Chapter 6: The Old Forest
Welcome back to another installment, where tonight I have just managed to survive an encounter with Old Man Willow and received the reward of being sung into safety by Tom Bombadil (and, eventually, his excellent wife, Goldberry). Most of this chapter involves a struggle with navigation, which is good reading but harder for me to comment on, but I’ve got a few thoughts to share.
First of all, I do really like that this chapter affords some opportunities for Sam and Pippin to shine, since so far they’ve much more frequently served as comic relief or sidekicks. Frodo very naturally set the course and pace from their departure from Bag End all the way to the Brandywine River, and of course since they met up with Merry, he’s handled a lot of the leadership in organizing their departure and actually leading them into the Old Forest. So I got a smile out of it being Pippin Took, of all people, serving as the voice of caution when Merry suggests following the path along the Withywindle: Pippin’s comment, “who made the track, do you suppose, and why? I am sure it was not for our benefit,” is insightful and not just in that context, since this kind of wariness in general will be useful on their journey. And then later, when, having disregarded Pippin’s concerns, the group has gotten themselves tangled up with Old Man Willow, I just love Sam’s ferocity as he throws himself into getting Merry and Pippin free, peaking with Sam’s insisting that “I’ll have it down, if I have to gnaw it.” If you’re in a bad spot, I don’t think you could do better than having Sam Gamgee in your corner. This is a thing that we know from being familiar with the many times he’ll rise to the occasion over the course of the story, but I think this is really the first glimpse of it, and it makes me glad.
Old Man Willow is a new antagonist, and he doesn’t stick around long, but it is interesting that he’s effectively the first enemy the hobbits do actual battle with. Sure, the Black Riders have made appearances, but so far those have only required the hobbits to pass some stealth checks (which they have). Old Man Willow’s actually managed to grapple with them in melee range. There are quite a few good depictions of Old Man Willow, but my favorite is probably the Hildebrandt portrayal: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/37/95/c237954aa9b3d69db3825be49fa2d055.jpg I am not particularly fond of the style of the Brothers Hildebrandt in plenty of other settings, but I think they get this one right. Anyway, one of the funny things about Old Man Willow is that he predates The Lord of the Rings -- as do Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, in fact. All of them appeared in print when Tolkien published a quite silly, sing-song poem called "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" in an issue of The Oxford Magazine in 1934, several years before the publication of The Hobbit. Their arrival here is therefore another example of Tolkien writing his way into the book: after some initial stumbles, he’d gotten a crew of hobbits to Buckland (at this point, early in 1938, all their identities and names are a little wacky and the canonical four haven’t quite materialized...the closest we have is Marmaduke Brandybuck, yes, Marmaduke, what was he thinking), and then complained to his publisher that he enjoys “hobbit-talk” but that he doesn’t really know how to get them into an adventure (at this point the whole Ring quest had still not really materialized). After months of being stuck there, though, he writes a letter to his publisher in August of 1938 noting that the story was now “flowing along” and indeed he comments that it is “getting quite out of hand” -- he didn’t know it yet, but he was on the verge of figuring out where he was going. To get there, though, he had to drag the hobbits finally out of their comfort zone….and the only way he could apparently work through his writer’s block was to take them into this fictional world he’d already imagined of the Willow and Tom Bombadil. If you’re one of the many readers who always found this section a little strange, since it can feel like a sideline to the Ring narrative, well, there’s a reason for that.
But I don’t read it as a sideline, myself, and I’d encourage you to ditch that reading, too, if you can. For one thing, the figure of Tom Bombadil is captivating -- I get that Jackson had to ditch him in order to get the film to hold together, but it’s a shame he’s not captured on film -- and I’ll explore who he is and what he means later, since we get plenty of him in the next chapter. But if we just take the Old Forest itself as a setting, this chapter teaches us a lot about the hobbits and their quest. For one thing, it reminds us what a magical space we have strayed into -- their challenges now won’t just be brambles and things, as they had to manage when taking a “short cut” in the Shire, but rather places like this one, in which seemingly every plant and slope in the region is conspiring against them. This conspiracy is impersonal, of course -- the Old Forest’s hostility and menace has nothing really to do with them, their errand, or the Ring itself. But all that does is remind us what a large world exists out here beyond the sweep of the Bounders who watch the borders of the Shire, and how terribly difficult it will be for them without a guide, or a lot of good luck. Tom’s a bit of good luck, and we’ll get more of that good luck out of him in the chapters ahead. But they can’t count on a Tom Bombadil showing up all the time. I get that films have to rush past these scenarios, but it’s a shame, since I think that, had the hobbits simply found their way directly to Bree, it would make for a much different conversation in the Prancing Pony when they find themselves talking to a potential guide. Part of the reason they make the choices they do is that they understand how close they’ve already come to dying without ever getting really close to a Black Rider, just navigating from Buckland to Bree.
One last thought is actually just a thought I should have offered last time around and forgot to -- the very last paragraphs of Chapter 5 (which I saw when I turned to the beginning of this chapter, and had my memory sparked) consist of Frodo’s troubled dream while sleeping at Crickhollow. The dream is, well, dreamlike as it drifts between disconnected images and impressions -- there are a tangle of trees at one point but then also a tower and the Sea air. Are the trees a literal expression of his fears about journeying into the Old Forest the next day, or can we take them somewhere else? I find the many potential interpretations fascinating, and can't really commit to one.
All right, I thought about fusing the next two chapters together given their length, but then I decided that I will have more than enough to say about Tom and Goldberry to warrant giving them ample space, so it’ll just be Chapter 7 tomorrow: In The House of Tom Bombadil.