What was Tolkien’s Inspiration for the Barrow-downs?

Q: What was Tolkien’s Inspiration for the Barrow-downs?

ANSWER: Most readers, I believe, think of the Barrow-downs between Bree and the Buckland as largely a place of ancient tombs. And though Tolkien did indeed emphasize the presence of tombs in the hill-lands, he really hinted that they were used for much, much more. In fact, the Barrow-downs were once a well-inhabited region, perhaps one of the most densely populated regions of Arnor. A reader left the following question for me:

The barrow-mounds on the Downs in The Fellowship of the Ring remind me of the dolmen and burial tombs I see in the Irish landscape, (Newgrange, Clontygora Court Tomb etc.). Were the people buried on the Barrow-downs from a Celtic type of culture and have similar customs?

I would say that the Irish landscape had a profound influence on some portions of Middle-earth, but there are ancient monuments and tombs found across Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland, and Brittany which are representative of an ancient pre-Celtic culture. The Celts may have inherited some of those customs but they were not responsible for the magnificent prehistoric tombs and monuments, of which Stonehenge is the most well-known. These images are often compared to Tolkien’s descriptions of the Barrow-downs, but the reader is given a first glimpse of the downs as Frodo and his companions emerge from the Old Forest, and then a second glimpse in the house of Tom Bombadil, where Bombadil teaches the hobbits something of the history of Eriador:

Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up on to the Downs. They 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 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.

Note here that Tolkien capitalized Great Barrows; he had something specific in mind, and not just “tall hills”. In fact, barrows are not supposed to be as tall as other hills. Various online etymology resources cite the following quote from the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-names: “In place-names used of small continuously curving hills, smaller than a dun, with the summit typically occupied by a single farmstead or by a village church with the village beside the hill, and also of burial mounds.”

We should think of the Barrow-downs as a place of habitation, so named because of the English usage as defined above. That means that at one time there were villages and fortresses scattered across the hills. The Online Etymology Dictionary Website says that barrow had become “obsolete except in place-names and southwest England dialect by 1400; revived by modern archaeology.” This is precisely how things are in Middle-earth at the time of the War of the Ring; the hill-dwelling Hobbits of the Shire had no barrows or places named like barrows for they were used in a different era and in a more ancient culture.

Barrow is a curious word, for though it is derived from Old English West Saxon dialect beorg, that word shares a root with burg (from which came words like burgher, borough, and bury). Linguists trace these words back to Proto-IndoEuropean *bhergh- (2) “high”. The Germans and Celts derived words for “hill” and “mountain” from that ancient root, but some hills were occupied either by whole villages or by fortresses, and these places gave rise to words like barrow and borough.

I don’t think it is an accident that Tolkien chose a word like barrow, with cognates in many other languages and dialects. Take, for example, the occurrence of Anglian berg in the translated Rohirric name for Minas Tirith: Mundberg. Many scholars have noted that the dialect Tolkien used to translate the Rohirric language was Mercian Old English. The Mercians (whose name was derived from miercca, “border-folk”) were a group of Anglian clans and sub-tribes, among the last to settle in England (and thought by some to have come over with the most ancient royal house of the Angles of Jutland). Had there been barrow-like communities in Rohan, Tolkien might have called them Borough-downs or Burg-downs. One attested name from Rohan (provided in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth) is Aldburg, the fortified city in the Eastfolde that served as Eomer’s home and base. Aldburg was the original fortified settlement, built by Eorl when he took possession of Calenardhon. It was probably known by a different name in his day (perhaps “Eorl’s Burg”, for example).

The Barrow-downs of Eriador thus represent an ancient, long-forgotten Edainic dialect that was related to Westron and Rohirric. The Rohirrim and other Northmen were descended from the ancestors of the Beorians (the First House of the Edain) and the Marachians (the Third House of the Edain). The Rohirrim did not write down their language, whereas the Westron became a written language because it was originally the dialect of the language spoken by the Marachians. In English history it was West Saxon that evolved into the first formally dominant written English language (all four major dialects were eventually written down, but West Saxon became pre-eminent). But West Saxon was displaced by Norman French as the language of state and literature.

Middle English, which eventually displaced Norman French, grew from many different roots and was most likely influenced by the intellectual poverty of the conquered Anglo-Saxons. Their daily lives focused on simpler things and so their linguistic needs became simpler. As they adapted to rule by the Normans they began to adopt some Norman words, but the preservation of Latin among scholars and the Church also influenced the Anglo-Saxons. So while some traces of West Saxon Old English may have survived into Middle and Modern English, it was not the primary source for Middle English. The Norman Conquest of 1066 changed all that.

It is in this context, I believe, that we must look at Tolkien’s use of the word barrow for the downs through which Frodo traveled, and where the wights eventually settled. There were indeed ancient graves amid the Barrow-downs, as we shall see shortly. And Tolkien did use the word to refer to grave mounds. For example, when Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli approached Edoras:

‘Look!’ said Gandalf. ‘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.’ ‘Seven mounds upon the left, and nine upon the right,’ said Aragorn. ‘Many long lives of men it is since the golden hall was built.’

This is, I think, a subtle indication from Tolkien that the Westron was influenced by the dialect of the Marachians (represented by West Saxon). But who actually lived in the Barrow-downs? The clues are scattered throughout the texts. For example, in the LoTR appendix on languages, Tolkien writes:

Wholly alien was the speech of the Wild Men of Drúadan Forest. Alien, too, or only remotely akin, was the language of the Dunlendings. These were a remnant of the peoples that had dwelt in the vales of the White Mountains in ages past. The Dead Men of Dunharrow were of their kin. But in the Dark Years others had removed to the southern dales of the Misty Mountains; and thence some had passed into the empty lands as far north as the Barrow-downs. From them came the Men of Bree; but long before these had become subjects of the North Kingdom of Arnor and had taken up the Westron tongue. Only in Dunland did Men of this race hold to their old speech and manners: a secret folk, unfriendly to the Dúnedain, hating the Rohirrim.

We commonly associate the Dunlendings and their kin (who included the Folk of Haleth, the Second House of the Edain) with Celts and Celtic things, so there you have some evidence of a Celtic-like tradition in the Barrow-downs. In another passage from the appendices Tolkien writes:

It is said that the mounds of Tyrn Gorthad, as the Barrowdowns were called of old, are very ancient, and that many were built in the days of the old world of the First Age by the forefathers of the Edain, before they crossed the Blue Mountains into Beleriand, of which Lindon is all that now remains. Those hills were therefore revered by the Dúnedain after their return; and there many of their lords and Kings were buried. [Some say that the mound in which the Ring-bearer was imprisoned had been the grave of the last prince of Cardolan, who fell in the war of 1409.]’

The Elvish name, Tyrn Gorthad, clearly denotes a place of burial; this apparent confusion in idiom may be Tolkien’s way of showing how time and history had conflated the associations for barrow. For example, when Aragorn leads the Hobbits to the peak of Weathertop:

In the morning they found, for the first time since they had left the Chetwood, a track plain to see. They turned right and followed it southwards. It ran cunningly, taking a line that seemed chosen so as to keep as much hidden as possible from the view, both of the hill-tops above and of the flats to the west. It dived into dells, and hugged steep banks; and where it passed over flatter and more open ground on either side of it there were lines of large boulders and hewn stones that screened the travellers almost like a hedge.

‘I wonder who made this path, and what for,’ said Merry, as they walked along one of these avenues, where the stones were unusually large and closely set. ‘I am not sure that I like it: it has a — well, rather a barrow-wightish look. Is there any barrow on Weathertop?’

‘No. There is no barrow on Weathertop, nor on any of these hills,’ answered Strider. ‘The Men of the West did not live here; though in their latter days they defended the hills for a while against the evil that came out of Angmar. This path was made to serve the forts along the walls. But long before, in the first days of the North Kingdom, they built a great watch-tower on Weathertop, Amon Sûl they called it. It was burned and broken, and nothing remains of it now but a tumbled ring, like a rough crown on the old hill’s head. Yet once it was tall and fair. It is told that Elendil stood there watching for the coming of Gil-galad out of the West, in the days of the Last Alliance.’

Merry’s comparison to the stone remnants of the Barrow-downs is no accident: he was treading in a place similar to the Barrow-downs, although much higher and used for a different purpose. The history of Weathertop is closely associated with the history of the Barrow-downs.

The original barrows must have been places of habitation. It would be natural for the peoples dwelling in those hills to bury their loved ones nearby, and so we may imagine Irish-style mound burial chambers such as those that were built during the Neolithic period, when a great culture united by trade and custom prevailed across western Europe (ranging as far away as western France and Iberia). The ancient sense of “barrow”, that of an isolated farm or place of authority, reminds me of the way the Folk of Haleth lived: in isolated farmsteads. When Elendil established the Kingdom of Arnor there may have been many people descended from or related to the Gwathuirim (from whom came the Dunlendings) and the Men of Bree living there. The Dunedain would have built the fortresses.

Through many wars and great loss and suffering the lands that had once harbored simple lives became transformed, just as Bombadil revealed to the Hobbits, into a fortified border region, and then ultimately abandoned as great evil came to dwell there. Over time people forgot that the Barrow-downs had once been filled with love and dreams and hope and instead came to think of them as a place of dread and horror. Only Bombadil and the dwindling Elves and Rangers remembered the ancient past, until one day four Hobbits wandered into the Old Forest with no clear idea of where they would go next.

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