Excellent post, Ancalagon's Fire. What I would like to know is: are the wights, like the old Police song sings, "spirits in the material world," meaning, how were they able to interact with the Hobbits in the physical world?
From what I can gather, Merry, Pippin and Sam were taken first by the wight(s). Frodo, after a long uphill slog, finds a wight/barrow and gets touched by the wight and remembers no more. So, first, how do the three hobbits get up into the barrow? How are their clothes removed? (and an aside, I believe that a wight exists next to my clothes dryer, as I cannot explain missing socks otherwise).
Seems like a big job for a crawling hand...
And after dragging the hobbits into the barrow, undressing them and adorning them with various bric-a-brac, the crawling arm makes to execute them, seemingly. Why couldn't the same mechanism that interacted with the Hobbits hold the sword that would have slain them?
__________________
There is naught that you can do, other than to resist, with hope or without it.
|