Goldberry, the ‘River-woman’s daughter’ (in the 1934 version, ‘Riverwoman’), was carried over into the 1962 poem without further explanation, though her character is notably enlarged in The Lord of the Rings. Both she and her mother, their nature and place in the scheme of Tolkien’s mythology, have been the subject of much discussion, but (as for the questions surrounding Tom Bombadil) without definitive resolution. In the poem, where Goldberry pulls Tom into the river by his beard, she resembles traditional water-sprites or nixies, sometimes accused of pulling humans into a river or lake to drown; in The Lord of the Rings, she is portrayed more as a nature spirit, related to seasonal change.
The poem episode of Old Man Willow catching Tom in a crack is echoed in The Lord of the Rings as Willow-man similarly traps Merry and Pippin. Under Tom’s protection, the hobbits are advised to ‘heed no nightly noise! Fear no grey willow!’ just as Tom himself, in the poem, ‘heeded not the voices, / taps, knocks, dancing feet, all the nightly noises’. Like Tom and Goldberry, the character of Old Man Willow grew in the later story: ‘his song and thought ran through the woods and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs’ (bk. I, ch. 7). According to Humphrey Carpenter in his Biography, Tolkien once said that the idea of Old Man Willow shutting someone up in a crack probably came in part from gnarled trees as distinctively drawn by the illustrator Arthur Rackham.
The dabchicks Goldberry accuses Tom of frightening are examples of a small waterbird, a grebe, with a long neck and short tail. The compound Badger-brock is simply a doubled word: brock is another name for ‘badger’. In the revised poem, the badgers pull Tom ‘inside their earth’, a word for a badger’s underground home which is typically lined with straw, hay, or grass; in the 1934 version, Tom is pulled more simply ‘inside the hole’. A badger’s earth, or sett, typically has multiple tunnels and several exits, hence references in the poem to ‘the front-door’ (where Tom takes shelter from the rain), ‘backdoor’, and ‘all their doors’. In The Lord of the Rings, Tom tells the hobbits ‘an absurd story about badgers and their queer ways’ (bk. I, ch. 7).
A barrow-wight is an unearthly creature which inhabits a barrow, or burial mound. In Europe there is a long tradition of ancient burial mounds and stone circles; and in some of the barrows, the dead were interred with gold and other precious things. Wights are said in folklore to serve as sentinels of such treasure, thus Barrow-wight in the poem dwells (1962 version) ‘in the old mound / up there on hill-top with the ring of stones round’, and is bidden ‘go back to buried gold’. There is also a tradition in Northern folk-belief in which the draugr, or living dead, haunted burial mounds (and elsewhere) and represented a threat to the truly living. In The Lord of the Rings, the Barrow-downs in which a wight entraps the four hobbits are given a history from the early days of Middle-earth, while the wight itself is an evil spirit who came to the mounds some two hundred years earlier, as an agent of the Witch-king of Angmar. The bone-rings the banished wight of the poem rattles in his ‘lonely mound’ are perhaps rings made from bone, of the sort sometimes found in burials; in The Lord of the Rings, Tom speaks of barrow-wights who ‘walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers’ (bk. I, ch. 7).
It is remarkable that Tom sends Goldberry, Old Man Willow, the badgers, and Barrow-wight to sleep before he himself sleeps, like a humming-top (1934 humming-top), a variation on the adage ‘slept like a top’, or very soundly, like a spinning top when it is at its steadiest.
BOMBADIL GOES BOATING
We have already mentioned that at some late date, Tolkien labelled a short text ‘germ of Tom Bombadil so evidently [written] in mid 1930s’. We now give this in full:
(Said I)
‘Ho! Tom Bombadil
Whither are you going
With John Pompador
Down the River rowing?’
(Said he)
‘Through Long Congleby,
Stoke Canonicorum,
Past King’s Singleton
To Bumby Cocalorum —
To call Bill Willoughby
Whatever he be doing
And ax Harry Larraby
What beer he is a-brewing.’
(And he sang)
‘Go, boat! Row! The willows are a-bending,
reeds are leaning, wind is in the grasses.
Flow, stream, flow! The ripples are unending;
green they gleam, and shimmer as it passes.
Run, fair Sun, through heaven all the morning,
rolling golden! Merry is our singing!
Cool the pools, though summer be a-burning;
in shady glades let laughter run a-ringing!’
The names John Pompador, Bill Willoughby, and Harry Larraby appear to have no historical or literary significance, but suit the rhythm of the verses. The place-names in the second stanza serve a similar purpose. Of these, however, Christopher Tolkien in The Return of the Shadow has identified Stoke Canonicorum as the medieval name of the present Stoke Canon in Devonshire; but if Long Congleby, King’s Singleton, and Bumby Cocalorum are (or were) also genuine names, we have not found them in Eilert Ekwall’s dictionary of English place-names (1960 edn.) or any other references. Nonetheless, they have the appearance of genuine place-names, and incorporate common elements, such as Long from Old English lang, referring to the length of a piece of land, and -by from Old Norse býr, boer, Old Danish or Old Swedish by, denoting a village or homestead. Ekwall notes towns named Singleton with various possible etymologies, and King’s appears both as a separate name element or in combination (as in Kingston). Bumby is a dialect word for ‘marshy land, quagmire’, and a cocalorum, or cockalorum, is a self-important little man. (Christopher Tolkien has told us privately that his father often used the word cockalorum, possibly to mean ‘absurd, elaborate fuss’.) Ax is here a dialect form of ‘ask’.
‘The germ of Tom Bombadil’ evolved at length into Bombadil Goes Boating, which had no published form before it appeared in the Bombadil collection in 1962. Tolkien developed the poem through at least ten versions as well as fragmentary workings (Bodleian Library, MS Tolkien 19, ff. 10–28, 37–40), calling it variously The Fliting of Tom Bombadil, The Merry Fliting of Tom Bombadil, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil II: The Merry Fliting before settling on its less recondite final title. Fliting, from the Old English for ‘strive’ or ‘quarrel’, refers to a contest of insults, often in verse. Examples are found in Northern and medieval literature, for instance in the exchange in Beowulf between Beowulf and Unferth before the former faces Grendel. This indeed is the thread which runs through Bombadil Goes Boating, in which Tom is scolded by the willow-wren, the kingfisher, the otter, the swan, the ‘little folk of Hays-end and Breredon’, and Farmer Maggot, and gives back as good as he gets. Violent though the encounters may seem, in truth – and arrows in his hat notwithstanding – the many threats given or received by Tom are made in good humour. Tolkien says in the preface to the collection: ‘Tom’s raillery is here turned in jest upon his friends, who treat it with amusement (tinged with fear)’.
Early in the development of the poem, Tolkien extended the dialogue of the original three stanzas, so that Tom is asked a question in the first, replies in the second, is asked in the third to tell Bill Willoughby to mind what he is doing and to ask Harry Larraby about his beer, and replies again in a new fourth stanza, to the effect that (as far as Tom is concerned) Bill can do whatever he pleases, and there is no beer (brewed by Harry) as good as can be found ‘Under-hill’ (MS Tolkien 19, f. 11). Tolkien soon omitted the initial dialogue, however, and introduced a new first stanza in which Tom decides to mend his boat and row down the river. The remainder of the poem grew until it became the longest of those in the Bombadil volume and contained the most complex vocabulary and allusions.
Bombadil Goes Boating begins in autumn, when the year ‘was turning brown’. Tom having caught
a falling leaf from a beech tree, he expresses a folk-belief that good luck follows catching a leaf before it reaches the ground. Some say that doing so brings a happy day, or month, or even twelve months of happiness; Tom takes his ‘happy day’ at once. He repairs his boat and journeys down the withy-stream, that is, the Withywindle, the river of the earlier poem (and The Lord of the Rings) bordered by willows (withies). Tolkien now plays on ‘willow’, first by introducing a willow-wren (the willow warbler) with its cry ‘Whillo’ (in draft, ‘Willow’, then ‘Whillow’), then mentioning Willow-man (Old Man Willow) and the threat of a willow-spit, and at last the ‘withy-willow-stream’ in Tom’s song. In the second and third stanzas, the willow-wren is a ‘Little Bird’ who offers to carry a message to Farmer Maggot, thus a proverbial ‘little bird [who] told me’ and a ‘tell-tale’.
Tolkien glosses Mithe in the preface as ‘the outflow of the Shirebourn’. The corresponding place-name element is derived from Old English (ge)myðe ‘junction of streams’. Here, in the context of Middle-earth, the river Shirebourn flows into the Brandywine; in the preface, Tolkien adds that there ‘was a landing-stage, from which a lane ran to Deephallow and so on to the Causeway road that went through Rushey and Stock’, enlarging the geography of the Shire already established in The Lord of the Rings. The name Shirebourn is not derived from ‘Shire’ but from Old English scïr ‘bright, clear, pure’ + burna ‘stream’.
Tom now shaves oars (makes or adjusts them with a spokeshave or drawing-knife), patches his cockle-boat (a small, shallow boat resembling a cockle-shell) – the kingfisher, and later the otter, deprecatingly calls it a ‘tub’ – and sets off through reed and sallow-brake (a clump or thicket of low-growing willows). Hays-end, where Tom knows ‘little folk’ (hobbits), is the end of the hay (an archaic word for ‘hedge’) or boundary fence that divides the Old Forest from Buckland; in the Shire map in The Lord of the Rings, it is marked at lower right (as ‘Haysend’), at the junction of the rivers Brandywine and Withywindle.
After the willow-wren, a kingfisher teases Tom. Although a ‘gay lord’ with brilliant blue plumage when on a bough, it lives ‘in a sloven [untidy] house’, a chamber tunnelled into a sandy bank and lined with disgorged fish bones and feces. T.A. Coward in The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs, a book Tolkien knew, describes the kingfisher’s home as ‘a running sewer of greenish liquid and decomposed fish [which] smells abominably’ (1936 edn., p. 286). Coward also writes that ‘when perched, facing the observer, [the kingfisher’s] ruddy breast alone is seen’ (p. 285), thus Tom’s (exaggerated) statement ‘though your breast be scarlet’. In drafts of the poem, Tolkien had written of a scarlet crest, but discovered that no variety of kingfisher likely to be seen in Britain would have that feature.
‘Fisher-birds beak in air a-dangling / to show how the wind is set’ refers to a folk-superstition described by Sir Thomas Browne in Pseudoxia Epidemica (1646), that if a kingfisher skin is hung by the bill, it turns like a weathercock to show from what quarter the wind is blowing. Tom makes the literal remark, ‘that’s an end of angling’: the kingfisher would be dead, and no longer able to angle (though the bird does not, as this word denotes, fish with a hook and line). Tolkien wrote to Pauline Baynes that the allusion to Sir Thomas Browne was one of several ‘donnish’ details he included in Bombadil Goes Boating, ‘just [as] a private pleasure which I do not expect anyone to notice’. He found that the bird’s name ‘did not mean, as I had supposed, “a King that fishes”. It was originally the king’s fisher. That links the swan (traditionally the property of the King) with the fisher-bird; explains both their rivalry, and their special friendship with Tom: they were creatures who looked for the return of their rightful Lord, the true King’ (1 August 1962, Letters, p. 319).
As we noted for the previous poem, Tom in The Lord of the Rings wears ‘a long blue feather’ (bk. I, ch. 6), rather than the peacock feather of the 1934 Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and in the 1962 revision Tolkien changed the feather’s source from a peacock to a swan. This change was made also to allow for an episode in Bombadil Goes Boating which would tell retrospectively how Tom’s feather came to be long and blue at the time he met the hobbits in the Old Forest: simply, that he found a stray feather from the kingfisher, lost as it left in a flash. (T.A. Coward writes, p. 285, that the kingfisher’s flight is so rapid that ‘a streak of blue as the bird vanishes round a bend is all that is often visible’.) The feather in Tom’s hat was already blue in the early prose story of Tom in the days of King Bonhedig (see Appendix).
Critics before us have noticed in Bombadil Goes Boating (let alone the first part of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) echoes of ‘The River Bank’, the first chapter of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows (1908). The most notable similarities are the introduction of the otter (‘Whisker-lad’), with rings swirling around Tom’s boat and bubbles quivering, and then his swift exit, ‘Whoosh!’ with ‘river-water spraying’: in Grahame’s book, ‘a streak of bubbles’ travels ‘along the surface of the water’ before Otter appears to Mole and the Water Rat, and he leaves with ‘a swirl of water and a “cloop!”’.
The otter’s insult that ‘Tom’s gone mad as a coot with wooden legs’ alludes to the saying mad as a coot, in which coot has the colloquial sense of a stupid, silly, or crazy person (rather than the water bird), while ‘wooden legs’ refers to the oars of Tom’s cockle-boat. Tom’s reply is more complex. He would give the otter’s fell (pelt or skin) to Barrow-wights (see our notes for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil), who would taw it (make the skin into leather, using a chemical solution). The wights would then smother the otter in gold-rings, such that if his mother saw him, she would never know him unless by a whisker – an allusion to the story of ‘Andvari’s gold’ in the medieval Völsunga Saga (or, with variation, in the Elder Edda) which may be summarized as follows. Otr (Otter), son of Hreidmar, could change his shape and often transformed into an otter to swim and fish. While in otter-form, he is seen by three of the Norse gods, one of whom kills him for his skin. But the gods are seized by Hreidmar and his other sons, who demand as compensation for Otr’s death that his skin be covered with gold. This is done, until only a whisker remains exposed, and that in turn is concealed with a ring. Tolkien included a treatment of this story in his Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009).
At the otter’s departure appears ‘Old Swan of Elvet-isle’: elvet is an old word for ‘swan’, from Old English elfetu, surviving in place-names such as Elvetham in Hertfordshire. A cob is a male swan. Tom now alludes to the swan-wing feather he wore in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and in which it became ‘worn by weather’. His insult, ‘Could you speak a fair word … / long neck and dumb throat’ reflects a folk-belief that swans are voiceless, or at least not musical, until just before death, when they sing a beautiful ‘swan song’; but this is not true: even the so-called Mute Swan is not wholly without voice. ‘If one day the King returns, in upping he may take you, / brand your yellow bill’ refers to an annual census conducted since the twelfth century, of swans owned by the English crown, later with the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the Worshipful Company of Dyers. Upping means ‘drive [swans] up or together’, so that marks of ownership, in the form of nicks, could (formerly) be cut into the birds’ bills; today, swans are given foot-rings with identification numbers.
Tom next comes to a weir or low dam built across the Withywindle. The meaning is evident from the need, at the end of the poem, to drag the cockle-boat ‘over [the] weir’ when being pushed upstream. The river rushes into the reach (an extended stretch of water), which leads Tom, ‘spinning like a windfall’ (in the manner of a twig or leaf blown down by the wind), to the hythe (or hithe, a landing-place) at Grindwall. In the Bombadil preface, Tolkien notes that ‘Grindwall was a small hythe on the north bank of the Withywindle; it was outside the Hay, and so was well watched and protected by a grind or fence extended into the water’.
Further in the same note, Tolkien writes that ‘Breredon (Briar
Hill) [from Old English brér ‘briar’ + dūn ‘hill’] was a little village on rising ground behind the hythe, in the narrow tongue between the end of the High Hay and the Brandywine’. Hobbits of Hays-end and Breredon now challenge Tom, insulting his facial hair as a ‘‘billy-beard’, as if it were the beard of a billy-goat (male goat); in The Hobbit, Tolkien established that hobbits themselves have no beards. Tom, who lives in the Old Forest, is one of the ‘Forest-folk’. His rejoinder ‘fatbellies’ refers to Hobbits’ love of food and drink, though his own reputation for drinking has preceded him, if the beer barrels ‘aint deep enough in Breredon’ to slake, or satisfy, his thirst. Orks is a variant of orcs (goblins); the latter spelling is used in The Lord of the Rings, but the -k form appears in Orkish.
Although the ‘little folk’ make good their threat of three arrows in Tom’s hat, the exchange ends in peace, as the hobbits carry him across the Brandywine by wherry (a light rowing-boat common on rivers and canals, distinct from the Norfolk wherry or sailing barge). At the Mithe Steps, or landing-stage, Farmer Maggot is not there to meet Tom, who now follows the Causeway road. The nearby village of Rushey (spelled ‘Rushy’ on the Shire map in The Lord of the Rings) is named for rush + Old Norse -ey ‘isle’, connoting a patch of hard land within marshes.
Maggot catches up and joins in the ‘fliting’, calling Tom a ‘beggarman tramping in the Marish’, the district of reclaimed marshland on the east side of the Eastfarthing in the Shire (marish is an old form of marsh), and accusing him of seeking ale without intending to pay for it. Tom in reply calls his friend ‘Muddy-feet’, doubtless a severe insult to a marsh-dweller. (Tolkien states in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings that while hobbits typically did not wear shoes, those of the Marish, like Farmer Maggot, had dwarf-boots for muddy weather.) Tom’s ‘penny-wise’ counters Maggot’s ‘you’ve not a penny’, and ‘old farmer fat that cannot walk for wheezing, / cart-drawn like a sack’ and ‘tub-on-legs’ insult Maggot’s girth, pointing out that Tom has had to walk from the Mithe while the farmer drove a pony-cart. In Book I, Chapter 4 of The Lord of the Rings, Maggot is described as ‘a broad thick-set hobbit with a round red face’.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Page 7