“What happened to these people?” John Ronald Tolkien asked. “We don’t know,” Philippa Esclarmonde replied. “Who are they?” “Cathars.” They were standing, pitch torches in hand, at the threshold of a large, roughly circular cavern. The light from their torches licked at a sight that the Englishman would never forget: human bones in mounds reaching almost to the ceiling set at intervals around the cave’s perimeter. Suppressing his revulsion, and his fear, as he played his torch light around the room, Tolkien saw that many, if not all, of these thousands of bones were paper thin, many more splintered like shards of glass. They all seemed to be covered with amoeba-like rust-colored patches. Here and there a full skull stared at him from among this rubble. Pock-marked vertebrae and mottled pieces of fingers and toes were strewn among the larger bones like dice randomly thrown by Hades himself. “Did they live here?” Tolkien asked. “No, they lived openly, but in defiance of Rome.
