Wights are undead creatures given a semblance of life through sheer violence and hatred, essentially categorizing them as vengeful spirits. They have many similarities to the Draugr who could be considered as the Norse equivalent of the wights.
Appearance[]
Wights appeared as weird and twisted reflections of the forms they had in life. They existed in a state between being alive and being dead. They are dark phantoms whose eyes were luminous and cold, and whose voice was horrible yet hypnotic; their skeletal hands had a touch like ice and a deadly grip. Their mummified flesh covered the twisted skeleton, the hands ended up in deadly claws, and teeth were sharp and jagged like needles. Due to their undead nature, wights existed simultaneously on the material as well as the immaterial planes, which granted them the powerful life-draining abilities that also nourished the creatures. A lot of animals could feel the presence of these evil dead creatures: dogs growled and howled, horses stopped and refused to move forward feeling the creatures, birds, and insects fell silent.
Overview[]
The word "wight" meant "person" in ages past. Centuries later, the word came to be exclusively used to describe these catacomb-dwelling undead creatures. There was no known spell, even in necromancy, that could create a wight, and the legends that described their origins were contradictory. Medieval christians defined the wights as the souls of those who were damned in Hell given sanction by Satan to commit vengeance on those who wronged them.
Wights were active at night, retreating away from the hated sunlight into crypts, tombs, burial mounds, where they dwelt during the day. Unlike vampires though, wights simply disliked the sun, not harmed by it. Their lairs were easily detected by eerie silence surrounding the area, abandoned by birds and wild animals, and abundant dead plant life.
Humanoid victims of the wights were returned as zombies controlled by their killer. The creatures that were killed with the life-draining attacks came back as enslaved wights themselves. If the master was slain, the wights that were created regained their malicious free will. Bringing a wight back to life was nearly impossible.
Trivia[]
- "Wight" is an old word used for a person of a particular kind (modern equivalents: species, race, spirit, lifeform), that applies to figures who transcend the concept of being and life such as deities and undead even if they have always existed or had created themselves. Nowadays words like “a spirit”, “a being”, and “a creature” are used like this instead of their literal meanings.
- Wights are featured in J. R. R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth, especially in The Lord of the Rings, and in George R. R. Martin’s novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as in HBO's television series Game of Thrones, an adaptation of the latter (see Barrow-wights and Wights). Since its 1974 inclusion in the RPG ‘’Dungeons & Dragons‘’ (D&D), it has become a recurring form of undead in other fantasy games and mods, such as ‘’Vampire: The Masquerade‘’.
