“The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by Amy Amendt-Raduege

Author:Amy Amendt-Raduege
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

CHAPTER 4

Haunting the Dead

The dead have long had a hold on human imagination. Archaeologists maintain that the “awareness of death and our attempts to transcend it have haunted humanity for at least the last ten thousand years and probably the last million years.”1 The archaeological record suggests an almost instinctive need to hallow the dead, to dispose of the remains with dignity, and to ensure that their final places of rest are respected. The same need to ensure that the dead rest in peace also connects with an apparently equally instinctive fear of the dead; they can be sources of malevolence, disease, and danger. As a result, our attitudes toward the places of burial are deeply ambivalent. Even the familiar phrase “Rest in Peace” reflects this ambiguity. On the one hand, it indicates exactly that: a wish that our most beloved departed might indeed rest peacefully in the afterlife, untroubled by the cares and concerns of this world. On the other, however, it means “Stay where we put you and don’t come back!”2

Just as in the Primary World, the vast majority of the gravesites encountered in Middle-earth are peaceful, serving as symbolic links between the past and the present, the living and the dead. Every so often, however, a grave is not so peaceful, and its societal function as a place of peace and remembrance is disrupted. But these graves, too, are linked to issues of community and immortality, for they are often haunted. Though many “serious” ghost-hunters insist that graveyards are rarely haunted—very few people actually die in a cemetery—popular belief continues to view cemeteries and churchyards as especially haunted locations. Graves represent “fissures in the world through which intimations of immortal damnation can creep,” and in cases where communal unease about a death exist—because of a tragedy or a murder, for instance—the dead are particularly likely to rest uneasily or to manifest themselves to the living until their troubles are resolved.3 The graves of troubled, unusual, or marginalized individuals are particularly susceptible to haunting, and it may be that “adverse circumstances of death may have created ‘bad deaths’ that required extreme measures often described by archaeologists as ‘deviant’ burial practices” necessary to keep the unquiet dead in their place.4

For the most part, ghosts are associated with sorrow and tragedy, and while they may not always be evil, they are often disturbing. Why some people become ghosts and others rest quietly remains a mystery, but the prevailing view is that something that happened in this world prevents peaceful entry into the next. One popular view is that “ghosts may wander as a punishment to themselves, as in the case of suicides and those who have led evil lives.”5 In his detailed study of the vampire lore of Europe, Paul Barber lists a surprising number of acts that might condemn an individual to an unquiet afterlife, including suicide, murder, death in childbirth, or being conceived during a holy period on the church calendar.6 In the Middle Ages, ideas of the

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