Chapter 7: In The House of Tom Bombadil
Well, dear readers, before we dive into the chapter, let’s pause to take in the latest book to end up in my hands. This is the first volume of the seven volume 1999 Millennium Edition of The Lord of the Rings (motivated, as I recall, by it winning a UK bookstore poll on the greatest novel of the 20th Century) -- the set divides the novel into its six books (divisions that are there in your Table of Contents regardless of your copy, but which we talk about infrequently) with a seventh volume for the voluminous appendices that appear at the end of the novel. This first volume is named The Ring Sets Out -- it’s interesting, isn’t it, to use that particular synecdoche here, with the Ring standing in for the collective group of heroes/protagonists? One of the things I like about this set is the way it draws my attention to Tolkien’s divisions of the story -- I’ll reflect a little more on them when I get further in. I also like the aesthetics of this edition a bit -- the red and black, with Tolkien’s hand-drawn and lettered Ring text and the lidless eye of Sauron -- along with its cheek, given that someone at HarperCollins realized that TOLKIEN is seven letters long, which explains why the book in my hand has no title on the spine, but a very large T at the top of it. My edition came with a CD of Tolkien reading passages of the novel aloud, but alas, it was loaned to someone (I have forgotten who) many years ago and never returned. Anyway, it’s not the easiest size for holding and I don’t love the binding, honestly -- it may be sturdy enough but it doesn’t feel very sturdy -- but I’ll definitely be picking up each of the seven volumes at least once along the way. If you’re going to be quixotic, why not go all in, right?
Now, to our chapter -- the house of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry is such a complete respite from the journey. I said in an earlier post that there are few moments of ease, but this is surely one of them -- even easier in some ways than Rivendell and Lothlorien, by which time the stakes feel higher, and the sense of a growing and approaching threat is more persistent. Here there is a simpler kind of welcome and rest -- Goldberry’s words, “heed no nightly noises! For nothing passes door and window here save moonlight and starlight and the wind off the hill-top,” are a charm, and one that does not merely work on the hobbits. I could feel myself chanting them in my own head last night as I finished reading and then drifted off to sleep (I generally let the chapter simmer a little before I sit down to write). Tom’s sing-song voice -- which would, I’ll grant Jackson (or any other director), be a huge challenge to cast for -- has its own restful cadence, lulling the hobbits (and me) into security and sleep like a sort of Eriador Goodnight Moon. It’s basically going to be non-stop fear and foes from here to Rivendell, so the hospitality of these good folk is really welcome. But who are these good folk?
“Who is Tom Bombadil” is the third most asked question in conversations about The Lord of the Rings, in my experience, behind only “do Balrogs have wings” and “why didn’t they have an eagle drop the Ring in Mount Doom” (the answers, by the way, are “no” and “the answer to this is so obvious to me that I feel like you must be trolling me”, but I’m sure I’ll address each of them at more length, in time). He is inscrutable -- weird enough in the Old Forest chapter, and of course even weirder here, both for what he says and what he does. The Internet, bless it, is full of essays and theories about him, and if you’ve never grappled with any of them, it’s a wonderful time sink. To me, the answer has changed over time, but it’s become clearer on this re-read.
I was once in the camp arguing that Tom was some powerful being from the groups of entities that helped sing the universe into existence -- maybe one of the Maiar (the class of spirits that includes Sauron and Gandalf, to name but two examples), maybe even one of the Valar in hiding (who are, given Eru Iluvatar’s consistently hands-off approach, the nearest thing Middle Earth really has to gods). But the text, to me, turns our attention instead to nature -- Goldberry calls him “the Master of wood, water and hill” but immediately rejects the idea that he is somehow in possession of any of these things. “He has no fear,” she replies. “Tom Bombadil is master.” And Tom himself, when approached on the subject by Frodo, tells him that his name is “the only answer” -- and then turns the tables back to Frodo, saying “Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless? But you are young and I am old. Eldest, that’s what I am.” Who are you, Frodo -- this is a question that has been implicit in his conversations for most of the book so far, with Gandalf surrounding what it means to have the burden he does, with Gildor regarding his journey, even with his friends in the unmasking of a “conspiracy” at Crickhollow, but it’s good to see Tom put it so plainly. He doesn’t wait for an answer, though (nor will he get one), and instead reminds Frodo of his incredible age -- I made much of the conversation with Gildor Inglorion who is almost certainly older than the Sun, but it’s hard to take Tom’s words to mean anything other than that he predates the waking of the elves and even the first stirrings of life in Middle-earth itself. “Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.” Tom is, I think, clearly closely tied to the earth itself -- the land that has seen so many creatures come and go, and which endures in spite of all this change. Tom’s energy is boundlessly renewed in the magical way that seasons turn, it seems to me, and his dance with the “daughter of the River”, Goldberry, as they nimbly coordinate together in feeding and housing the hobbits, suggests to me a very elemental joining of earth and water. The two of them are impossibly old, impossibly wise, and nearly as impossibly remote from the troubles and struggles of Middle-earth, even struggles as momentous and consequential as the war about to erupt between Sauron and the Free Peoples.
This explains plenty of things about Tom, and I think it explains most of all that very strange scene surrounding the Ring, in which Tom is curious about the Ring but unaffected by it -- it cannot vanish him, and when Frodo puts it on, Tom can see him just as well. There are lots of ways to read this, but if we take Tom to be closely identified with the earth itself, it makes sense to me -- the earth that yielded the ore used in the forging of the Ring is unaffected by it (when the Ring fell on the ground as Gollum lost it, it certainly didn’t make the mountain disappear), and even if visible light misses Frodo when he wears the Ring, his feet still fall (even with the light touch of a hobbit) on the earth that feels it. Could Goldberry have played so lightly with the Ring? I wonder. But then I wonder many things about them both, and will never cease to, since Tolkien never explains them -- and, indeed, in a letter once commented that “even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).” So if you have your own theories about Tom (and I’ve heard an incredibly wide range, including more than one theory that posits that Tom is, in fact, a creature of immense and ancient evil who is deceiving the hobbits), I think that's more than warranted.
I hope that you’ve read this story, and that if you haven’t, you’ve at least got a copy handy to dip into, because I would really encourage you to read bits of this chapter where Tolkien’s prose is firing on all cylinders -- the section in the middle of this chapter that begins “the upper wind settled in the West…” is really wonderful, as Tom tells the hobbits tales on a rainy day. I’ll give you a taste -- here’s Tom about the region they’ve passed through. “It was not called the Old Forest without reason, for it was indeed ancient, a survivor of vast forgotten woods; and in it there lived yet, aging no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords.” He’s definitely drawing a little here on Joseph Conrad -- one of my favorite passages in Heart of Darkness is when Marlow says that “going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.” But it’s also Tolkien weaving his own particular magic, building into the landscape a remarkable power that will make those passages about the journey all the more evocative (and of course he is preparing us for a longer and more significant encounter with an awakened forest down the road, in Fangorn). Anyway, I love that one sentence, but the whole section where Bombadil is narrating literal millennia to the hobbits but in sweeping phrases without any names or details -- to me, with my reading of Tom, as though the geology of Middle-earth was telling the story of its existence with a very limited understanding of the names of kings and their borders and wars -- is incredible and improves when read aloud.
The experience of the hobbits here is a lot calmer, and so I have less to say about them individually. I think it can’t be denied that this chapter helps reinforce for Frodo (whether or not he’s really internalizing it) that there’s a fate guiding his steps that’s kept him in good fortune for a while -- we learn from Tom that he knows Farmer Maggot well, and that Gildor had actually sent him word (how??) of Frodo’s journey, so that really everyone Frodo has spoken with since leaving Bag End is part of a sort of resistance network that’s helping to ferry him through the first steps of his journey basically undisturbed by Black Riders (and other fell things). Frodo’s dreams are still troubled, though, even in the peace of Tom’s house -- the dream narrated for us will, of course, become comprehensible once Frodo reaches Rivendell and learns what it was he was seeing without knowing it. For now, it is just one more omen for him, one more reminder that there is trouble brewing and that he cannot always tell what is in motion or how to respond to the dangers he perceives. For once, though, unlike their conversation with Gildor, the hobbits have been given good advice about how to avoid Barrow-wights and a good backup plan in the rhyme they need to summon Tom to secure his aid -- if you don’t know this part of the story (especially as the films skip it entirely) I’ll let you guess how this will go, although if you’re guessing that they do everything as they’re told and never need a Plan B, well, I love your optimism and I wonder if you’ve met Peregrin Took.
This chapter, though, reminds me how much I love the early going in Fellowship -- I know some folks (who will remain nameless) who find this all tedious, and basically skip everything from Gandalf telling Frodo about the Ring to their arrival at the Prancing Pony as “filler”, and I have to say, I don’t even know how to read this book that way. A little skipping around in a long novel is no great sin (I’ve done it myself with Melville, and I love Moby Dick), but here I just think you’d be missing some great, great stuff in these characters and the way Tolkien unfolds his world for us. Anyway, I’m glad to have had the peace of this house (many thanks to you both, Goldberry and Tom), and I think I’m ready to face just a little bit of peril (I hear some of you saying, “no, it’s too perilous”) again as tomorrow I follow four hobbits into Chapter 8 and the Fog on the Barrow-downs.