Barrow Wights (Middle-earth)

"Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone. Never more to wake on stony bed, never til the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. In the blackness, the stars shall die, still here let them lie, til the Dark Lord lifts his hand, over dead sea and withered land"

- The Barrow Wight's death chant

"Get out, ye old Wight, vanish into the sunlight! Shrivel like 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, for the Gates stand forever shut, til the world is mended!"

- The exorcism chant of Tom Bombadil against the Wights

The Barrow Wights are antagonists in the Lord of the Rings. They are evil ghost/Undead creatures which haunt the Barrow Downs, over the East of the Shire, and are famous and feared amongst humans and hobbits alike.

The origins of the Barrow Wights is unknown but are suspected to be reanimated corpses influenced by the Witch-King of Angmar. The fearsome Barrow Wights guard the plundered treasure of Angmar fiercely and will kill or banish anyone who meddles with it.

The Barrow Wights abduct Merry, Pippin and Sam and leave a frightened Frodo to stumble blindly lost in the night. He gets weak with calling for his friends but then a Barrow Wight answers and says "I have been waiting for you" and then knocks him out and drags him into the Barrow. When Frodo reawakens, he is inside a stone chamber, and he sees the other hobbits bound beside him. Over their necks is a sword and they are dressed in coffin shrouds. Frodo sees a hand creep down a tunnel at him with a long bare arm after it, and the hand of the Barrow Wight comes down to pick up the sword and execute them. But Frodo sings to summon Tom Bombadil, and he appears in a few seconds, exorcises the Barrow Wight, and it shrieks as Frodo cuts off its hand with the sword. Then the Barrow collapses on it and it vanishes.