For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.

[Bêthberry]

Wow, this thread has run on! Great to see it sparked such good comments.

I tend to agree, as Aiwendil put it, that the fundamental difference between the fates of Men and Elves would be a very strong case against the fea of a fallen Man being responsible for Merry's dream.

However, I want to add another pot to this kettle or, rather, relate these concepts of reincarnation to what Verlyn flieger callsa larger theme running through Tolkien’s major works, that the past is not just tributary to the present, but also inhabits and immediately affects it. Particularly interesting is Tolkien's use of the dream memory.

Originally Posted by Fleiger

Drawing on such concepts as Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, and J. W. Dunne’s notion of serial memory, Tolkien in three separate
examples used the concept of dream-memory as the psychic or psychological
connector/channel between characters in the narrative present and a distant past beyond their waking memory. Two of these examples are his unfinished science fiction stories, “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers,” written nearly ten years apart but making use of the same concept and method. This treats timetravel as a psychic or psychological mode whereby two modern-day Englishmen travel back to Númenor through the unconscious memories of
a succession of ever more ancient forebears. The third example, and by
all odds the most extreme and puzzling, involves the anomalous experience
of Merry Brandybuck at the barrow in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien puts forth memory as the vehicle for time travel in his unfinished science fiction work. Instead of Jung's collective unconscious, Tolkien posited an ancestral unconscious and this was clearly for Men, not Elves. And his characters experience the same dream of drowning that permeated his own dreams. (It's in the Letters, which I don't have at hand right now.) Yet Tolkien's stories remained unfinished, perhaps because of his reservations over the implications.

Tom Shippy suggested that Merry takes on the personality of a body in the barrow. It can't be one of the Witch King's Men from Carn Dum, for they won the battle (which wasn't fought on the Downs, anyway, but farther north, as I recall) and Merry's dream comes from one among those who lost and who was ritually buried in some kind of royal--the golden circlet--barrow. The Appendix suggests this is a prince. Somehow, not an ancestral voice, but a voice connected by experience with the Dark Lord speaks into Merry's unconscious mind. And then, later, when Merry meets Theoden in Rohan, he speaks of his relationship to the King as like that of a father and son. I've always thought that a bit odd, responding to a foreign king with filial feelings.

Can it be that one who died at the hands of the Witch King long ago reaches out to Merry, who will worst the Witch King. Or was the memory imbedded in the Barrow Downs themselves. The Downs were a portal to the past, after all, and in LotR even rocks may have memories.

[Mithadan]

Bethberry asks,

Can it be that one who died at the hands of the Witch King long ago reaches out to Merry, who will worst the Witch King. Or was the memory imbedded in the Barrow Downs themselves. The Downs were a portal to the past, after all, and in LotR even rocks may have memories.

I think that it is the Barrow-Wight who is to blame for Merry's nightmare rather than the Downs themselves. Our four Hobbit friends were under its spell and were slumbering as they awaited their death. The Wights were not the shades of those buried at the Downs, but rather evil spirits who later came and inhabited the mounds. Laws and Customs of the Eldar makes specific mention of the fact that the unhoused fear of Elves at times become anchored to particular places. So the Wights may be such spirits perhaps sent there by Sauron or the Witch King. Clearly evil, we can assume the Wight delighted in tormenting his victims. The dreams are likely a form of such torment, communicated to his victims by osanwe.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Well, not osanwe, which was a transferance of verbal or pre-verbal thought, experienced by the recipient as a 'voice.' Osanwe didn't transmit sense-data.

Tolkien it seems viewed body and soul in incarnates as partaking somewhat of each other's nature, being made for each other; in Elves, ultimately their faded hroar would exist merely as memories imprinted on their fear. I think it not unlikely that, under the magic of the barrow, a corpse would retasin some imprint of its last living thoughts, and that these would have been picked up by the animating wight, perhaps passed on through a series of possessed bodies- of which Merry perhaps was targeted to be the next.

Of course T had thought none of this through when he wrote this chapter (which was never really revised); one thought he had at the time that Black Riders were Barrow-wights, or closely related

[Mithalwen]

I wonder if Merry's experience at Bree, so soon after is significant - when 'He seemed to be asleep. "I thought I had fallen into deep water," he says to me, when I shook him' (Nob) adnhe says "I had an ugly dream". Aragorn says it is the Black Breath (and Eowyn has bad dreams when she experienced it also). Maybe Merry is more sensitive to such things either generally (as a Bucklander closer to the edge of the Shire and more aware of the dangers beyond, and also more curious and educated than most), or made more sensitive by his experiences in the Barrow.

[Bêthberry]

Nice idea, Mithadan, but as WCH has already pointed out, osanwe kenta was "direct thought transference" and Merry felt the blade in his heart and not just remembered it.

Also, I thought that the ability had atrophied down the years--ages--once language had developed and that by the Third Age only very few had the ability. We are told how Melkor was able to instill his thought, but was osanwe possible with unconscious minds?

Further, it seems a bit of a canonical conundrum to point to an essay Tolkien wrote c. 1959 when the Barrow Downs chapter was written in 1938, between Lost Roads (1936) and the Notion Club papers (1945-46). I think WCH has already said this.


Mithalwen, I think it is interesting that Merry's explanation at Bree concerns being overwhelmed by deep waters.

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Mithalwen, I think it is interesting that Merry's explanation at Bree concerns being overwhelmed by deep waters.

Because of the strong link between water and death in Middle Earth?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

Because of the strong link between water and death in Middle Earth?

No. I don't necesarily see a link between water per se and death in Middle earth.

As for the fine tunings of rebirth, reincarnation, resurrection it strikes me that Flieger is right when she suggests that Tolkien modified the theologically difficult question of reincarnation to the less problematic concept of memory time travel or that term he used in the Letters, hoarding memory (if I am recalling it correctly).

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

No. I don't necesarily see a link between water per se and death in Middle earth.

Oh I do. There seem to be a disproportionate number of drownings, shipwrecks, being lost in snow and ice, let alone Boromir's funeral, dear bought fish and Legolas's message from Galadriel being interpreted as speaking openly of his death. Any body of water larger than a bathtub seems inherently perilous.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Nice idea, Mithadan, but as WCH has already pointed out, osanwe kenta was "direct thought transference" and Merry felt the blade in his heart and not just remembered it.

I disagree. Merry was not actually feeling a blade in his heart, he only briefly "thought" he was. There is a great difference between the two. I don't believe sensory data was being transferred at all.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Again, osanwe was essentially verbal. Think of Gandalf's "voice" in Frodo's mind on Amon Hen.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

I disagree. Merry was not actually feeling a blade in his heart, he only briefly "thought" he was. There is a great difference between the two. I don't believe sensory data was being transferred at all.

Whatever it was that affected Merry, it was enough to make him clutch at his breast after he spoke, "Ah, the spear in my heart." I don't think he's being a melodramatic actor here. And then he comes to regular consciousness.

As Esty suggested on the Chapter by Chapter thread, it appears to be the golden circlet that slips over his eyes that instigates the dream. Can inanimate objects use osanwe?

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Whatever it was that affected Merry, it was enough to make him clutch at his breast after he spoke, "Ah, the spear in my heart." I don't think he's being a melodramatic actor here. And then he comes to regular consciousness.

As Esty suggested on the Chapter by Chapter thread, it appears to be the golden circlet that slips over his eyes that instigates the dream. Can inanimate objects use osanwe?

And yet the fact remains that there was no spear piercing Merry. It was a mental thing of some sort and not physical. I am not saying that it was osanwe as it is strictly defined but I think it was at least something similar.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

As Esty suggested on the Chapter by Chapter thread, it appears to be the golden circlet that slips over his eyes that instigates the dream. Can inanimate objects use osanwe?

The Palantir that Denethor held retained the image of his burning hands, so it seems that physical objects can retain 'echoes' of events. But how that works is another question (I don't know whether Tolkien ever attempted to account for that effect.) I wouldn't favour the 'reincarnation' theory in Merry's case - as the sceptical Theosophist once said, "Of course I remember past lives - but are they mine?

[Gordis]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

I think that it is the Barrow-Wight who is to blame for Merry's nightmare rather than the Downs themselves. Our four Hobbit friends were under its spell and were slumbering as they awaited their death. The Wights were not the shades of those buried at the Downs, but rather evil spirits who later came and inhabited the mounds. Laws and Customs of the Eldar makes specific mention of the fact that the unhoused fear of Elves at times become anchored to particular places. So the Wights may be such spirits perhaps sent there by Sauron or the Witch King. Clearly evil, we can assume the Wight delighted in tormenting his victims. The dreams are likely a form of such torment, communicated to his victims by osanwe.

I don't think the Wight is to blame for Merry's vivid dream.
Firstly the dream happened after the Wight had already been chased away by Tom.
Secondly the WK sent the Wights from Angmar to inhabit the Barrows after the Plague of 1636, while the fighting Merry dreamed of and the fall of the Last Prince of Cardolan happened in 1409 - more than 200 years before the coming of the wights. By this time, the fear of the buried Dunedain would be long gone to Mandos. So how would the Wight itself learn the details of the fighting?