Very nice take on the creepiness of the Dead Marshes scenes.
It is true that the spirits of Elves, upon death, go to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor, and the spirits of Men leave Arda to parts unknown. So the lack of animation of the Dead Marsh corpses is consistent with their being mere preserved corpses unanimated by spirits. (I'm not sure, but I believe Barrow-wights are least spirits (sub-Maiar, sort of), a handy category that at one point Tolkien considered for some famous Orc leaders like Azog and are probably necessary to explain the rock-giants in The Hobbit as well, unless you consider them an invention of Bilbo's memoirs or an intrusive one by his translator; we don't know where Tolkien stood since his 1960 attempt to re-write the book to make it perfectly consistent with LOTR stopped before that point.)
I will now turn off the Tolkien geek part of my brain and start thinking about baseball Win Probabilities again. (My two worst recent dreams were that Jonathan Papelbon blew the save on Opening Day, which he just emphatically did not do!)
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It is true that the spirits of Elves, upon death, go to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor, and the spirits of Men leave Arda to parts unknown. So the lack of animation of the Dead Marsh corpses is consistent with their being mere preserved corpses unanimated by spirits. (I'm not sure, but I believe Barrow-wights are least spirits (sub-Maiar, sort of), a handy category that at one point Tolkien considered for some famous Orc leaders like Azog and are probably necessary to explain the rock-giants in The Hobbit as well, unless you consider them an invention of Bilbo's memoirs or an intrusive one by his translator; we don't know where Tolkien stood since his 1960 attempt to re-write the book to make it perfectly consistent with LOTR stopped before that point.)
I will now turn off the Tolkien geek part of my brain and start thinking about baseball Win Probabilities again. (My two worst recent dreams were that Jonathan Papelbon blew the save on Opening Day, which he just emphatically did not do!)