The Red Book of Westmarch

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!

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.

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.

Well.  There have been a very few number of church services in my life that contained moments intense enough almost to count as mystical experiences.  This morning’s was one of them, and it lasted only while we sang a certain hymn.  This hymn made me very curious, and I thought about it a great deal while the pastor preached his sermon (which is not to say that the sermon was bad… during the moments I actually attended to it, I thought it rather above average).

The hymn was a transfiguration hymn (since today is Transfiguration Sunday), and it was unusual for our hymnal because it gave us only the melody line.  The organist presumably had something to tell her what harmonies to play, and I think it was these peculiar harmonies that set everything off for me (more of that in a moment).  The ciphers at the bottom of the page said that the text was from the Sarum Breviary, Salisbury, from the year 1495; translated by John Mason Neale (1818-66); and that the tune was “English, 15^th century.”  Here are the first two verses of the hymn:

O wondrous type!  O vision fair
Of glory that the Church may share,
Which Christ upon the mountain shows
Where brighter than the sun he glows!

With Moses and Elijah nigh
The incarnate Lord holds converse high
And from the cloud the Holy One
Bears record to the only Son.

That is enough for you to get the gist.  It is poor poetry—not doggerel, to be sure, but no better than the average for most hymnals.  (I haven’t looked into the Latin, but my experience of Neale is that he is a fairly decent translator, and I will guess that the original does not have much more to it than he gives us here.)

The entire quality and feel of the verses changed dramatically when they were sung to the organ music.  I do not even especially mean to compliment the melody here, since it was 15^th-century enough to be charming but not utterly captivating.  I wish I had an ear and some experience for the inner workings of harmonies and modes, but all I can say is that the music was in a minor mode, and the harmonies were ones I was not at all used to hearing.  Whatever they were, they completely overwhelmed everything, by which I mean the text.  The text in the hands of the organ was more or less like Hobbits in the talons of Eagles—carried to the tops of the mountains far above anything they could have reached on their lonesome.  The Gesamtaffekt (to coin a German word like Gesamtkunst, except that we weren’t in an opera) was indescribable.  When we sang “converse high,” the minor descending harmonies sounded like lowering thunder (a most satisfying affect for the councils taken between Elijah and Christ).  I have never before experienced a work of church music that so totally transfigured the text at hand.

The whole thing was provoking to me in light of several debates that we had in an aesthetics philosophy seminar during my undergrad.  The debates surrounded whether a text combined with music actually “means” differently than either a text or music on its own.  (This, of course, was designed to lure us into the labyrinthine debates concerning how exactly poetry “means,” and how musical notes “mean.”  We never found our way out after that.)  I have experienced very strong transformations of non-sacred music before, the most brilliant of them appearing in “The Return of the King.”  There Howard Shore works outright magic on what looks at first sight to be a mildly cheerful traveling song:

Home is behind, the world ahead
And I have many paths to tread;
Through shadow, to the edge of night
Until the stars are all alight.

Mist and shadow, cloud and shade,
All shall fade!  All shall fade!

The text is actually taken, with minor alterations, from Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, chapter 3.  Pippin sings it with high gusto as the Hobbits march along cheerfully through the Shire.  In the movie, however, it becomes a dirge:  Pippin sings it slowly and hauntingly as the viewer watches the knights of Gondor sacrifice themselves in a hopeless charge to retake Osgiliath.

Now this transformation is especially interesting.  Tolkien provides no sheet music for his poems in the Fellowship, but with Pippin’s presumably cheerful singing, one sees nothing more in the rhymes than a traveler eagerly hasting to his journey’s end.  After Shore’s transformation, however, the music seems to give the words a new sort of meaning:  “Home” is no longer a house, nor even a whole Shire, but perhaps all of this earthly life; the “paths to tread” may be paths of doom, or of the afterlife; “shadow” and the “edge of night” no longer mean their simple selves, but death and doom and perhaps despair; “stars” now perhaps signal some rays of hope.  As for “All shall fade”—the music works its magic with these words most deeply.  Hope fades, Lothlorien fades, the flower of Gondor fades, the world of Men fades:  the music has altered the meaning of the words by whole dimensions of reality.

I have to bring all my ramblings to a close, but I want to tie everything together with the power of music.  I am still trying to grapple with the reality of how a non-verbal medium can actually change the meanings of words themselves.  What does this say for our understanding ancient and medieval poetry, which (we are told) was meant not to be read but sung?  I’ve skimmed Aristotle’s Poetics again, but he doesn’t offer anything helpful on this head:  he too appears to have assumed that poetry sprang from “rhythm and harmony” and that much of it is meant to be sung.  If I can find another philosopher who analyzes this phenomenon of a sung text being greater than its parts, I will post on what he says.  For now, the whole thing remains a mystery to me.

Who is Tom Bombadil?

To anyone who knows the rest of the Tale of the Ring, Bombadil’s appearance seems in hindsight to be, at best, only precariously pertinent to the story—a delightful and ingenious thread spun from the whirling imagination of the Master, but one which nevertheless should have been snipped out from the final texture.  Bombadil has all the feel of a deus ex machina.  Unmentioned by Gandalf, unpreserved in Shire or even Buckland legends, completely unforeshadowed (an anomaly especially for Tolkien), unannounced except for his bounding hat and yellow boots, Tom Bombadil comes leaping into the story to save the Hobbits from the unfriendly acquaintance of a real live willow tree.

The willow tree, of course, has a precursor in a story by one of Tolkien’s favorite nineteenth-century romance writers, George MacDonald—namely, his book Phantastes, a Faerie Romance for Men and Women.  There the eerie dendritic villain is a black alder, and a black alder (interestingly enough) shows up in one of Bombadil’s rhyms: Fear no alder black!  Heed no hoary willow!  But as far as I know, Tom Bombadil himself has no glimmer of pre-existence in any of MacDonald’s stories—or Andrew Lang’s fairy tale collections, or Norse legends.  He simply comes leaping up from the reeds and the water, startling everyone (that is, the Hobbits and the readers) by his very timely singing.

This entrance is, of course, the main puzzle in justifying his presence in the stories.  Is Bombadil really only playing deus ex machina to Tolkien’s foundering plotline?  I would like to take up this idea of a deus ex machina in a very loose way, and (ignoring its rich and precise use in Greek drama and subsequent literature) only deal with three rather vague phenomenon that I loosely connect to the idea of a deus ex machina.  Most of them will not have much to do with the ancient and venerable species of deus ex machina proper; but, following the wisdom of Humpty-Dumpty, I believe in making my words mean what I pay them to mean.

In my experience, when readers cry “deus ex machina!” they usually mean (1) the author wasn’t clever enough to solve a plot problem by means of previous material in the plot itself, (2) the deus character is structurally irrelevant to the rest of the story, or (3) the deus character simply appears with too little warning.  Since all of these meanings together require an exceptionally long-winded reply, I’ve broken them up into three corresponding posts, which are only moderately long-winded.

The first question is this:  Granted that Tolkien had to lose his Hobbits an Old Forest, put them to sleep and start feeding them to a scurrilous willow tree for the sake of waking us all up to the living and subjective nature of Nature, why couldn’t Tolkien have gotten the Hobbits out of their plight simply by means of their own wits?  Or Farmer Maggot’s?  Or the Elves’?  Or some plot contrivance more plausible than a random bloke wearing a feather in his cap?  Someone, at least, that we had heard of before?

The whole answer, I think, hinges on the notion of a “plot contrivance,” or at least of a “plot.”  We cannot be too careful about the kind of plot the Hobbits have wandered into.  During the first chapter we might have suspected they were in a washed-out eighteenth-century novel; by the second chapter even the dullest of us were beginning to suspect they might be in some Old Nordic epic; and after the first several pages of “The Old Forest,” it ought to have been quite clear that they were in a fairy tale.  (If “fairy tale” is too upsetting for some, we’ll call it a “romance.”)  The Hobbits, after all, are in an Old Forest.  Think of what usually happens to poor villagers who wander off into old forests.  Indeed, think of what happens to George MacDonald’s hero in Phantastes, when he gets himself lost in an old forest.

The “Forest” in romance literature is the locus of unexpected adventures.  I think this is so because a forest is a place outside society—an unhuman place in the sense that it houses the “other,” the strange and magical.  It is curious to me how often the people who meet with adventures in forests are ultimately forced to fall back on help from unforeseen quarters.  I wonder very much if it has to do with Nature or the “other” being so much older, or greater, than our human selves.  At any rate, this feature is a commonplace for the chap in Phantastes, for Little Red Riding Hood and other damsels in distress, and for any number of Arthur’s knights who suddenly find themselves the prisoners of Morgan le Fay (who is, I would like to emphasize, a fay).  All of this only means, of course, that forests in romances are a hub for sudden and unexpected meetings of all sorts.

The boldness of my claims about Bombadil depend on this point.  Bombadil is not only the sort of character who would live in an Old Forest, but he is the most romance-consistent character Tolkien could have introduced to the Hobbits at their point in the plot-line.  The Hobbits were entangled in an older and stronger Nature—and, lo! an even older and stronger being shows up to set them free.  It is, in fact, much more plausible than having Red Riding Hood’s woodcutter (whether in the form of Farmer Maggot or otherwise) simply cut down the tree.  The peculiar danger presented by the Living Willow demanded a very peculiar kind of character to answer.  And the suddenness of the character’s appearance, and the fact that the Hobbits could not in fact have done without him, are all very consistent with the fairy-tale-romance plot itself.

The actual power that Bombadil exercises over the unhuman forces of nature (i.e., Old Man Willow) is worthy of more comment, but I will not bring that up again until the third and last of these posts on Tom Bombadil.