I originally published this article January 12th, 2021 on my KoFi blog.
With all the bad news lately, I thought it might be a pleasant diversion. The article is part of a series covering a broad range of topics in the Catholic sphere, focusing on the importance of Matter, Form and Intention in daily life, both in ordinary and extraordinary happenings.
And I ended it with a spooky story of my own.
I hope you enjoy.
God Bless!
***
“Cold be hand and heart and bone,
and cold be sleep under stone;
never more to wake on stony bed,
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.
In the Black Wind the stars shall die,
and still on gold here let them lie,
till the dark lord lifts up his hand
over dead sea and withered land.”
(Chant of the barrow-wight, The Lord of the Rings)
A long time ago, I went with friends to a part of England called Uffington, to the famous chalk carving there called The White Horse. Many people will tell you, if you haven’t seen it yet, that it doesn’t really look much like a horse. As my friends from there said, ‘It’s made to show what a horse be.’
Later on, I recall thinking that they may have been quoting from the fantasy author Terry Pratchett. But on the other hand, maybe Pratchett was quoting them – who really knows for sure?
Many horse owners will tell you that a white horse is never called white – they’re all called grey. They never explain why, though. Many will shrug and say something like, ‘It’s always been that way’. Maybe this white horse carved into the chalk hill was in fact the original reason, but it was so long ago, it’s been forgotten.
JRR Tolkien had the wizard Gandalf riding an exceptional white horse, Shadowfax the chief of the Mearas in The Lord of The Rings. A pure horse that ran like lightning - but still breaking the convention on white horses.
He broke a lot of literary and poetic conventions in his books, such as the above quoted chant of the barrow-wight.
The English reader is immediately “put off” by the deliberate use of rhyme without the customary iambic pentameter that such a verse should fall into naturally. Tolkien wanted his readers to know that what was speaking was an unnatural creature, a bad copy of life.
Appearances are deceiving in his world, and in ours. He didn’t go into great detail to describe the appearance of the wight, but sought instead to have the reader look at what the barrow-wight is.
Whichever villain they are, whether they have a physical form or not is less important than what they are and what they do.
Just as in life, you can miss a lot in his stories if you take anything for granted.
For instance, you will often hear or read of people saying, ‘Tolkien was a soldier of the First World War’, as if it was an important, but easy to discard status or article of clothing.
The actual truth is that Tolkien was a soldier for the rest of his life, day and night, sleeping and waking. Becoming a soldier changes a person from the soul out. It becomes fused to one’s natural character forever.
Experiencing war is just a further annealing, hardening and tempering of that truth.
In the Catholic Church, of which Tolkien was a lifelong member, the Sacrament of Confirmation intends something similar (though without the large vocabulary of cuss-words and with different weapons in mind). The Lord of The Rings – the whole book - is written by a Catholic, scholar-soldier.
Tolkien the Catholic scholar took the schilling and became an officer. Then he stepped into the “desert” of war, and witnessed first hand the wastelands of darkness and its denizens.
In his war, he was required to go out into the mires and mudholes of the No Man’s Land between the trench lines, sometimes alone for reconnaissance, and sometimes leading a team to repair communication wires.
It was done at night, by stealth, and was lethally risky. In those places he would have looked into cold pools and seen the faces of the dead from both sides, the glowing, eerie fogs and “corpse candles” made by the release of gasses from their remains.
Tolkien was describing with frank reality the Dead Marshes that Frodo and Sam crept through.
He himself met Gollum there.
I’ve met him too. We all have.
The Gollum that Tolkien knew was the same thieving, sneaking, evil-minded, duplicitous malingerer that every generation of soldier is bound to run into eventually.
They would cheat you or steal from you, then blame you for it if they could.
They feared punishment from authority, and despised it even as they toadied and snitched to it for their own gain.
But if dirty work had to be done – if you had to go “out there” in the dark of night, they could lead you in, through and back out again – so long as there was something they could gain from it.
They’ll flee at the first hint of a fight with the enemy, and will throw your life away to save their own, though.
As a young soldier, I learned from seasoned old Corporals and Sergeants how sometimes regulations and even laws could be bendy when you needed them to be – but never to the point of breaking.
They taught us to understand that the rules and the Rule of Law were there for good reasons, and worth fighting for. The rules could bend, but must never break.
All of us understood this was a line to never cross – except Gollum.
Their intelligence levels may vary, yet all are skilled liars and schemers which they use to conceal their real motives and intentions. There is so much selfish darkness in them, you can never completely trust them, and no sane person ever wants to put their lives in Gollum’s hands.
Gollum’s actions and deeds is a key to understanding all of the evil creatures in the world of Middle-Earth.
NONE of them start life that way, but from one evil choice after another, ALL of them end their natural lives in the total decay of soul death in moral degeneration.
Something inside Smeagol was already going wrong for quite a while before he murdered Deagol over the One Ring.
They are lost.
Yes, lost… because they never want to be found.
And they will never stop losing themselves more.
They LIKE it that way.
And like Frodo, I pitied him. Every wretched one of him I ever met while I served my country at home or at war.
At the infantry battle school where I trained, I once saw these words written on a wall: “ A Psycho-path is one path too far.”
Gollum has already gone too far – willingly – on the road of self-destruction into the kingdom of evil for his life to be saved. That is Gollum.
At the end of his part in the story, there was no more room inside him for anything else but Gollum.
Not even remorse.
***
Tolkien’s world, like our own, is full of psychopaths and sociopaths, and it doesn’t stop there.
Ghosts, wraiths and wights haunt the tale. The ghosts of the men cursed by Isildur for betraying him and refusing to fight on either side were not wights, and did not pursue the path to “wightishness” as Gollum did, but were unable to rest until their oaths were fulfilled, and lingered on in a painful version of a Purgatory of their own making.
The word wraith may have an uncertain etymology, but Tolkien felt the word was close to the Anglo-Saxon writhe, meaning to twist.
The wraith is a spiritual being twisted by evil. Aragorn could release the ghosts after they fulfilled their oaths, and they departed Middle -Earth for good. Wraiths and wights do not leave willingly or so easily, and the manner of their removal is more like an exorcism.
As my friend Hilary White so aptly observes on her blog, “We all face this threat, this temptation, to take a ring of power offered by Sauron. And if we do, the fate of the Nazgul awaits us - an eternity in the cold, empty void, our withered souls subject to the domination of evil … the threat of turning Wightish is one of the Enemy's most feared fates.”
There are three important words to help the reader through all of Tolkien’s stories, and through our own in this haunted world :
Matter, Form, and Intention.
These three things describe what is absolutely necessary for the validity of all of the Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church, and are also necessary to discern a venial sin from a mortal sin, an act of the Seven Virtues, or an act of the Seven Deadly Sins.
The matter, form and intention of any act, person, place or thing will determine if it is for good or evil. As in Tolkien’s stories, the choices we make in our lives determine our fate to a very great extent, now and into eternity.
The above definition of wight includes that it is related etymologically with the Dutch word wicht, meaning a little child. In our world, we hear stories of Black Eyed Kids, wight-like creatures resembling young children or youths that try to attach themselves to people, seeking entry into their cars or houses, emitting a strange dark aura of unnaturalness and dread.
There are many stories on the internet about them, most of which were written with the intention to entertain. However, there are enough of them written in a manner, form and intention which lends to them an air of a genuine encounter.
I have a story of my own to tell. Not about BEK’s, as I have never encountered one of those. It is about a wraith, though.
Many years ago, I went up into the Northlands on a very challenging solo canoe trip into northern Canada.
Ever since reading stories as a boy about the Far North from authors like Jack London and Farley Mowat, I had wanted to journey by canoe to reach the end of the great Boreal Forest, and see the beginning of the Barren Lands at the edge of the Arctic Circle.
The research I put into maps for the route took nearly a year, and the trip was going to be over two months, using the old, mostly forgotten and disused waterways -- the first superhighways of my country in the fur trading days.
The first few days that I spend alone in real wilderness are often the most difficult. It takes a while to stop tuning out my surroundings, like everybody must do who live in crowded places like cities, and let myself attenuate naturally to the movement and noises in my surroundings.
The wilderness seems to cast a sphere of dead quiet, sometimes feeling almost sinister, especially at night. But the natural world is a living, breathing environment. It is quieter than normal, because it needs time to get used to me, too.
Eventually, my senses eased open, and the living world around me “made room” for my constant presence. The sphere of silence shrank steadily and then disappeared into the normal humdrum noises of a world that is very busy growing, foraging, breathing and moving.
On that route northward a traveler can often come across traces of human activity from the old days. Solitary cabins, abandoned campsites, and even old ruined forts built in the days of the private wars between the Northwest Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
People seldom come out this far, not even those hardy folk that live up here. The scenery is idyllic, but the black flies and mosquitoes are murderously intense.
I had to traverse a lot of muskeg and marshland, and most portages around rapids were long disused, their markers gone or only left in traces. I cut out a lot of trails myself, and I was forced to back track more than once to pick up the right stream, and then do it all again.
But it was worth it. I did make it all the way to the end of the treeline, and after a short rest period, I started the journey back.
One day I was out on a long, large lake that the maps didn’t have a name for, when the light drizzle I had been enduring since dawn began to turn into a heavy rain. The skies were filling with clouds threatening heavier weather coming soon, and the wind was picking up, making the waves choppy and treacherous.
I wasn’t in any particular hurry, so when I spotted an island within reasonable reach, I decided to make for it instead of the shore to wait out the storm. It had a good cover of trees, and I could make out the outline of some old building on the near part of it.
I found a shingle beach, and got out to look around. As I secured the canoe, I could make out the traces of where some old docks had once stood.
There was a wide copse of spruce trees covering most of the island, and no trace of any fortification walls, but the foundation stones of several long-gone buildings suggested there was once a number of people living here.
At the eastern end of the trees, close to the middle of the island, there was an old ruined stone church. The roof and windows were long gone, but it still had all four walls. A huge old spruce tree growing up inside its walls covered most of it in a natural roof. I could see on the north side that beneath a green carpet of moss and undergrowth there was a small cemetery beside it, with most of the headstones fallen down. So this place must have been an old Catholic mission at one time.
The island didn’t appear to have been vandalized, and the only trash I remember finding was down at the beach where I landed. The place looked a bit sad and woebegone. No-one had visited here in a very long time.
But it had a peaceful feeling to it. The old ruined church still seemed to emit that aura of God’s House, and felt almost welcoming.
As I looked around, the storm was getting worse. The wind was now up to a blow, and the lake was unsafe to cross with my canoe now. So I pulled the canoe way up the shingle, securely tied it to a convenient tree just in case, and unloaded my gear.
I brought everything up to the front part of the old church, and set about gathering firewood for my camp. It was still only early afternoon, and after making a quick meal, I set to work. There were a lot of deadfalls in the area of the little cemetery, and while I cut them up, I cleared the underbrush around the graves, thinking that it was wrong to just leave them like that anyway.
Soon, I had enough dry wood for immediate needs. I set to rights what I could of the little headstones, pulled away a little more moss and brush, and when I was satisfied, turned my attention to setting up the camp.
It was actually where I was going to get a fire to light - and stay lit - that decided that. The only place out of the wind with anything remotely resembling dry ground was inside the walls of the old church. The wood beams and interior it once had was long since returned to earth again. I could see it never had a basement, and except for the tree’s roots, the floor had only a uniform covering of spruce needles and dead sticks.
If it ever had any side altars, they were long gone too, but the sanctuary remained, and the high altar was intact except for the missing consecrated altar stone.
From the evidence, somebody had decommissioned it and left it to nature, rather than destroying it. Perhaps someone hoped that people might return here some day. I dug around the altar under the dirt and needles and found the stone floor.
I set to work again, cleaning away the dirt and debris, and washing the altar clean with numerous buckets of water from the lake. It seemed only right that if I was going to spend the night in God’s House, I could do a bit of overdue housecleaning.
I started to have a strange feeling about the place around sunset, as I set up camp inside the sanctuary and lit a fire. The wind howled around outside, and the noise of the waves crashing into the island was quite loud even inside the thick stone walls. The old spruce giving me a roof was pretty sturdy though, and didn’t have any widow-maker limbs on it that would hurt me.
Despite this, it seemed to my senses, well attuned to the world around me, that there was a growing pool of silence on the island.
Now that it was cleaner, and lit by my fire, the place had a very peaceful feeling. I set two of my candles on the altar, and the lamp onto a little alcove in the wall, and the ancient sanctuary looked a bit more itself again.
Evenings last so long in the northland summers, even on miserable stormy days, and I usually enjoyed them, but my uneasiness grew with the lengthening shadows. I had checked the island very thoroughly, which was not hard to do, as it wasn’t that large. Even so, I was getting a very strong feeling that I was not alone.
Firelight on a spooky night in a storm can cause all manner of optical illusion, but I was well used to such things even back then, and long accustomed to solitary travel in remote wilderness. I didn’t spook easy then, and I don’t spook easy now. Yet I could not shake the feeling that someone was outside.
I went out to look around again. The feeling of being watched increased immediately when I left the doorway of the church. I walked over the island again, never seeing any footprints except my own, but sometimes getting the feeling that there was a figure just at the corner of my eye.
I checked the canoe, and the beach, wary of anything amiss, but nothing came at me to attack me. There was a growing feeling of uneasiness in me, and as I made my way back up to the church, I was having a hard time shaking off the feeling that something out there intended to try to do me harm.
Once I re-entered the church, that feeling diminished immediately, and the sense of peace inside prevailed. I sat down to consider what was happening. I remember thinking that even though it had been empty for over a century, some protective grace from the prayers and good works of those who built the church yet remained.
Holiness had touched earth from heaven on this ground, and protection was there for whoever needed sanctuary.
If I had in fact seen a figure out there in the thickets, whoever it was should have been making so much noise with every movement, that I could have shot him dead while blindfolded. But other than the sounds of storm, wind and wave, there was not even a hint of the sound of sticks broken or underbrush being moved by the passage of someone walking through.
What I was experiencing then, I reasoned, could not be explained as natural. The feelings of being watched by something hostile diminishing so quickly after just entering the church, suggested that either I was overtired to the point of nearly pushing myself into an onset of bush panic, or there was something unnatural outside on the island that could not make itself felt forcibly to me from inside this ancient holy place. If so, It was easy to test this.
I always keep a few Catholic things with me on long journeys into the wilderness. I brought out my rosary, a little vial of holy water, a small crucifix and a copy of the Roman Missale, the book used by laity for following along with the priest at Holy mass. I lit the candles and the lamp, and placed my little crucifix on the high altar between the candles.
The button-down cover for my canoe was the perfect shape to rig from a pole to create a little canopy roof over the altar. With a warm fire over against the north wall, and a clean, dry sanctuary, I figured now was a great time to practice serving at the altar, and making a spiritual communion.
After that, I placed some drops of holy water over the altar, the two windows, and across the threshold of the doorway. Then taking the lamp, I went out again into the storm, to put a drop or two on each grave. As I left the church, the feeling of dread and malice was noticeably diminished. The presence remained, but it felt like it was now some distance away from me.
I said the Lord’s prayer over each of the graves, and went back inside.
I was tired, but not exhausted. Still, I didn’t sleep much that night. Just as I would begin to doze off, I thought I kept seeing a figure in the darkness hovering at the entrance, just at the edge of the light. Vaguely human shaped, maybe cloaked.
Whatever was out there wasn’t staying out because it was afraid of me, but because a power external to me kept it out.
Again, I would doze off , but as soon as I was about to enter into a dream state, the dream would turn dark, and I would wake myself.
Finally, about two or three in the morning, the wind died down, and the storm abated. I lit my lamp again, and rebuilt the dying fire.
I looked out at the doorway, and someone was there, standing just outside the threshold.
One moment it was solid enough that you could say it was a man, then it would seem to fade, and its shape would become blurred.
It kept a vaguely humanoid form, but sometimes it seemed like it was hooded, and the next moment it looked like a long-haired man.
I felt cold dread well up inside me. I blinked a few times, but it was still there.
It went on like this for a while, as I watched silently.
Then I got up, put on my boots, and went over to the altar again. I lit the candles, made the sign of the cross, and then, for no reason I can remember, I began to sing the Lord’s prayer in Latin.
“Praeceptis salutaribus moniti, et divina institutione formati audemus dicere: Pater noster, qui es in caelis, Sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducat in tentationem: sed libera nos a malo.”
Then I picked up the crucifix from the altar, and walked straight at the door.
The figure quickly retreated back, away from the door. I stopped beside the spruce tree.
Holding the crucifix in front of me, I spoke to the darkness outside and said, “Your lies and illusions don’t work here, stupid. This is a house of God. It’s welcome to everyone who loves Jesus.”
I got a very definite flinch from the thing outside when I mentioned His Holy Name.
I stepped forward again, this time going right to the door.
Then I said, “ I’m not alone here. Jesus is here with me. You are not welcome, and you never will be.”
Though I could no longer see it, I sensed that the thing out in the darkness withdrew a great distance from the doorway. I placed the crucifix in front of the threshold, and went back to the fire.
The wraith, for that is what it was, did not trouble me with its presence anymore. After a while, I slept again.
I remember dreaming of a large room filled with lit beeswax candles.
I slept well past dawn, and awoke about midmorning. I ate a breakfast, packed up my gear and brought it down to the beach.
The canoe was just fine, so I put it into the water and loaded everything in.
Before I left, I said some prayers at the altar, and had one last look around.
There was no trace of anyone having been on that island except me, and no sense of being watched anymore by someone who meant me harm.
