By Eric Meub
A recent weekend witnessed the opening of the second installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy: The Desolation of Smaug. While millions of us will watch the director continue to indulge his limitless thirst for vertigo, this is also an excellent time to muse upon those fragments of the J.R.R. Tolkien opus that have escaped such cinematic spectacle.
Jackson obviously favors certain of the many facets of Tolkien’s vision: he loves the battles, the build-ups, the strategies, the multiple plots, the epic dimensions, the sense of antiquity, the strange creatures and environments, not to mention the medieval artifacts and costumes which encrust the surface. He is less interested in—or demurs to the cinematic challenges of—the slowly passing days, the phases of moon, the details of foliage, the ways of indigenous species, and the innate silence of the imaginary countryside. One can watch the entirety of The Lord of the Rings and wonder why so much of Middle Earth is missing.
In the original plot, Bilbo’s nephew Frodo learns disturbing news about the golden ring of invisibility and must embark on a quest to take it back. He travels a different route out of the Shire than his uncle did sixty years earlier, and he meets various characters along the way: elves, farmers, and the incompetent Black Riders (who will later evolve into the most dangerous and unstoppable agents of the Enemy). Frodo and his companions linger in Buckland, take a nearly lethal short-cut through the Old Forest, and get lost (and almost murdered) on the Barrow-downs before finally returning to the Great Road. Along the way we meet Tom Bombadil, singer of ridiculous verses, yet master of wood and stone, who rescues the hobbits on the two dangerous occasions mentioned above.
This new itinerary provided Tolkien the opportunity to flesh out geography he had skipped over in the previous book: the wide, mostly vacant lands between Hobbiton and Rivendell. And in doing so, he began to create a different Middle Earth from that of the earlier story. As in The Hobbit, the dangers of the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs are independent evils, unallied with Sauron (or the prior malignancies of Morgoth). At the same time, however, they are more visceral, and more serious than those of Mirkwood or the Goblin caves. The spirits of nature and the spirits of the dead constituted the two great fears of pre-modern man, and Tolkien imbues their horrors and hungers with eloquent insight. The saving presence of Bombadil and his consort Goldberry is likewise more heartfelt than heroic.
And just who are these people? Tom Bombadil is apparently a man, though he has lived forever in a state of prolonged early-old-age. He eats and drinks like any man, yet never fattens or feels ill. He defeats Old Man Willow and the Barrow Wights in turn, but only through the efficacy of his cheery nonsense rhymes. He is all-powerful within his little realm, but his realm has limits. According to Hobbit lore, he has occasionally wandered into Buckland and the Marish, but he mainly limits his activities to the vicinity of the downs, the wood, and the Withywindle River.
Just as mystifying is Goldberry, described as the River-daughter. Nowhere else in the novel do we encounter such a creature, a seeming personification of a natural element. We hear of no daughters of the Brandywine, Isen, or Anduin, and the Ents do not include such beings in their lists of the Free Peoples (Goldberry-types could scarcely be included in the other list).
Bombadil and Goldberry, therefore, do more to expand Tolkien’s world than all of the inserted geography. They participate at once of both medieval redemption and nurturing humor as well as classical clarity, beauty, and optimism. There is an innocent gladness in their presence that surpasses that of Galadriel herself. But, for all their mystery and attraction, they must be bade farewell for the adventure to proceed.
In continuing his story, then, Tolkien led the hobbits to the village of Bree where they encountered a ranger named Strider. For a while, Strider was just another of the colorful characters of the adventure—more hobbit than man—until Tolkien started puzzling out who he was, where he came from, and what was his part in the story. With time, Strider evolved in Tolkien’s mind into the weather-beaten Aragorn, last of a line of kings, poised to regain the throne of Gondor with the fall of Sauron and the destruction of the Ring. Suddenly Tolkien had found his epic. The Lord of the Rings was no longer destined for the children’s shelf, but expanded into a unique monument of twentieth century literature.
Even before completing the final chapters of the trilogy, therefore, but with the larger end in mind, Tolkien started revising the first chapters, to better set the stage for the events to come. Much of the explanatory conversations with Gandalf date from these revisions. The Bombadil episodes, however, even though they had no bearing on the larger story, somehow remained (as did that talking fox). They endure as the last outcrop of an evolutionary stage: an invented world that lies between the lightness of The Hobbit and the epic gravity of The Lord of the Rings. They are, in a way, a kind of middle Middle Earth. And caught within their pages, like the gossamer-wings of insects held in amber, suspend the images of Bombadil and Goldberry.
Again we ask ourselves, as Frodo did of Goldberry: Who is Tom Bombadil? Her answer is stunning: He is. These are the self-descriptive words of the God of Abraham and Moses on Mount Sinai. These are the words that embroiled the Gospel Jesus in a riot in his hometown Nazareth. From the pen of a Catholic, these are blasphemous words to ascribe to anyone but God. Is Bombadil therefore the Almighty? One response is that he cannot be everyone’s God, since he has territorial limitations. Frodo cannot sing Ho Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo from the Cracks of Doom and expect deliverance.
But Bombadil exudes other attributes of divinity. He personifies calm assurance in the manner of Jesus: Heed no nightly noise! Fear no grey willow! he instructs the hobbits at bedtime. His fearlessness is contagious: Goldberry exudes the same calm confidence in all being as it should. But, on the other hand, nowhere in the Gospels do we encounter the ribald and comic behavior of Bombadil. And he may be earthy in other ways as well. First encountered in the act of bringing Goldberry flowers, he constantly fusses over her and praises her beauty. We don’t know her age any more than his, but she is pictured as youthful and lovely. He recounts with joy the day they met, as would any man about his beautiful bride. It is impossible to imagine he does not enjoy the full range of conjugal relations implied by such a union: Tom is no sexless elf. If he represents God, then we are witnessing an enthusiastically carnal version.
In discussing Bombadil in Rivendell, the Council of Elrond agrees that Bombadil’s strength is not in power, but in his resistance to power. Bombadil’s reaction to the ring is significant. Not only does it not make him disappear, it cannot even make him take the ring seriously. He looks through its circle with his big blue eye, spins it in the air, and even, by a juggling trick, makes it disappear.
The greatest insight into Bombadil’s power is revealed after he hands the ring back to Frodo. Frodo worries that the ring has been tampered with and decides to test it. He puts it on in the midst of one of Bombadil’s stories. Of course Tom can see Frodo’s every invisible move, but more telling is Frodo’s internal mention of the story Tom is telling at the time: the word Frodo uses to himself is absurd. This is Frodo’s only negative judgment of Bombadil, and it is made under the influence of the ring. The ring, we are given to know, does not like Bombadil at all, which is probably the single most explicit testament to his significance.
But given Tom’s resistance to power and evil, what of his limitations, his geography? He is master within these bounds, but of what good is this mastery? Hardly a human soul lives in the region of his dominion. Other than the migrating bands of elves, who do not need Tom’s assistance, only the chance wanderer would have occasion to stumble upon Bombadil and his humble cottage. Granted, he did not necessarily choose his isolation. He recounts the entire history of the region, including periods when castles crowned the hills and armies marched against one another. He remembers individuals, including a fair lady who once owned a brooch liberated from the barrow wight’s hoard. Tom didn’t retreat from the world: the world retreated from him, and he makes no effort to entice the world back.
He cannot be entirely autonomous, of course. His yellow boots, for instance, likely came from a cobbler in Buckland, Bree, or East Farthing. Whether he paid for them with a bit of barrow gold or filched them from a trash heap and mended the stitches, we can only guess. In either case, they will not last forever. For these and other necessities he must endure intermittent incursions to the world of men and hobbits. But, unlike what one would expect of a regional divinity, neither Tom nor anyone else evangelizes in his name. He is a lone recluse, as inert as a Barrow-downs monolith. One can go to visit him as Gandalf does, and talk a day or two, but he extends no invitation, and makes to effort to return the call. In any case, even Tom’s resistance to evil has its limitations. As Elrond notes, should the forces of Sauron surround the little realm of Bombadil, he would at last succumb.
This theory also illuminates Bombadil’s love of rhymed and rhythmic verse, where the music overpowers the meaning. Tolkien used The Lord of the Rings as a setting for many works of imaginative narrative poetry and songs, pieces that may have had independent origins and were in search of a frame. In Bombadil, Tolkien may be parodying his song-lust while redeeming its efficacy to diminish suffering.
Furthermore, Tom’s resistance to power is typical of an author who cannot be controlled by the evil motives in the characters he has created, no matter how much independent life he has given them. But, while he cannot be controlled, he has stepped sufficiently outside of the narrative flow to let events proceed as they should. Tom-as-Tolkien also clarifies the distinction Goldberry makes, that while Tom is master, he owns nothing of his world around him. An author indeed creates, and knows the ordering of his creation, its rewards as well as limitations. But once the world is made, the doors are open to all comers. Tolkien no more owns Middle Earth than do any of his readers. These days, it seems, Peter Jackson owns it most of all.
What we are left with is less an alternative model of godhead than a self-portrait of Tolkien: comforting, welcoming, liberating, glad, and loving. He has chosen his corner of the countryside and lives in it well and benevolently. He undoes evil with tuneful mirth. He loves the common pleasures of the day: the plenty of a simple hearth and board, the sunshine and the rain, the over hill and under hill. He is no match for a Hitler or a Stalin, but for the myriad petty evils of our day, how many of them might we mortals wither under the robust refrain of Ho Tom Bombadil!
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Copyright © 2013 by Eric Meub
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