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When Frodo gets lost on the Barrow-downs in The Fellowship of the Ring, he finds himself surrounded by fog, with two huge standing stones “towering ominous before him and leaning slightly towards one another like the pillars of a headless door.” Panicked and unable to find his friends, Frodo runs around in the fog until he finds himself right up against a large barrow, and a voice from underground says, “I am waiting for you!” An icy grip seizes him and Frodo blacks out, waking up imprisoned inside the barrow itself alongside Merry, Pippin, and Sam, who are all unconscious. It seems pretty clear that the landscape Tolkien describes here is inspired by both Stonehenge and the many other standing stones and stone circles found across the British Isles and Brittany in Northern France, often in the near vicinity of barrows.
The Barrow-wights themselves, however, are most strongly inspired by Norse mythology and the legends told in Old Norse sagas. The Scandinavian sagas were written in the mid and later medieval periods, possibly based on earlier oral histories, in several different genres. These are: Kings’ sagas, which told stories of kings of Sweden and Norway; Íslendingasögur, which tell stories about early settlers and colonists in Iceland; contemporary sagas, which tell story from their own contemporary or near-contemporary history; chivalric sagas, which might be translations from French chansons de geste or Latin poems or might be original Icelandic poems; legendary sagas, covering Scandinavian myth and legend from before the settlement of Iceland, and saints’ and bishops’ sagas, which are translations of hagiographies or bishops’ lives.
Many of these sagas, especially the Kings’ sagas and and Íslendingasögur, tell stories of undead creatures. Although they are often called “ghosts” in English translations, these are not shadow-like or insubstantial, but zombie-like revenants that are literal walking corpses (when they are not shape-shifting into seals). They could even be referred to as “trolls,” a word which was sometimes used for monstrous beings in general before it started to be used for a more specific type of creature. The revenants, or wights, were sometimes called draugr, aptrgangr, or haugbúi; the last term being one which was often used for the sort that Tolkien might call a barrow-wight.
Barrow-wights, or mound dwellers, are a particular type of revenant that reside in their own tombs. Barrows, raised mounds covering a tomb that might include treasure along with the human remains, were used in various parts of Europe across several millennia, and were popular in England in the Bronze Age, and in Scandinavia in the Viking Age. The wights are often there to guard their treasure from thieves. Some will not disturb anyone if they are not disturbed themselves, while others, like Tolkien’s, are a bit more proactive and might attack anyone passing nearby. In Grettir’s Saga, for example, a barrow-wight called Karr the Old sends up flames from his barrow to frighten away the locals. Grettir the outlaw heads over to the barrow to steal the treasure and fights Karr, defeating the wight by cutting off its head and placing the head by its rear end, a common solution to the problem.
Another example that may have been particularly influential on Tolkien is a king from The Saga of Hromund Gripsson called Thráinn. Thráinn was not, as Hobbit fans might think, a Dwarf, but an undead witch-king with a magic sword called Mistletoe. The hero Hromund fights and defeats Thráinn, burns his body, and takes the magic sword.
In Norse mythology, mound dwellers or barrow wights are undead, that is, they are the dead person, reanimated and even more monstrous than they often were when they were alive. In Tolkien’s lore, they are slightly different. Tom Bombadil tells the Hobbits that after the Númenorean kings whose bodies lie in the barrows had been buried for a long time, “A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind.” This seems to imply that the Wights are not the kings themselves, but some kind of shadowy evil spirit inhabiting their bones.