[Morthoron]

Speaking of singing and wights, I'd like to bore you for a few moments with an excerpt from my 'Monty Python's Fellowship of the Ring' parody. No wights were actually harmed in the making of this satire:

When Frodo awoke, he found himself lying on a cold stone slab. There was a stabbing pain in his arm where the invisible hand had clawed him, but he still managed to struggle upward to lean upon his elbows. Looking about him through the darkness, he knew all too well where he was: a cruel wight had dragged him down into a barrow! Well, isn't this just friggin' wonderful! he thought to himself. But as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness (characters in fantasies can somehow always see underground in the pitch black), he noticed that Sam, Merry and Pippin were laying unconscious to his right. They each lay on a slab, and they were robed in white satin nighties (where the Moody Blues perhaps got the song title "Wights in Night Satin'). Their hands were adorned with bejeweled rings, their heads were crowned in diadems and a sword lay at each of their feet.

From a vestibule or hallway to his left there rose a faint green emanation, a phosphorescent glow straight out of any 1950's B-grade Hollywood horror flick, which was still quite frightening to Frodo as the cinema had not arrived in the Shire as of yet. He heard bones rattling and skeletons scratching as they dragged their white knuckles across the stone floor towards him.

"What skullduggery is this?" Frodo hissed in a barely audible whisper.

Suddenly the rattling and scratching, crawling and scrawling began falling into a cadence, then the cadence into a regular rhythm, and the rhythm thrummed with a beat: scrawl-crawl-scratch-scratch-rattle-rattle-scratch, scrawl-crawl-scratch-scratch-rattle-rattle-scratch, scrawl-crawl-scratch-scratch-rattle-rattle-scratch, and an eerie, mournful voice began to sing in a low moan to the bony beat:

There's a saying going 'round and I begin to think it's true,
It's awful hard to love someone, when they're rotting through and through.
Once I had a lovin' ghoul, but now I start to wonder,
Why I'm sad and lonely, cos' she's buried me six feet under.

Won't somebody go and find my ghoul and bring her to me?
It's awful hard to decompose without a little sympathy.
Once I had a loving ghoul, as good as any on the Downs,
but since my deadhead left me, I'm the saddest wight around -

Because…

From another room of the barrow came faint echoes of music that rapidly rose in timbre and tone until Frodo could make out an entire netherwordly ensemble – a hamstring quartet, perhaps, or an entire Orcestra: there were trombones and organs, tympanis and eardrums, nose flutes and jaw harps, not to mention the hairy bagpipes, all playing ragtime. And the ghostly voice belted out a banshee wail:

I'm just a bag 'o' bones and everywhere I go,
Cadavers are the part I'm playing.
Paid for every bone dance, risen up by necromance -
Ooh, what they're saying!

There will come a day when youth will pass away,
What will they say about me?
When the end comes I know,
they'll say, "He was just a bag 'o' bones"-
Life goes on without me…

And then, to Frodo's surprise, a chorus line of skeletons burst into the room with arm bones locked together and kicking in unison so high he could see their metatarsals and phalanxes flailing in the air. And they were all singing with jawbones flapping out of time with the lyrics:

Cos' I aint got NO BODY!
No body cares for me, no body, no body cares for me!
I'm so cold and stony - cold and stony, cold and stony -
Won't some grave ghoul come take a chance with me…

But before the skeletons could utter another refrain - BOOM! There was a tremendous explosion and the roof of the barrow came crashing down. Frodo could see daylight streaming in from behind a monstrous beaver tail. Astride the giant beaver was none other than Tom Bombadil, who waved at Frodo and shouted, "That racket was loud enough to wake the dead, if you'll pardon the pun!"

And with one final bluesy note from a hidden sax, the wightish skeletons fell into crumpled heaps of bone and dust.