Following on from
Tirned Tinnu's points about bogs, I would concur that English folk culture has many stories and old tales about false lights in marshes. These find their way in the literature. Here's an example of one from the nineteenth century, from Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre. Jane has just run away from her job at Thornfield because of the master's bigamous offer of marriage and is now lost, starving, on the wild moors (quite wild, rough terrain):
Quote:
...but all the surface of the waste looked level. It showed no variation but of tint: green, where rush and moss overgrew the marshes; black, where the dry soil bore only heath. Dark as it was getting, I could still see these changes: though but as mere alterations of light and shade: for colour had faded with the daylight.
My eye still roved over the sullen swell, and along the moor-edge vanishing amidst the wildest scenery; when at one dim point, far in among the marshes and the ridges, a light sprang up. "That is an ignis fatuus,' was my first thought; and I expected it would soon vanish....
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Jane is wrong in this instance, but Bronte is working with the traditions of marsh lights here.
I had always assumed that Tolkien was using this little bit of folk lore for the Dead Marshes.
Bethberry
[ September 07, 2002: Message edited by: Bethberry ]