Ho Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadil-o. Tom Bombadil is honestly very strange-o.
Seriously. I love him, but there’s no question this is a very odd part of the story. I’ve seen a number of articles over the years referring to how book fans are angry at Peter Jackson over the exclusion of Tom Bombadil from the movies, but I’ve never actually seen or interacted with any of the fans in question. (edit: /u/wishforagiraffe is one, she tells me) I suppose they’re out there, but about the strongest negative reaction I’ve actually encountered is along the lines of “It’s a shame that Tom wasn’t in the movies, but of course cutting him makes perfect sense.”
This chapter very much feels like an interlude in another world. I didn’t really have the reading background to get this when I first read LotR, but if I were reading something like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or The Bear and the Nightingale or The Dresden Files I would say 100% that Frodo and company stumbled into Faerie. It’s all otherworldly. The sights, the sounds, the fact that the Hobbits all find themselves singing instead of talking, Tom telling tales and spinning glamour - it’s all so very fairy story-ish. I can’t help but feel like the Hobbits become enchanted to some degree. They will experience something similar when they get to Lothlórien and Frodo notices that time flies past without him really noticing - rather as if he was an immortal who had been alive since before the Sun, and for whom a month or two is barely worth noticing. Here, they seem to adopt some of Tom’s carefree attitude. It’s hard to see how else Frodo could do something so careless as putting on the Ring.
As I write this, it does sound a little sinister, so the satirical “Tom Bombadil is evil” stuff (which I’ll touch on later) make more sense. But there’s really nothing at all dangerous or frightening in Tom.
If you read the extended poems about Tom from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (which yes, I own, and yes, I dug it up before writing this post. I appreciate it a lot more know then I did in middle school, when I mostly found it confusing) you find more of what Tolkien references here. More encounters with Old Man Willow and with Barrow-wights. References to the “absurd story about badgers and their queer ways” that Frodo comments on at one point, and much more of the “nightly noises” that Tom told the Hobbits not to be bothered by. (Of course only Sam wasn’t bothered by them, and “slept through the night in deep content, if logs are contented”)
Two more tidbits: the feasts that Tom and Goldberry lay before the Hobbits contain no meat at all. I’m sure this is not an accident. Finally, Frodo has a dream-vision that is obviously Gandalf trapped on top of, and escaping from, Orthanc. I haven’t done the math, but I would bet that he was seeing something happening contemporaneously. The timing is more or less correct.
Now on to Tom himself. Like a lot of things in this story, he actually predates LotR. The Tolkien children apparently had some kind of doll (with a blue jacket and yellow boots, naturally) and their dad made up silly songs about his adventures. (There’s a similar origin story for Tolkien’s Roverandom, and more famously The Hobbit itself. Which is ridiculously heartwarming.)
Tom is the subject of a great many debates, largely about who and what exactly he is. There’s a lot to be said, and no solid answers to be found. Per the man himself:
And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally). (Letter 144)
In other words, Tom is kinda like if Tolkien had left himself space on the map to write in “Here There Be Dragons.”
Not that this stops the fandom from arguing, of course. We can say a lot about what Tom isn’t. He’s not an Elf, a Man, a Dwarf, a Hobbit, an Ent, or anything else that is identifiable as part of Arda. Him being a Valar (most often the guess is Aulë) doesn’t work for various reasons, and is honestly rather boring as an explanation. There’s a post that’s been making the rounds on the internet for decades arguing that he’s the Witch-King of Angmar. The post is satirical, but that hasn’t stopped lots of people from believing it. Here’s another, more recent post along the same lines. The single most common guess is that Tom is Eru Ilúvatar. This can explain every oddity about Tom (“he’s really God” works even better than “a wizard did it” as a universal explanation of inconsistency). There is also the moment when Frodo asks Goldberry “Who is Tom Bombadil?” and she replies “He is.” “He is” can be seen as parallel to “I am,” as an Exodus 3:14. Tolkien explicitly rejected that comparison, and the notion that Tom might be Eru altogether:
There is no embodiment of the One, of God, who indeed remains remote, outside the World, and only directly accessible to the Valar or Rulers. … The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write. (Letter 181)
So what did the man himself have to say about Tom? Quite a bit, actually. Here’s probably the single most interesting passage from The Letters of JRR Tolkien on the subject:
Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a 'comment'. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron. (Letter 144)
For my part, I think the most interesting thing about Bombadil is his utter indifference to the Ring. He isn’t tempted by it, and isn’t even really interested in it. The ability to resist the lure of the Ring is in some sense proportional to how much one wants to do with it - it’s a theme we’ll see later with Sam, and Galadriel, and poor Boromir. It’s a fundamental part of how humble Hobbits (yes, even Sméagol) are so resilient against the Ring. But Tom? He takes this notion to its logical conclusion. He is utterly content with who and what he is, and thus the Ring holds no temptation for him at all. It barely even holds his interest. There is nothing it can offer him that he might want. And there’s a second parallel with Hobbits that Tolkien touches on. Tom leads the very ideal of the “simple life” that Bilbo talks about in the voice-over at the beginning of the Fellowship movie. And like the Shire, it’s something precious and worth preserving, but can’t stand on its own. Both the Shire and Tom need protection from that which would destroy them, because an inherent part of what makes them special is an inability to protect themselves.
(Interesting parallels to the Tuatha’an and Perrin Aybara from The Wheel of Time here as well)
To (finally) wrap this post up, I find I appreciate this chapter a great deal more than I did as a kid. The world is a big place, with lots of interesting (and inexplicable) things in it. It’s worth taking the time to explore.
Friday: things get spooky (and damp) when there’s fog on the Barrow Downs.