The Problem of Pleasure

As a first encounter with the world of Men, Bree is not too painful. To be sure, Tolkien weaves in plenty of uneasiness at the beginning of the chapter—the strange attitude of Harry the Gatekeeper, the unfamiliarity of the dark buildings, and the presence of Southern Men in the common room—but he manages to disarm each oddity fairly quickly with good food, good ale, and good cheer. The fact is that the hobbits have a constitutional weakness —a fondness for comfort and good cheer—and Tolkien simply exploits it.

Consider that, only the day before entering Bree, the Hobbits are lulled off their guard and lulled quite asleep by the cool shade of a harmless-looking stone. A few days before that, they are likewise lulled to sleep by a whispering stream. Several days before that, Pippin merrily bursts into loud song in the woods outside Hobbiton. (Perhaps this would not have been such a bad thing, if not for the convenient fact that it was dusk and a Black Rider was coming up behind. On a related note, it is, to all appearances, simply not a good idea to burst into song in the middle of a forest if one is a Hobbit. Frodo tries the same thing in the Old Forest, and the trees get upset and he is forced to stop.)

In the Inn at Bree, Tolkien develops the easy transition between a Hobbit’s sense of ease and of danger at least thrice, and with amusing detail. The greatest catalyst in this transformation is good food and good cheer (some may argue specifically it is good beer). Observe it happening no fewer than three times:

First, in the Hobbits’ decision to quit their room for the common room. This decision, as Tolkien tells us quite plainly, was prompted by the fact that they felt “so refreshed and encouraged” at the end of “three quarter’s of an hour’s steady going” at their supper. A chapter later in his conversation with Strider, and with the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, Frodo acknowledges this choice to have been rather foolish.

Second, in Pippin’s story-telling in the common room. He starts off with a comic account of the collapse of a roof in Michel Delving; and, when greeted by merry applause, is prompted to give an account of Bilbo’s birthday party. As Tolkien says (from Frodo’s perspective): “Pippin was evidently much enjoying the attention he was getting, and had become quite forgetful of their danger. Frodo had a sudden fear that in his present mood he might even mention the Ring.” Remember, it was Pippin who had serenaded the Black Rider earlier in the forests outside Hobbiton.

Third, in Frodo’s attempt to intervene. One would think that Frodo, at least, would be well on his guard, after having seen Pippin let down his. And, in fact, he starts off well by spouting off some nonsense to distract Pippin’s audience, and then responding quickly to a call for a song. The problem is that the course of the song itself, and the applause it arouses at the end, and (no doubt) another drink of ale, and the attempt to make the song merrier and better the second time—all of these distract Frodo from his danger, and lead to the evening’s colossal disaster. Apparently, singing in an Inn is as dangerous as singing in a Forest.

In short, Tolkien moves these particular bends in the plot along by having the Hobbits make mistakes very much in keeping with their amiable and convivial nature as Hobbits. It shows, perhaps, that he is not above exploiting the very characteristics that he makes lovable.

The Prancing Pony (or, The Post That Should Have Come Before “Black Riders”)

First, the Hobbits leave Hobbiton. Then they cross the Ferry from the Four Farthings into Buckland. Then they leave the Shire through a gate in the wall, and wander for a time in an Old Forest and across the downs. Finally, they enter the world of Men through another gate in a wall, and Tolkien repeats his familiar plan of attack.

In a quasi-historical manner quite similar to what he used when the Hobbits were crossing into Buckland, Tolkien gives us a brief description of Bree and its origins, and then (widening his scope) a brief account of its socially mediatory status between the Shire and the rest of the world. The most important difference between the history of Buckland and the history of Bree is that Bree goes back quite a bit further—the Breelanders consider themselves “descendants of the first Men that ever wandered into the West of the middle-world.” In homely Bree, home of the Prancing Pony, we already encounter the flavor of something mythic.

As befits this stage of the journey, however, Tolkien paints Bree in a curious blend of the mythic, the homely, the familiar, and the strange. He does this by adopting for a moment the different perspectives of the Hobbits themselves. To Samwise son of Hamfast (Anglo-Saxon for “Home-bound” or “Home-body”), the houses of Men and the Inn at Bree appear unwelcoming, the likely hide-outs of Black Riders, and generally much too tall. Frodo, however, shares none of Sam’s perceptions and expects the Inn to be “homelike enough inside.” And, indeed, the inside is very Shire-like, complete with round windows and the hallmark of a Hobbit’s being at home—a good supper.

As a first encounter with the world of Men, therefore, Bree is just unfamiliar enough to put the Hobbits well on their guard, and familiar enough to gradually lull them off it.

Black Riders

As one of those annoying children who read The Lord of the Rings seven or eight times before reaching high school, it is sometimes difficult to remember what stood out at the first reading. It is very easy, for example, to focus on the meeting with Strider at the Prancing Pony as the most important event in the Bree chapters, because of who Strider turns out to be. However, it strikes me that the reader does not know of this importance, or even really begins to trust Strider, until after the Hobbits reach Rivendell, or (at the earliest) until Strider meets Glorfindel near the Ford. I think that what is really going on in the Bree chapters, and the rest of Book I, has two main currents: pursuit by the Black Riders, and the problem of Gandalf.

The Black Riders are the spoken and unspoken material of the Bree chapters. I had forgotten, until I was puzzling recently over a few passages, how firmly Tolkien assumes that the reader has the fear of the Black Riders in the back of his mind while reading about the Hobbits’ entrance into Bree. Everything, even the occasional oblique reference, caters to it. Here are some of the more obvious ones which, in my over-familiarity with the story-line, took some genuine thought before I realized again that they were obvious:

The gatekeeper is, for some reason, interested in the fact that there are four Hobbits from the Shire knocking at his gate. Beginning with him, there are repeated references—by Butterbur, by Strider, by Tolkien’s description of the people in the common room—to “queer folk being about.” It’s Tolkien’s way of saying that something’s rotten in Denmark. The only “queer folk” concerned with the Hobbits so far have been the Black Riders.

Frodo, however, doesn’t take the hint and instead wonders if Gandalf has been to Bree and is looking for the Hobbits. Sam, poor fellow, is the only Hobbit with Black Riders on his mind as they trot through the lanes of Bree. When the “dark figure” scales the gate after the Hobbits and vanishes into the streets, the reader’s mind instantly goes to the Black Riders, though later we find out that this figure was Strider himself.

Strider makes himself untrustworthy from the start, by dropping hints about Frodo’s name: “I am very pleased to meet you, Master—Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.” This brings to mind the name of Baggins, and the reader wonders if any fellows on black horses have been asking for Baggins in Bree. Then, while Frodo is up on the table distracting Pippin’s audience, he feels exactly what he has felt previously in the presence of the Black Riders—the temptation, apparently from outside himself, to put on the Ring.

In short, even before the meeting with Strider, the letter from Gandalf, and the actual attack on the Inn, the Black Riders are everywhere in Bree. The unusual thing about the way Tolkien brings this to the reader’s awareness, however, is that he almost never mentions them directly. (The one blunt exception to this is Sam’s thoughts about them.) Just as the Riders are unseen, they are unspoken; and this adds power to the reader’s fears and suspicions about them. It is Tolkien’s subtle playing with the reader’s expectations that makes them invisibly present even at the merriest moment in the inn’s common room.

Once again there will be a progression with the Black Riders: an unspoken presence in Chapter 9, Strider’s revelation of who they are in Chapter 10, and finally a tour de force of their powers in Chapter 11. Gandalf too becomes an increasingly important matter; but that should be reserved for another post.

Two More Themes

As a concluding thought on “Fog on the Barrow Downs,” I think that the end of this chapter introduces two themes that will become important through the rest of the book.  Both themes, interestingly, are integral to the world of Men, on whose brink the Hobbits are now teetering.  The first theme has to do with greed; the second with self-sacrifice.

 

The chief evil represented by the barrow-wight is, oddly enough, not an abstract one but the very concrete evil of goldlust.  This may not be apparent at first, but consider the way in which Tom Bombadil breaks the spell on the barrow after exorcising the wight from it.  He brings out the mound’s treasures and bids them lie there, “free to all finders, birds, beasts, Elves or Men, and all kindly creatures.”  This particular cure suggests that the curse on the barrow originally had to do with the hoarding of gold.

 

This theme is unfortunately very common in Middle Earth.  One remembers the end of The Hobbit, where five armies fight over the possession of a dragon’s treasure.  One also thinks of The Silmarillion, where Feanor’s proud refusal to give up his jewels in order to rekindle the light of the Two Trees initiates a series of disasters, the implications of which continue even down into the days of Frodo and Aragorn.  And, repeatedly, Tolkien casts the appeal of the Ring in terms of its beautiful golden hue.  Greed and goldlust are among the cardinal sins in Middle Earth.

 

Along with the theme of Men’s greediness, however, Tolkien introduces the theme of their nobility.  That is, he introduces the first hint of a line of Men who will become increasingly important to the tale:  the Numenoreans, who have dwindled to become the Rangers.

 

The barrow that trapped the Hobbits is a Numenorean barrow; the knives that Bombadil retrieves from the treasure to give to the Hobbits are the very blades that were forged by the sons of Isildur to wreck ruin on the Nazgul.  When Bombadil gives the knives to the Hobbits, he tells them that their makers “go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folk that are heedless.”  Though the Hobbits do not understand him, they will meet one of these unseen guardians that very night, under the unlikely guise of Strider the Ranger.  The point is that the world of men is full not only of greed but of generous self-sacrifice.  The old kings no longer rule; but they still guard those who cannot defend themselves.

 

And with this introduction to the world of Men—its greed and its sacrifice—the Hobbits set off for Bree.

The Barrow-Wight

The claim may (and probably will) admit of some controversy, but with the Barrow-Wight I will begin to seriously press the notion that Tolkien incorporates an Augustinian view of evil in his depiction of evil beings.  The claim will likely grow stronger as the hobbits travel nearer to Mordor, but I want to start pointing out the scraps of evidence early.

 

What I should do first, by all rights, is offer a concise account of what exactly an Augustinian view of evil involves.  This is rather a tall order for me at present, since I need time to think about several passages in Augustine and Aquinas; so for this post I’ll only mention a few things about the Barrow-Wight that may prove interesting in light of future posts on evil.

 

Our first and only description of the Wight himself is that he is a “tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars” with “two eyes, very cold though lit with a pale light that seemed to come from some remote distance.”  The likeness to a shadow seems to be a stock simile with Tolkien when it comes to his especially evil creatures.  The light-like eyes contrast with this, of course; as does the seemingly very corporeal grip that is “stronger and colder than iron.”  I’ll point out that this is an apparently contradictory set of characteristics:  an insubstantial visible form, but a (seemingly) very substantial grip.  There are other ways of pointing out the dichotomy:  darkness and coldness, for example, are privations of light and warmth; but a strong grip isn’t a privation of anything, since it is rather a sort of power.

 

Still on the subject of the grip, one of the most effective things about the encounter with the wight is that fact that, when Frodo is inside the barrow, he gets a close-up view of a hand and arm, but nothing else.  The spectre of the hand—the part that tries to behave like the whole, or the part that is severed from the body to which it belongs, first by description and then by Frodo’s actual knifestroke—horrified me more than anything else as a child (with the exception of the well in Moria).  I emphasize the fact that Tolkien gives us only the hand and arm for two reasons:  first, because it is part of the art of ghastly story-telling to recognize that, though corpses are bad, parts of corpses are worse; and second, because it is another way of depriving us of any clear and distinct picture of what form this being actually has.

 

Frodo’s experience of the Wight’s dwelling seconds all this.  The barrow is dark and cold; and the strange light, when it comes, seems (inexplicably) to be coming not from the barrow but from Frodo himself.  The wight’s song is a dreary and “formless stream of sad but horrible sounds,” full of words that are “grim, hard, cold… heartless and miserable.”  At least half of these terms (including that most important term “formless”), again, are privative.  Moreover, even when the wight’s words do “shape themselves” and become intelligible, their shape still concerns privations:  coldness, the sun failing, the moon and stars dying, the land withering.

 

Finally, lest there be any more doubt about the matter, Tolkien’s own authorial commentary on the song makes the point about privation explicit:  The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered.

 

All of this, of course, combines to create an impression on the reader that will raise problems here and in many descriptions to come.  Evil is associated with the cold, the dark, with night and shadows, with mutilated forms and parts of forms and deformed forms.  And yet, for something that that is deformed, shadowy, and generally deprived of good things, evil in Tolkien’s world is remarkably stern, strong, and—well, substantial.

 

As I hope to point out later, these are the same classic problems raised by the Augustinian view of evil.  I wish I could say that Tolkien’s narrative and poetic answer to the problem persuasively complements Augustine’s philosophical answer; but as I don’t recall the core passages from Augustine or Tolkien himself clearly enough, that is a series of posts that will have to wait.

In the House of… Goldberry

Having now written three posts on Tom Bombadil, I suppose it would only be fair to include at least one on Goldberry.  I do not know if it is significant that Bombadil and Goldberry are the first married couple we meet with any degree of thoroughness in the Lord of the Rings.  Now that I think of it, they are the only married couple, except for Celeborn and Galadriel.

 

This in itself may be odd.  What strikes about the long tale of the Ring is the general and perhaps intentional lack of women, and especially of wives.  Elrond’s consort Celebrian (Galadriel’s daughter) was mortally wounded some centuries before our story starts, and passed into the West.  Theodon’s wife, the Queen of Rohan, we never hear of.  The same goes for Denethor’s lady.  Dwarf women never show up at all, except in Gimli’s scant remarks about them; and Treebeard laments the disappearance of the Entwives.

 

In general, I think this lack of wives—the lack, if you will, of the sources of life and renewal—contributes to an atmosphere of exhaustion and decay in Middle Earth.  Of course, the end of the tale (as for all comedies) brings revitalization and a number of auspicious marriages.  But in the midst of the decay, Tolkien does give us these two glimpses of Goldberry and Bombadil on one hand, and Celeborn and Galadriel on the other.  I am still puzzling over why he does this—it may, in fact, not turn out to be very important to the story—but perhaps it constitutes some reason for dwelling a little on Goldberry herself.

 

Goldberry is a strange combination of a housewife and a great lady.  I call her a housewife because she has no servants and therefore presumably does all the housework herself.  (She prepares the meals and holds washing day and autumn cleaning.)  However, in the House of Goldberry, the work of the house hardly sounds like drudgery.  Even when she and Tom Bombadil lay the table, they do so as if it were a dance.

 

Outside the house, incidentally, Goldberry appears to do little or nothing; she is not one of the doers of great deeds in Middle Earth.  Even in the matter of gathering water lilies, it is Bombadil who undertakes the mission.  Perhaps this is why Bombadil, besides calling her pretty River-daughter and clearer than clear water, refers to her frequently as waiting:

 

Tom has his house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting!

 

In short, Goldberry seems to embody the old ideal of feminine domesticity.

 

Of course, Goldberry is also a great lady.  Her voice is clear, her speech is half-poetic (like Bombadil’s), and she inspires an Elvish wonder in the Hobbits.  When they first see her, she is sitting in her house in the midst of bowls of water-lilies, as if in state.

 

This Elf-like queenliness, when rolled together with the huswifery above, results in the initially paradoxical impression that she is a domestic queen, a princess of the hearth.  In a sense, I wonder if Tolkien is awakening us to something here:  the realization that domesticity and queenhood need not be opposed in Middle Earth.  Goldberry (unlike Eowyn, for example, and perhaps in deliberate contrast to her) lives her life by the home hearth, in elegance and merriment.

 

I bring this up as a counterpoint (though I don’t know if Tolkien intended it so) to those scholars who construct a philosophy of women in which housework and domesticity always function as a sort of oppression.  There is no doubt that many women do love the work of the house; and I think that Tolkien’s portrayal of Goldberry is true to such women.  He has struck, in fact, a role that seems quite natural to many women, while giving it a quasi-enchanted air; and that, no doubt, explains part of why Goldberry is (in Frodo’s words) “deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange.”

 

As a concluding caveat to all this, I do not wish to extrapolate anything about Tolkien’s “view of women,” or views on feminine domesticity, from such a small vignette of Goldberry.  There are too many other things to take into account:  Arwen as the bella donna of courtly romance, Galadriel as fairy godmother, Eowyn as the reincarnation of a Nordic demigoddess.  I would guess that it would be as tricky to discuss Tolkien’s view of women as it would be to discuss his view of literary genres.  I only wish to point out that, in Goldberry, we find Tolkien seamlessly knitting up two qualities that our current age tells us are unreconcilable.  Goldberry is, indeed, both a housewife and a queen.

Excuses, Protestations, and Apologies

It does not bode well for my career as a blogger that other people are apparently paying more attention to my blog than I am.

 

As one of my friends pointed out once, it seems a little absurd to apologize for not writing what nobody is obligated to read, or perhaps even desires to read; and especially absurd to assume the arrogance of thinking that anyone would desire to read it greatly enough to merit an apology for its not being written.

 

However, when someone clearly states a time at which something will begin to be written again, and then fails to follow through on it, perhaps it constitutes a moral ground for a categorical apology, whether anyone reads it or not.  I would therefore like to offer a categorical apology, especially to Monica and Maxim, who apparently read this blog more than I; and to make thin and watery excuses about being tied up by schoolwork, and grubbing around in classical economics, and suffering the mundane but curiously distracting affairs of life.

There’s a post on Goldberry forthcoming, and after that, hopefully some stuff on evil.

 

 

A Clerical Note

Since a season of exams and other unpleasantries is now imminent, I will not be posting for a few weeks.  Regular readers (either or both of you) may not want to check back until March.

Bonam fortunam to the rest of you in the same straights!

Tom Bombadil, Part III

My task in this third Bombadillian post is to answer the question of whether Bombadil shows up with too little warning.  In fact, he shows up with no warning.  He does this because he is Tom Bombadil.  And with this I am going to return to the question I asked at the beginning of Part I of these posts:  Who is Tom Bombadil?

In answering the question of Bombadil’s identity, I will plead for a little metaphorical license.  Bombadil is no “deus ex machina”.  He is a homo ex machina; or best yet, a homo ex humo.  (I could digress vociferously here upon the pregnant connection between homo, human, and humus, earth.  But I resist the desire to linguisticate.)

Bombadil’s arrival in the Hobbits’ adventure as a man who springs up, as it were, from the earth itself, could not symbolize more aptly what we learn of him in time.  And what do we learn of him?  Already I hear the feathers ruffling.  If there is anything we learn of Bombadil, it is the fact that no one calls him a Man.  No one, in fact, calls him anything.  Elrond refers to him as a “strange creature” during the Council, but that is it.

In my last post, I essentially called Bombadil a half-way house between Hobbitry and Humanry, while still groundlessly referring to Bombadil as a “Man.”  That he is not an Elf comes out clearly enough during the Council, where Elrond does not acknowledge any remote kinship with him (“strange creature” not being the way Elves usually speak of one another).  However, I am sticking with my designation of Bombadil as a homo ex humo; and, as I hinted before, I think this accords with the details Tolkien gives us concerning his past and his nature.

Bombadil’s past is a force to be reckoned with.  To Frodo he gives away something of his age:  he says that he walked the earth even before the rivers and trees or the coming of the Dark Lord.  From Elrond we later learn, “Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless.  But many another name he has since been given by other folk: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by Northern Men, and other names beside.”

Orald, by-the-by, is a phonetic kissing cousin to the German word Uralt, “old as origin” or “ancient.”  The reference to Bombadil being “oldest” and especially “fatherless” arouses some suspicions about his likeness to another ancient character known in our world as Adam.  Adam was a son of the earth itself (“Adam” meaning “red earth” in Hebrew); and, interestingly, the Elf Glorfindel later associates Bombadil and the earth:  “Power to defy our Enemy is not in him,” he says, “unless such power is in the earth itself.  And yet we see that Sauron can torture and destroy the very hills.”  Bombadil’s clothes and his gardening are earthy, and he makes his power over the things of the earth to be felt everywhere through his little dominions.  And now, in spite of the fact that I said in my first post that Bombadil doesn’t have a glimmer of existence in any other fairy tale, I do recall a very lanky farmer-like character in George MacDonald’s book Lilith, which character, in addition to turning himself into a crow at will, also turns out to be Adam; and his wife Eve is not wholly unlike Goldberry.  So perhaps Tolkien is not so unoriginal in this as I thought.

Be that as it may, Bombadil comes leaping into the Hobbits’ story much as he must have come leaping into Middle Earth in the first place—a new thing, a surprise, an earth-and-sky-colored singing wonder.  It is no accident that Tolkien introduces him so suddenly, or in the particular manner of having him come bounding up from the reeds surrounding a dirt track.  And the singing itself is no less important than the rest.  I have tried to scan Bombadil’s rhymes for any set meter, and there really is not one: he falls into iambics or anapestics only by accident.  He does occasionally seem to be alliterating in an Anglo-Saxonly manner, but the strength of the verses is with their bounding rhythm, internal rhyme and plays on word sounds.  What is important is that Bombadil keeps this up even in his speech.  (With Bombadil, in fact, there is hardly a difference between his sung and spoken words.  Both have the same exuberant rhythm and parallels:  What be you a-thinking of?  You should not be waking.  Eat earth!  Dig deep!  Drink water!  Go to sleep!  Bombadil is talking! [131].)

The singing and rhyming are as much in the nature of Bombadil as age itself is in his past.  The startling thing about Bombadil’s rhymed and rhythmed words is the power they have over actual things.  Old Man Willow obeys him; a barrow-wight obeys him; and Goldberry calls him “the Master of wood, water, and hill” (135).  His mastery has to do with his singing and naming.  This is peculiarly interesting to me in light of a rather pedantical, slightly outdated, and yet not wholly valueless quotation I ran across in a book some time ago:

“Men have been keenly sensitive to the magic of words from the earliest times.  When man first uttered rhymes and measured lines, he was thought to be imbued with magical powers.  The notion that poetry is the product of inspiration was extraordinarily widespread among the peoples of antiquity.  The significance of the word Carmen among the Latins, and the belief of the Australian aborigines that their dead ancestors teach their poets their songs, are sufficient proof of the prevalence of this conception” (Guillaume, Prophecy and Divination, cited in Dawson’s Religion and Culture).

Words and names, of course, form the fabric of the Genesis story, from God creating things to Adam naming the animals.  Singing as a creative act shows up not only in Tolkien’s account of the creation of Middle Earth in the Silmarillion, but in C. S. Lewis’s account of the creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, and even Leonard Bernstein’s lectures on the “Unanswered Question,” in which he suggests that the words of creation in Genesis were not said but sung.

The power of sung words, however, does not consist merely in their ability to make things, but to express the passions of the soul—among them, wonderment and pleasure.  As Bombadil escorts the Hobbits back to the Road after their adventure with the Barrow-Wight, he sings (when he’s not singing nonsense) in “an ancient language whose words were mainly those of wonder and delight.”  Consider this behavior in light of his age.  Young things find the world wonderful and surprising; young children sing nonsense and dance about when they are delighted.  Tom Bombadil, as “oldest and fatherless,” is either a dotard or the embodiment of the delight that the first creatures must have felt when the world was young, and all was utterly new. 

Even the internal rhyme in Tom Bombadil’s own name is important.  Of course, Bombadil’s name is something of a theme through the two chapters of our acquaintance with him.  The first bit of sense we get out of him is a running phonetic play on Tom Bombadillo.  Twice Frodo asks who Bombadil is.  The first time he asks Goldberry, and she tells him simply, “He is,” and “He is the Master of wood, water, and hill” (135).  The next day he asks Bombadil himself, to which Bombadil returns the answer (in iambics),

“Don’t you know my name yet?  That’s the only answer.  Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?  But you are young and I am old.  Eldest, that’s what I am” (142).

So in questing for Bombadil’s name, we come from his age to his singing and back to his age again.  They are all related: he sings because he saw the first wonder of the world and still cannot get over it; his songs move the natural things in his little dominion; his power stems partly from his being of the same earth with them, and partly from the fact that he is older than they; and because he is older, he has the sort of power over them that adults have over children—all while he is most child-like himself.

I am going to leap out onto a very far-fetched limb and offer both a final theory regarding Bombadil’s identity, and a final excuse for calling him a homo after the manner of Adam.  C. S. Lewis once described the Lord of the Rings as a long tale about people who were happy once, before the coming of a great Shadow, and who only wished to be happy again.  Bombadil, I think, is our glimpse into “those who were happy once”—a portrait of an original, uncorrupted Adam both powerful and childlike in his innocence.  Bombadil is what Men and Hobbits would have been if the Shadow, through all its ages and in all its various ways, had not alternately vitiated the lowest of the earth-creatures and forced the highest of them into quasi-tragic heroism.

Both the vileness of the Easterlings and the greatness of the Numenorean kings was forged during the dark wars with Morgoth.  But what if Morgoth had never been?  What if Men had never been tempted with evil, or had been too simple and innocent to heed it from the beginning?  What if they had never renounced their original mastery over the world that was made for them to “have dominion over”?  I think Bombadil is Tolkien’s answer.

Be that as it may, one thing is sure:  In tale as he was in time, Bombadil is First.

Tom Bombadil, Part II

In my last post on Bombadil, I took up the idea that he functions as a deus ex machina, in the sense that he is called upon to fix a broken plot though he is connected to nothing that came before him.  This is the strict meaning of deus ex machina—the god who suddenly appears from “the machine” (i.e., the boxy thing the Greeks had to put the actor in so he looked like he was floating down from the sky), the superhero who dives down out of nowhere.  In this post, I will take up a rather ballooned idea of deus ex machina, and use it to refer not only to the god who comes from nowhere but who vanishes back into nowhere:  the guy who is structurally irrelevant to the rest of the story.  And this is important, because this accusation (not the one in the first post) is the one usually leveled against Tom Bombadil.

I have three observations on why Bombadil’s thread cannot be pulled, structurally speaking, out of Tolkien’s story.

(1) Tom Bombadil, for a Man, is remarkably like a Hobbit; and, if anything, he falls somewhere between the two.  As Tolkien tells us, “He was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People.”  The Hobbits, interestingly, feel much more at home in his house than they do in any other place except (maybe) Rivendell.  Frodo’s experience of Goldberry catches the point beautifully:  “He stood as he had at times stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange.”

Bombadil and Goldberry open up a new sort of category in the Hobbits’ experience:  between Hobbitry and Elvenry, they bring in Humanry.  Structurally as well as atmospherically, they serve as a “middling” stepping-stone between the Shire and the world of Men.  It is no accident that, shortly after meeting Bombadil, the Hobbits meet a very different sort of man who transposes the comic Bombadillian fairy-tale tone into something more serious:  a dead man whose spirit has been taken over by evil forces, a barrow-wight.  And, as we know, the third Man in the Hobbits’ acquaintance will be no less than a king in disguise—the very king who will embody all the mythical pathos of the entire mortal world of Middle Earth. Tolkien takes the transition slowly and savors the steps.

(2) Bombadil has a lot to say about trees.  For most of the time the Hobbits are in his house, they listen to stories about his stomping grounds:  “Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange…. 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, ageing no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords.”

Now, Tree-Lords are something impressive.  The reader might recall that the Tree-Lords play a role in the story coming up; that there will be, in fact, yet another time when a few Hobbits wander into an old forest and meet an unforeseen host.  The theme of nature being “alive,” choosing sides and conspiring to overthrow what harms it, is a theme Tolkien will not let die.  Bombadil himself is an integral part of it and is not without his structural counterpart in Treebeard.

(3) The incident with the Ring cannot be ignored.  Both before this incident and afterwards, Gandalf and Aragorn and Elrond hammer into the Hobbits’ heads the notion that the Ring corrupts absolutely.  But just like Shakespeare throws a comic scene with a drunken porter into the middle of a murder, Tolkien throws a completely comic scene with Bombadil into his account of this deadliest of perils.  Tolkien contradicts everything we know about the Ring:  Frodo gives it up to Bombadil without a second thought; Bombadil wears it without vanishing; and the Ring fails to hide Frodo from Bombadil’s eyes.  The reader, like Frodo, is “a trifle annoyed with Tom for seeming to make so light of what even Gandalf thought so perilously important.”  The question, of course, is why Tolkien subjects us to these absurdities.

The answer, I think, lies in the importance of taking the “long view” of the Ring.  Tom Bombadil, as I will rhapsodize about in my final post of these three, is extremely old—perhaps older than the Elves, and (by his own testimony) certainly older than the coming of evil into the world.  “Tom was here already, before the seas were bent,” he tells us himself.  “He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.”  What Bombadil seems to embody is a Nature that is not only alive but older than, and in a certain sense simply unaffected by, the particular evil of the Ring.  As we remember from Gandalf’s tales and from the Silmarillion, there was a time when the Ring did not exist and when its maker was not a Dark Lord.  The Ring is a finite and transient thing.

The danger the Ring poses, of course, is too real and pressing for Tolkien to hold this realization too long before our eyes; but he throws it momentarily into our faces like cold water.  It wakes us up to the fact that there is more to the past and the future and the world than the Ring—and it provides an illuminating contrast and counter-point to the intense pressure that Tolkien will begin to ratchet down upon the Ring-bearer for the rest of the tale.

To end with a bit of reflective rambling:  Tolkien was a maker of histories, just as Bombadil was a teller of histories.  And the thing about history is that it is vast and immeasurable, and even the most impassioned story is only the falling of a leaf in a forest.  Middle Earth is at once old, and alive, and—in a certain sense—unconcerned.  Bombadil, structurally speaking, embodies it all.