Unlikely heroes and ancient evils
Opposing our (unlikely) heroes are the ancient evils that must be overcome on the quest for the destruction of the One Ring. Having focused mainly on book 1 when working in rimbë, I found it both challenging and fascinating to determine the moments when our heroes accidentally enter the sphere of power of “evil-hearted” creatures like Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight. For our purposes – recording the movements and certain actions of all characters in The Lord of the Rings – it is vital to determine when a character should first be recorded as appearing on the narrative mainline, and when they leave it again. Since our protagonists only become aware of Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight after they have already entered their respective spheres of power, it has proven tricky to determine exactly when, and for how long, these characters become an active part of the narrative.
Here’s how we handled these special cases; bearing in mind that our current solutions are not set in stone.
Old Man Willow
The first explicit mention of the name “Old Man Willow” can be found in 1.06.080, when Tom Bombadil comes to the rescue of the hobbits in the Old Forest and names their foe. This is the text chunk where we would be introduced to Old Man Willow’s name if we were reading The Fellowship of The Ring for the first time. However, Old Man Willow becomes part of the narrative at least 31 chunks earlier: In 1.06.049, Frodo already notices “a huge willow-tree”, which makes this the first record of the willow’s physical presence, even if the character remains unnamed for the time being.
Importantly, the willow’s physical appearance does not necessarily mark the beginning of Old Man Willow’s presence on the narrative mainline. By the time Frodo notices the tree, the hobbits are already firmly under the influence of his power. Frodo’s awareness of the willow therefore does not allow us to pinpoint the moment at which Old Man Willow actually enters the narrative. Instead, we believe that the unnatural “sleepiness” that already affects Frodo and his companions in 1.06.046 is a good indicator of the beginning of Old Man Willow’s sphere of power, and that this signifies the beginning of his presence on the narrative mainline.
After their encounter with Old Man Willow, the captured hobbits are freed by Tom Bombadil in 1.06.081–82. This deed, however, does not necessarily help to determine when the hobbits leave the sphere of the willow’s power. Since we do not know the exact extent of Old Man Willow’s power, I think that the hobbits (without Tom Bombadil’s continued help) would not be safe from the willow’s influence until they had left the Withywindle valley for good. Following this logic, only the edge of the Old Forest, which the hobbits finally reach in 1.06.089, would mark the definitive end of Old Man Willow’s realm and, therefore, his possible sphere of influence.
However, since our hobbits are fortunately in the company of Tom Bombadil (or at least under his protection since they cannot keep up with him all the time), we came to the conclusion that they leave Old Man Willow’s sphere of power in 1.06.084, when they start following Tom Bombadil along the Withywindle path. Tom Bombadil’s power successfully cancels out Old Man Willow’s, so that the hobbits’ departure from the willow marks not only the end of Old Man Willow’s physical presence in the story but also the end of his influence on them and, consequently, of his presence on the narrative mainline.
The Barrow-wight
The Barrow-wight which the hobbits encounter in the Barrow-downs is an even trickier case than Old Man Willow, since this entity is not rooted to the ground and seems to be able to move around the Barrow-downs to some extent. What, for example, spooks Frodo’s pony in 1.08.019 when he passes the ominous standing stones? Could this already be the influence of the Barrow-wight, even though Frodo is still at the foot of the hill where its barrow is located? At any rate, the general creepiness of the Barrow-downs presumably originates from the Barrow-wights in the first place, so the question where the power of these spirits – and therefore their presence on the narrative mainline – begins and ends is an especially difficult one to answer.
To solve this dilemma I decided to stop speculating and to follow Frodo, who is the focus of the narrative after he gets separated from his companions, closely. Once Frodo has followed his companions’ cries to the top of the hill where the barrow is located, the Barrow-wight speaks to him in 1.08.028 with a voice “that seemed to come out of the ground”; followed shortly by the reveal of its presence in 1.08.029, when it grips Frodo to take him into the barrow. It is difficult to say if the Barrow-wight is indeed ‘physically’ present in 1.08.028, since its corporeal nature remains somewhat unclear. However, given that it reveals its proximity to the protagonist in this particular chunk, we decided that this is the moment where its presence on the narrative mainline should be recorded.
After the hobbits’ ordeal in the barrow, Tom Bombadil comes to the rescue once more – and the situation becomes even more complicated. Before Tom arrives, Frodo already manages to drive the Barrow-wight back, by hewing off its hand in 1.08.037. However, this is not the end of the Barrow-wight, since Frodo can still hear it “snarling” in the darkness. It follows that the Barrow-wight is still in close proximity to the hobbits, and that Frodo’s small, though by no means insignificant, victory would have been short-lived, had he not remembered to call on Tom Bombadil in that moment. Ultimately, Tom Bombadil manages to drive the Barrow-wight away for good in 1.08.045; which is followed by a description that always reminds me of the Witch-kings death: “Then there was a long trailing shriek, fading away into an unguessable distance; and after that silence.”
However – and here I return one last time to the realm of speculation – we do not know for certain if this marks the end of the Barrow-wight’s power, because Frodo’s companions are only awakened from the Barrow-wight’s spell in 1.08.050, several chunks after its departure. Furthermore, Tom Bombadil says in 1.08.067 that “the spell of the mound” will only be broken if the treasure from the barrow is eventually scattered. For me, this implies that the Witch-king’s spell on the wights is not yet broken, and that the evil presence in the Barrow-downs could still have an influence on the hobbits if – once again – Tom Bombadil was not there to protect them. But since this is mostly speculation, I will stick with my earlier conclusion and take chunk 1.08.045 as signifying the end of this particular Barrow-wight and its power.
In general, I believe that there are many more creatures in The Lord of The Rings which fall into the same category as Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight. For example, Robin Propst discovered not too long ago that we had woefully neglected the precise recording of the Watcher in the Water in A Journey in The Dark – a creature that also seems to be present for some time before our protagonists become aware of it. Another interesting example might be Saruman, when he appears to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli at the edge of Fangorn, though I have not personally worked on the annotation of the characters in The Two Towers yet. So, there is still a lot to discover and discuss for us about the presence of these ancient evils on the narrative mainline in The Lord of The Rings.