Frodo and the Barrow-Wight

This short clip comes from a bigger project that was never finished. Somewhere around 1999 I was part of a group of Swedish artists and musicians who worked on a musical video version of "Lord of the Rings"! For real! This was just before Peter Jackson´s mega-version of the books grabbed the world. At the end of the 1960's, Krister Gustavsson and Stefan Håkansson had written folk-rock songs based on the many poems of the books. You'll find Krister under the alias 21stu2os here on YouTube.
At first we got permission from the publisher Harper Collins and the Tolkien estate to do an amateur version of the story. Then New Line Cinema pulled all the worldwide rights to protect their interests. This could very well be the biggest disappointment of my life. Now I realize that our version was very humble indeed and not much different from other amateur efforts, with hand-held cams and kids for hobbits.
I still finished this little part for the really curious and added an animated barrow-wight hand. Those of you who know the books can see that I've changed the barrow-wight fight a little bit. For those of you who don't know the story, it is as follows: The Hobbits are captured by a ghost called barrow-wight, but rescued by Tom Bombadil, master of the Old Forest.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Frodo
• Tom
• Bombadil
• Hobbit
• Tolkien
• Lord
• Rings
• hand
• monster
• stop
• motion
• animation
• sword
• knife

[hellomate639]

I think interpreting a Barrow Wight visually is going to be a new project of mine, since none of the interpretations I see are satisfactory to me. They're all embellished in some way or another in directions that move away from the original description. I feel as though they are a major part of the story left out of the movies. Leaving them out changed the tone, as did leaving out Tom Bombadil.

[bluworm]

@hellomate639 It sounds like a great project! I wish you all the best in your effort to create the ultimate barrow-wight.

[Luka1180]

The Barrow-wights havea body in the book though :)

[bluworm]

@Luka1180 Yeah.. This film was a very troubled production. There were a lot of people wanting to have a say in how things looked. Some wanted to show the barrow wight, some only wanted a hand, others wanted something different altogether. Eventually we agreed upon showing just the hand. This portion of our Ring project still turned out the best, compared to how the rest of the story fared.

[Luka1180]

@bluworm But a floating hand like that... is just... O.o Which "side" were you on yourself? And nice to hear that you're Scandinavian like me :P

[bluworm]

@Luka1180 I think I wanted to show more of the barrow-wight. As I recall, I started building a whole puppet, which then ended up as another creature. This whole project (we were making videos of all the songs and poems in "The Fellowship of the Ring") was just one endless debate about everything. And yep; I'm all swedish.

[bluworm]

@GBHuGzz Haha! well, it was pretty real in our deranged little minds :)

[GBHuGzz]

this movie seems sooo real

[bluworm]

It's more than likely that I'll be doing short clips, animated probably, featuring the songs from this project. I listen too them quite often and I think they hold up very well. The songs were written in a time when interest in Tolkien's stories were getting very popular, especially among the hippie, art and musc crowds. So these songs are very much children of their time and have nothing to do with the recent interest in Tolkien. This is old-style Tolkien (the way I prefer it)!

[TheRomulan]

Do you think there's any chance someone would try again? Its such a beautiful idea, and it could be kept so much truer to the books this way....