the borrow downs

[Mnemosyne]

Originally Posted by frodo123

What did the borrow down look like?? i have been reading the book and i am having a hard time thinking about what the borrow downs(frodo and the other 4 hobbits go into after leaving tom bombadil house) land scape migh look like. if there is like a drawing of it could some one send me the link to it that would be great.

It's hard to say, as there's no outright canonical evidence of any sort of down being borrowed in Tolkien. About the closest thing we get are Lobelia Sackville-Baggins' receipt of Frodo's lovely luxurious beds in Bag End, which we don't even know had any sort of down in them, although one might assume so since Frodo is a member of the upper class. But at any rate this was not any sort of outright borrowing (even though Frodo got them back in the end, provided that they were not outright destroyed in the mistreatment of Bag End during the Scouring of the Shire), because this was a sale. So since Frodo received monetary compensation this wouldn't necessarily count. But I imagine that borrow down in Tolkien would look much like borrowed down in real life, since in the absence of any other information we can assume that Middle-earth resembled the real world.






All pedantry aside (and do forgive me for my facetiousness in taking you to task for a typographical error), the Barrow-Downs probably resembled other hilly areas in England--at least, at a distance. The actual burial sites would have been something like the reconstructions of such early burials as the excavation at Sutton Hoo. If you have seen the scene in The Two Towers Extended Edition where they lay Theodred in the burial mound (feat. a singing Eowyn), that is how they would have looked up close. We also have a picture of a Finnish barrow here.

Anyway, those are actual barrows. I checked the main BD site for fanart and found this picture here as well.

Hope that helps, and enjoy your reread.

[skip spence]

The Barrow-Downs would have been a hilly, green and tree-less highland with a multitude of moderately tall ridges and valleys in between. The actual Barrows I believe were for the most part really ancient tombs of lost civilisations, dating back several thousand years, and at the time of LotR probably just mossy ruins consisting of scattered stoneworks or jagged standing stones, little resembling how they once looked back in the day. Some of them, like the one the Hobbits were trapped in, would have been built by the Dunedain of Arnor and better preserved, though these too would be more than a thousand years old.