[Priya]

One of the matters, I’ve mused upon is the age of the standing stone. More pointedly I’ve asked myself: when was it transported to the center of the hollow, and when was the ‘Open Sesame’ enchantment placed upon it?

Unfortunately some things we will never know the answers to. Nonetheless one might speculate.

Tom told the hobbits the stone was ancient:

“Don’t you go a-meddling with old stone …”.
- In the House of Tom Bombadil (my underlined emphasis)

But how old is “old” to someone like Bombadil?

Master Tom, himself, declares to his visitors:

“But you are young and I am old.”,
- In the House of Tom Bombadil

and then proceeds to reel off a set of events from antiquity:

“Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. … He was there when the elves went westward before the seas were bent …”.
- In the House of Tom Bombadil

Some of these events are truly primeval, are they not? I can’t prove it - but given the little information we have, I think one can reasonably conclude the standing stone was primeval too. And thus its siting in the hollow preceded the arrival of the Barrow-wights!

If Middle-earth Faërie has existed from the beginning - when Eru first created Eä - the Universe, then surely both Primary and Secondary Worlds have always touched? And for the gifted and inherently powerful from Faërie - of a divine nature themselves, surely a method must always be continually present to enable travel between these two worlds?



Anyhow ……



In one of my early posts I said I had misgivings about the following notion:

“At first I thought it must have had an enchantment placed on it: a sort of early warning system alerting the nearby Wight that ‘prey’ was approaching.”

But since then I’ve reconsidered, and now once again realign myself with such a position. And that’s because Tom, in his awakening of the hobbits, appears to indicate that any power stemming from the Wight was shorn - and it was now a safe time for the return of their spirits. There was now a way back through a ‘Gate’!

“Wake now my merry lads! Wake and hear me calling!
Warm now be heart and limb! The cold stone is fallen;
Dark door is standing wide; dead hand is broken.
Night under Night is flown, and the Gate is open!”
- Fog on the Barrow-downs

From the rhyme the cold ‘heart and limb’ is seemingly linked to the ‘cold stone’, while the ‘Dark door’ surely refers to the barrow entrance. The ‘Night under Night’ seems to me to be the secondary barrow darkness at nighttime which the captured hobbits experienced. The ‘dead hand’ is, of course, obviously linked to the horror of the barrow corpse.

So given all these seemingly connected items - I’m inclined to believe the Wight had magically affected this standing stone particularly because of its proximity to the barrow. Then, although a far older enchantment was bound to the same standing stone, one which was associated to accessing Faërie, the Wight had his own spell for ensnaring passers-by cast upon it.

This is about as far as my logic takes me - but do others have different ideas, opinions or interpretations of the text?