people, and about that time the Witch-king sent wights into the empty barrows so that the downs might never be resettled. They stayed for fourteen centuries. Bucklanders and Bree-folk learned to keep away, and the wights of the Barrow-downs became one of the few pieces of the old North's history that hobbits remembered, if only as a bogey.

The hobbits on the downs

On September 28, 3018, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin crossed the downs from Tom Bombadil's house, slept too long at noon in a stone ring, and were caught by fog. A wight took all four into its barrow. Frodo woke to find his companions laid out in white with a sword across their necks and a hand creeping toward the hilt; he cut off the hand, and remembering Tom's rhyme, sang for him. Bombadil broke open the barrow, drove out the wight and scattered its treasure on the grass so that its spell would be broken. From the hoard he gave the hobbits long knives of Westernesse, made in Arnor for the wars against Angmar. Merry's blade, carried to Gondor, was the one that broke the Witch-king's spell on the fields of the Pelennor, so that the smith who forged it in Cardolan a thousand years before was avenged on the enemy who had destroyed his realm.

A range of grassy hills east of the Old Forest and south of the Great East Road, crowned by barrows and standing stones; the Road runs along their northern edge and Bree lies a day's journey beyond.