[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Some other ideas that were supposed to be in my last post but which were apparently lost:

There's an interesting connection between the Dead Marshes and Lorien: both are places of memory, but in different ways. In Lorien the past lives on, but it presents a danger to those who come into contact with it. The peril of the Wood is that one will never want to leave. The Dead Marshes also preserve the past insofar as they contain the decaying/rotting memory of the ancient past -- and like Lorien they present a peril to the unwary -- if you get too close to those images of the past, you can literally drown in them and never leave.

It brings an interesting comparison to the fore between the sterile preservation of Lorien and the mummification of the Dead Marshes. Against the sterility of Lorien the Marshes are a startling fertile place: for all their associations with death and their proximity to Mordor, time passes there, things actually grow and die. The processes of change that are suspended in Lorien are not suspended in the Marsh: the dead are of and in a past that is distinct from the present and future.