by Tom Shippey
It is admittedly not so easy in the beginning. The thing we would like to know about Tom Bombadil is what he is, but this is never asked or answered directly. In chapter 7 Frodo raises the courage to ask instead who he is, only to receive the answers, from Goldberry, (1) ‘He is’, (2) ‘He is, as you have seen him’, (3) ‘He is the Master of wood, water and hill’, and from Tom himself (4) ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer.’ He seems in fact to be a lusus naturae, a one-member category; the hobbits are doubtful whether he can be called a man, though he looks like one apart from his size, which is intermediate between man and hobbit. More revealing is his main attribute, fearlessness, present in The Lord of the Rings but even clearer in the 1934 poem (and in its rewritten form as lead-poem of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962). The action of that is simply four clashes between Tom and potentially hostile creatures, Goldberry, ‘the Riverwoman’s daughter’, who pulls him into the river, Willow-man, who catches him in a crack, the Badgerfolk who drag him down their tunnel, and finally as Tom goes home the Barrow-wight behind the door:
‘You’ve forgotten Barrow-wight dwelling in the old mound
up there atop the hill with the ring of stones round.
He’s got loose to-night: under the earth he’ll take you!
Poor Tom Bombadil, pale and cold he’ll make you!’
But Tom reacts only with simple imperatives: ‘You let me out again … You show me out at once … Go back to grassy mound, on your stony pillow / lay down your bony head, like Old Man Willow.’ And once the threats have been dismissed Tom goes further, going back to seize Goldberry from her nameless mother ‘in her deep weedy pool’, taking her back to his house to be married. Their wedding-night is undisturbed by the hags and bogles murmuring outside, and the poem ends with Goldberry combing her hair and Tom chopping sticks of willow. As Goldberry says to Frodo, Tom is ‘the Master’. What he is may not be known, but what he does is dominate.
Tom’s other major quality is naturalness. Even his language has something unpremeditated about it. A lot of what he says is nonsense, the first thing indeed that the hobbits notice, even before they see him. When it is not ‘hey dol! merry dol!’ and the like, it tends to be strongly assertive or onomastic, mere lists of names and qualities. From time to time it breaks through to being ‘perhaps a strange language unknown to the hobbits, an ancient language whose words were mainly those of wonder and delight’. But though they may not know the language, the hobbits understand it, as they understand Goldberry’s rain-song without recognising the words; and when Tom names something (as he does with the hobbits’ ponies) the name sticks – the animals respond to nothing else the rest of their lives. There is an ancient myth in this feature, that of the ‘true language’, the tongue in which there is a thing for each word and a word for each thing, and in which signifier then naturally has power over signified – language ‘isomorphic with reality’ once again.7 It is this which seems to give Tom his power. He is the great singer; indeed he does not yet seem to have discovered, or sunk into, prose. Much of what he says is printed by Tolkien as verse, but almost all of what he says can be read as verse, falling into strongly-marked two-stress phrases, with or without rhyme and alliteration, usually with feminine or unstressed endings; see for instance his last ‘prose’ speech, ‘Tóm will give you góod advice, / tíll this day is óver / (áfter that your ówn luck / must gó with you and gúide you) /: fóur miles alóng the road / you’ll cóme upon a víllage, / Brée under Brée-hill, / with dóors looking wéstward.’ The scansion-system (more complicated than I have marked) is a little like that of the Old English verse Tolkien was later to reproduce in the songs of Rohan, but more like that of much Old English ‘prose’, over whose claim to being ‘verse’ editors still hesitate. The point is though that while we appreciate it as rhythmical (unlike prose), we also do not mark it as premeditated or artificial (unlike verse). The hobbits fall into song themselves, ‘as if it was easier and more natural than talking’.
Tom Bombadil, then, is fearless. In some way he antedates the corruptions of Art. According to Elrond he is ‘Iarwain Ben-adar … oldest and fatherless’. Like Adam, also fatherless, ‘whatsoever [he] called every living creature, that was the name thereof’. Unlike the descendants of Adam he does not suffer from the curse of Babel; everybody understands his language by instinct. It is odd, though, that Tom shares the adjective ‘oldest’ with another being in The Lord of the Rings, Fangorn the Ent, whom Gandalf calls ‘the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun’ (p. 488). An inconsistency? It need not be so, if one accepts that Tom is not living – as the Nazgûl and the Barrow-wight are not dead. Unlike even the oldest living creatures he has no date of birth, but seems to have been there since before the Elves awoke, a part of Creation, an exhalation of the world. There are hints in old poems of such an idea. The Old English poem Genesis B, originally written in Old Saxon, at one point calls Adam selfsceafte guma, which could be translated calquishly as ‘self-shaped man’. Modern translations prefer to say ‘self-doomed’ or something of the sort, while the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary prefers ‘a man by spontaneous generation’. Adam of course wasn’t spontaneously generated. But Tolkien may have wondered what the thing behind such a word could be. He must have also reflected on the strange Green Knight who comes to challenge Sir Gawain in the poem he had edited in 1925, like Tom Bombadil unflappable, a lusus naturae in size and colour, conveying to many critics a sense of identification with the wild wintry landscape from which he appears, called by the poet in respectful but uncertain style an aghlich mayster, ‘a terrible Master’. The green man, the uncreated man, the man grown by ‘spontaneous generation’… From what? Obviously, from the land. Tom Bombadil is a genius loci. But the locus of which he is the genius is not the barren land of the Green Knight’s Pennine moors, but the river and willow country of the English midlands, or of the Thames Valley. He represents, as Tolkien said himself, ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (Letters, p. 26).
It is interesting that Tom’s adversary from 1934 on is Willowman. By The Fellowship of the Ring both have become attached to the River Withywindle, ‘withy’ of course being no more than the local word for ‘willow’, while ‘windle’ is O.E. *windol, ‘winding brook’. There is a Withybrook north of Oxford, in Warwickshire, while Windsor in Berkshire to the south could be derived from *windolsora, ‘the landing-place on the winding stream’, in this case the Thames. As for the sudden striking description of the Withywindle in chapter 6, with its drowsy late-afternoon sunshine and through it winding lazily ‘a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves’, it would not do badly as a description of the stream that runs down to join the Thames at Oxford, the Cherwell – a ‘very apt name’, says Ekwall’s English River-Names, meaning probably ‘the winding river’.
The hobbits, to be brief, have got outside the Shire but not outside the boundaries of ‘the Little Kingdom’. Tom is the spirit of pretty much their own land, and so like them in being slow, lavish, unbeautiful, but only stupid-seeming. Willowman is a narrower variant of the same idea, and Goldberry another in being ‘the River-daughter’, at first sight ‘enthroned in the midst of a pool’, with rippling hair and reed-green gown and flag-lilies round her waist and feet. Barrow-wight too springs from landscape, for barely fifteen miles from Oxford begins the greatest concentration of barrows in the country, where the green Berkshire downs rise from the plain. ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ and the others must have called to Tolkien’s mind the many Icelandic tales of the dwellers in the mounds, the haugbúar or ‘hogboys’ of dialect story. As for ‘Bree on Bree-hill’, it shows its conception in its name. Three miles from Worminghall and ten from Oxford the town of Brill sits on its hummock, betraying in its name a tale of ancient conquest.8 ‘Bree’ means ‘hill’ in Welsh and Brill (from ‘bree-hill’) is therefore in a way nons
ense, exactly parallel with Chetwode (or ‘wood-wood’) in Berkshire close by, exactly opposite to the ‘capitalised’ names of The Hill, The Water or The Carrock. Tolkien borrowed the name for its faint Celtic ‘style’, to make subliminally the point that hobbits were immigrants too, that their land had had a history before them. But for their first hundred-odd pages the hobbits seem to be wandering through a very closely localised landscape, one even narrower than their own travels; and that landscape and the beings attached to it are in a way the heroes.9 They force themselves into the story. But while they slow its pace, appear strictly redundant, almost eliminate the plot centred on the Ring,10 they also do the same job as the maps and the names: they suggest very strongly a world which is more than imagined, whose supernatural qualities are close to entirely natural ones, one which has moreover been ‘worn down’, like ours, by time and by the process of lands and languages and people all growing up together over millennia. In sober daylight no linguist would care to admit that places exhale their own names any more than English counties exude Tom Bombadils. Many people however feel that names fit; and that places have a character of their own. On this not entirely irrational opinion much of Middle-earth is based.
What has just been argued naturally says little about the story in The Fellowship of the Ring chapters 1–10, except perhaps that it was not the author’s overriding interest. Still, much could be said about that too. Probably an analysis of the fantasy in those chapters would do well to start with the things that are not old in Tolkien’s imagination and do not appear to fit. It is a great moment for instance when Merry wakes from the wight’s spell and remembers only a death not his own. ‘The men of Carn Dûm came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart!’ He seems to have taken on the personality of the body in the barrow, but that warrior can hardly be the wight, for Bombadil remembers the dead lords and ladies with affection. So what did the wight intend, and what is it itself, human ghost or alien ‘shadow’ or sediment of death attaching itself to gold like the dragon-spell of avarice in The Hobbit? The uncertainty and the glimpses of an alien world that defies understanding (white robes, wriggling hand, sword across neck), these offer the special thrill of fantasy beyond study. However that thrill is also related to the sense of solidity already mentioned. Without the feeling that he is at once independent, sui generis, and also related to a larger pattern that can take in the Ring and Farmer Maggot and the elves and the Dark Lord, even Bombadil would be a lesser creation.
Stars, shadows, cellar-doors: patterns of language and of history
The basis of Tolkien’s invention is unexpectedly earthbound and factual. However he was also good at peripheral suggestion. ‘“Strider” I am’, says Aragorn, ‘to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.’ He does not say what the ‘foes’ are – wood-orcs? trolls? killer-Huorns? ettens from the high fells? – but the idea of glimpsed shapes in the sunless woods remains. In the same style Gandalf declares that ‘Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things’, but does not particularise. The ‘things’ include Durin’s Bane, the Balrog (maybe the same as the creature that replies to Pippin’s stone with faint knockings, but maybe not), and such beings as Shelob, Gollum, the ‘fell voices’ and maniac laughter of the elementals like mad Bombadils who haunt the Dimrill Stair. Sometimes a veil is lifted for a moment, as when Gandalf tells the story of Gollum and takes Frodo back for a moment to Sméagol and Déagol and their quiet empty world of pools and irises and little boats made of reeds. However more often stories are not told. Aragorn does not explain ‘the cats of queen Berúthiel’ (p. 303), he cuts off the tale of Gil-galad just before Frodo gets to the word ‘Mordor’ (p. 186), he offers only a selection from Beren and Tinúviel (pp. 187–90). Gandalf says similarly that if he were to tell Frodo all the story of the Ring ‘we should still be sitting here when Spring had passed into Winter’, and of Sauron’s loss of the Ring ‘That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall … One day, perhaps, I will tell you all the tale.’ Might and perhaps are the operative words. It is a mistake to think these matters are settled by Appendices, or later publications (even if some of them eventually are). Their job in context is to whet the appetite and provide perspective: they do this, perhaps, less powerfully as history than as ‘myth’.
The centre of Gandalf’s account in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ is thus the little verse about the rings, which acts as epigraph to the whole work and also as final confirmation of the nature of the Ring itself. It concludes:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
The last line is a kind of internal refrain for the verse. It is echoed oddly in the snatch of song that Sam repeats a hundred and forty pages later, about Gil-galad, which ends:
But long ago he rode away
and where he dwelleth none can say;
for into darkness fell his star
in Mordor where the shadows are.
The stanza is yet another pause on the brink of a story, but it acts also as a corroboration. What is the relationship between the one poem and the other? Nobody says, but there must be some relationship, some body of lore that has acted as stimulus for both; and this is not Gandalf’s property alone, but something (once) widely dispersed in Middle-earth.
Bits of it keep turning up. Gildor and the other elves appear on p. 78 singing a ‘hymn’ to Elbereth which ends ‘We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees, / Thy starlight on the Western Seas.’ The implication is that the elves are exiles, themselves living in shadow though not in Mordor, looking up to a starlight from which they are now excluded. Bombadil evokes the same image of loss when he says sixty pages later ‘Few now remember them, yet still some go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folk that are heedless’, and his words stir in the hobbits ‘a vision as it were of a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow’. We realise eventually that this last is Strider, or rather Elessar ‘the Elfstone’; but Bombadil’s words just before are paralleled by Bilbo’s gnomic and descriptive rhyme, heard before anything of Strider’s lineage is revealed:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost …
The echoes run off in many directions, but through them run the words ‘remember’, ‘wander’, ‘dwell’, most of all ‘star’ and ‘shadow’. From all these references, together with others like Aragorn’s song of Beren and Tinúviel with its heavy but elusive use of ‘stars in shadow’, ‘trembling starlight’, ‘shadowy hair’, one could further construct a kind of repeated pattern, allegedly historical, in which stars and shadows are always at strife, the latter nearer and more powerful, the former persisting in memory and in resistance.11 Probably no reader actually does this, but all readers nevertheless perceive something, to be confirmed, reinforced, but not supplanted later on by fuller accounts from Gandalf and Elrond, from Galadriel’s song on pp. 368–9, from the Appendices, eventually from The Silmarillion and the many versions of the latter in ‘The History of Middle-earth’. Few readers also can fail to have resonances struck from their own familiar myths: the ‘sons of Martha’ story, maybe, in the grim unthanked indispensable Rangers, the Harrowing of Hell in Bilbo’s ‘A light from the shadows shall spring’, Icarus or Prometheus or Balder Dead in the fall of Gil-galad. All these remain unfocused but not unfelt. Without extensive explanations they set the characters in a moral world as well as a geographical one, both of them like but not the same as our own.
‘Gil-galad’, then, has a function rather analogous to ‘Nobottle’. Both offer the as
surance that there is more to Middle-earth than can immediately be communicated. Among the many differences between the two names, though, is the fact that ‘Gil-galad’ is clearly something from an unfamiliar language; the effect of languages in Tolkien’s world, as might be expected, is as great as those of maps or of myths. As might also be expected, Tolkien used them in an extremely peculiar, idiosyncratic and daring way, which takes no account at all of predictable reader-reaction. The ‘myth of stars and shadows’, for instance, is repeated in entirely characteristic style in a song sung in Rivendell (p. 231): ‘O Elbereth who lit the stars … I will sing to you after having looked into far lands from here in tree-tangled Middle-earth …’ However no reader of The Lord of the Rings can actually know that, since it is sung in the elvish language Sindarin and not offered in translation till p. 72 of The Road Goes Ever On, the song-cycle published in 1968.12 As they stand in The Fellowship of the Ring they are nonsense syllables: A Elbereth Gilthoniel … Na-chaered palan-díriel o galadhremmin ennorath, Fanuilos, le linnathon. What could any reader be expected to make of that?