LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 08 - Fog on the Barrow-Downs

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

With the last two lines of Tom's song, he seems to send the wight the future way of the Witch-king, Sauron, and Saruman: doomed to a lonely, impotent existence in the waste.

And finally, Tom mentions a 'mending', which appears to be a quite different version from the wight's. Tom sees the world's end as it should (shall) be, and in his overcoming the wight, seems to confirm his is the right one.

Great observation, Zil. That is indeed how I saw it at first, or basically, all the time until now when the other possibility occured to me.

However, now what you said just further strenghtens my belief that it is possible to successfully argue for the Dagor Dagorath scenario. Because Tom is actually saying the same thing, then, and in "my" version, it is not that what Tom says invalidates the Wight's wish into being a mere wish, but actually they would both be right.

Like this: if the "end of times" means that Morgoth will return and all evil will come together for the final battle, that's what the Wight is talking about. But afterwards, we know that the world will be remade, and that is what Tom is talking about. It's such an absolutely wonderful example of how losing hope works - interpreting a positive thing in a negative way by overshadowing the hope, like a tunnel vision with the Wight intentionally obscuring the light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, it is also the way the word "apocalypse" has been twisted in our culture to effectively mean "destruction", even though the point of all apocalyptic literature has always been to bring hope to those who were in the middle of chaos and destruction. Imagine any story with a happy end, of course the heroes have to go through all the danger. But what the Barrow-wight does is to cut the story just at the worst moment, and tries to pretend that there is nothing afterwards. Tom actually reveals (ha! Apocalypsis - revelation - indeed!) that there is something after, the good end, when "the world is mended". Huh, some really deep eschatology in this, actually.

Incidentally, that also means that even if the Hobbits ended up "never waking 'til..." as the Wight intended, there would be awakening for them, afterwards. Because there is afterwards. (But of course, that is outside the scope of the story of the Ring. Nonetheless, I think interesting.)