There can never be enough Bombadil!

[Alatar]

Yes! Another "Tolkien Virgin" thread would be amazing.

It's our only chance to read the books through new eyes again.

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

There can never be enough Bombadil!

Indeed, and no Tolkien-related message board is complete until the subject of Tom Bombadil has been discussed. (Now where's that Balrog with/without wings thread? )

But seriously…

There are some who believe that Tolkien is playing a game with us, that all the clues to Tom's true identity are there for the person or persons with enough wisdom, intelligence, and diligence to ferret them out.

I find that this line of thinking is contrary to what Tolkien stated in his letter to Peter Hastings in September of 1954 ( Letter 153, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien):

I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it.

I believe that Wildwood’s approach to Tom—

Tom and Goldberry are one of those things that I probably don't *want* explained to me, too much! The mystery, the fantasy, the fancy surrounding them is part of their magic and charm for me.

—is precisely the approach Tolkien meant us to take. Our example for this is, I believe, the hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin:

Frodo and Sam as if enchanted...

The hobbits sat still before him, enchanted...

Whether the morning and evening of one day or many days had passed Frodo could not tell…He spoke at last out of his wonder…

Then Tom and Goldberry set the table; and the hobbits sat half in wonder and half in laughter; so fair was the grace of Goldberry and so merry and odd the caperings of Tom.

'What do you mean?' asked Pippin, looking at him, half puzzled and half amused.

Tom sang most of the time, but it was chiefly nonsense, or else perhaps a strange language unknown to the hobbits, an ancient language whose words were mainly those of wonder and delight.

Sam summarizes their feelings when he says after Tom has set them off on the path to Bree:

‘He’s a caution and no mistake. I reckon we may go a good deal further and see naught better, nor queerer.’

The hobbits themselves explored the mystery of Tom’s identity. Frodo asks Goldberry who Tom is. What’s her answer?

’He is, as you have seen him…He is the Master of wood, water, and hill…He has no fear. Tom Bombadil is the master.’

Not satisfied with Goldberry's response, Frodo asks Tom himself. Tom replies:

‘Eh what?...Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer…Eldest, that’s what I am…’

Bombadil's precise identity is supposed to be mystery (Letter 144):

And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).

The character of Tom Bombadil has many detractors. Some find him silly, or even annoying. Some believe that Tolkien inserted Bombadil into the story at a point where he had no clear idea of where it was going, and left Tom in the story merely because he had no desire to remove what he’d already written despite its seeming incongruence with the remainder of the story. Those who hold this opinion apparently do not believe Tolkien when he wrote (Letter 144):

Tom Bombadil is not an important person—to the narrative…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…

It would seem that regardless of the circumstances that led Tolkien to inserting Bombadil in LOTR—and leaving him in LOTR despite those who apparently attempted to persuade Tolkien to remove him—Tom was meant to be included and does serve a purpose in Tolkien's story. Whether or not that purpose is perceived by every reader, however, is another question.

On a side note, I find the description of the sage or master in Athrabeth’s post in complete harmony with what we find in Letter 153:

He is master in a peculiar way: he has no fear, and no desire of possession or domination at all. He merely knows and understands about such things as concern him in his natural little realm. He hardly even judges, and as far as can be seen makes no effort to reform or remove even the Willow.

It seems that Goldberry knew what she was talking about after all: Tom is Master.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm bumping this thread for scirocco's sake. Of course, it really must be read in context of the original thread at board77, but just reading Ath's wonderful post at the beginning is worth it.

I'm going to repeat my own thoughts of "who is Bombadil" that I posted in that original thread (which really was Impy's thoughts that I just expanded on a little.

*******

I do not believe that Bombadil shared in the duality of body (hröar) and spirit (fëar) that the Children of Eru experience. I believe that he was a pure material manifestation of Eru. Consider again Imp's profound words:

And there is this: if Tom is the song, or a part of the song, or the echo of the song, then Tom existed before Arda as well as being a very part of the fabrid of Arda. Tom embodies the natural world, but he also is ageless, without beginning or end. What a curious idea that is! A splinter of Eru, in fact.

Yes, exactly. A splinter of Eru. He embodies the natural world because there is no "I" between him and the natural world. He is "one with the natural world" because his spirit is not separate from his material body.

Brian very aptly said that Tom was the antithesis of Morgoth (it must be apt because that observation fits right in with what I said in my first post ). But another apt comparison is with Saruman. As I said earlier, Tolkien came to consider Bombadil as a symbol of "pure science" -- of understanding nature for the sake of understanding only, not for any practical purpose. Saruman is of course the diametric opposite of this: he is the symbol of using science for the manipulation of nature in the name of "progress," something that Tolkien thought was a very bad thing.

But on a more fundamental level, Saruman, like all of the Istari, contrasts with Bombadil in that they accepted the duality of body and spirit when they came to Middle-earth and adopted the forms that they did. And consider this: Tolkien says that of the Istari, all but one failed. In adopting forms that were part of the substance of Arda, the Istari's souls became subject to the corruption of Arda Marred. And consider this further: the hröar of the only one of the Istari that succeeded, Olórin, had to die before he could succeed. As Tolkien stated:

He was sent by a mere prudent plan of the angelic Valar or governors; but Authority had taken up this plan and enlarged it, at the moment of its failure. 'Naked I was sent back -- for a brief time, until my task is done'. Sent back by whom, and whence? Not by the 'gods' whose business is only with this embodied world and its time; for he pased 'out of thought and time'.

So there we have it. If Bombadil was a pure material "splinter of Eru" as Imp put it, then Gandalf the White came back from death as a pure spiritual "splinter of Eru".

[scirocco]

Thanks for bumping the thread, Voronwë, but I was referring more to a discussion of Tom's origins in the light of the textual evidence (as posted on TORC ad nauseam over the last few years) rather than the style of this thread which is more the "interpretative", "what Tom means to me" type of discussion. And, in view of your previous post, I had wondered if such discussion might be unwelcome here, and particularly in this thread.

But I have come to much the same conclusion as you, if perhaps for different reasons. There's no one answer to the question and speculation is "at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous" as Tolkien probably said. . But that never stopped anyone trying!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

It would certainly be welcome here. I would love to hear what you have to say on the subject. Bring it on!

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

There can never be enough Bombadil!

And now, for those of you who, like me, can never get enough Bombadil. I now present Old Tom...in German!

Tom, der alte Bombadil, stets vergnügt und munter,
Trug den Kittel himmelblau, gelbe Stiefel drunter,
Grünen Gürtel um den Leib, Hose ganz aus Leder,
Auf dem hohen, spitzen Hut eine Schwanenfeder.
Am Hügelhange stand sein Haus, nah der Weidenwinde,
Die zu Tale schlängelte, bald langsam, bald geschwinde.

For those who don’t recognize it, that’s the first stanza of "Die Abenteur des Tom Bombadil" ("The Adventures of Tom Bombadil").




Yes, this confirms it…

Hose ganz aus Leder

Tom Bombadil wears Lederhosen!

[Bolg of the North]

"There can never be enough Bombadil!" is an excellent title and says it all for me. Chapters 5-8 remain one of my favourite sections of the story.
To me it is not just the meeting and visiting with Old Tom that makes it enjoyable, ( although that in itself is stands alone perfectly ) but the whole scene is enhanced and complimented with the reunion at Crickhollow and the ensuing journey into the Old Forest.

The build up to Tom's House is as important, I believe, as the experience itself.

I have begun my annual reading of LoTR ( as is customary in September ) and look forward to meeting Tom yet again.

[sh_wulff]

reading this thread has caused me to reconsider the place of Ol' Tom

I usually try and get those chapters over and done with and my eyes glaze over any poems included

this is despite reading the book more than 10 times

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

I'm re-reading Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century a second time. I thought I would share this passage about Bombadil:

Finally Tom Bombadil himself was from his first conception a genius loci, a ‘spirit of the place’, the place being, as Tolkien remarked to Unwin (see Letters, p.26), ‘the (vanishing) Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside’. The elves in The Lord of the Rings call him ‘oldest and fatherless’; he is the one creature whom the Ring has no power at all, not even to make invisible; but he could not defy Sauron permanently, for his power ‘is in the earth itself’, and Sauron ‘can torture and destroy the very hills’. He is a kind of exhalation of the earth, a nature-spirit and once again a highly English one: cheerful, noisy, unpretentious to the point of shabbiness, extremely direct, apparently rather simple, not as simple as he looks. The fact that everything he says is in a sort of verse, whether printed as verse or not, and that the hobbits too find themselves ‘singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural than talking’, make him seem, not an artist, but someone from an age before art and nature were distinguished, when magic needed no wizard’s staff but came from words alone. Tolkien may have got the idea from the singing wizards of the Finnish epic the Kalevala, which he so much admired, and which he perhaps wished might also have an English counterpart.

[Kruppa]

From the many debates on this matter I extracted a somewhat similar description for Tom Bombadil. It seemed the only thing that really fit his comment that he was here before the first Dark Lord came and before darkness was a thing to be feared. That quote from Tolkien to Unwin in the Letters made it official for me. Aside from the Valar and Maiar it is said that many other orders were sent into Eä as well. Tom is surely one of those, the living incarnation of the forest. As Goldberry remarked, he does not own the forest, he is master.

[Impenitent]

I'm re-reading LOTR for the first time in four years - I used to read it 2-3 times a year before the movies and TORC came into my life; I think it was TORC rather than the films which caused the burn-out. The break has been quite a good thing, in retrospect because I'm re-reading not quite with fresh eyes but fresher than they have been since I was a teenager. I have some ideas to share, having just left the barrow-downs.

I had forgotten about the existence of this thread so my notes are quite copious as I was going to start a new thread. Now, however, all the notes I took last night during my reading won't all be transcribed here as they repeat somewhat of others' posts (especially Athrabeth's - I found it so fortifying to read your first post here and see therein many of the ideas that came to me last night! How wonderful!) Anyway...back to my thoughts (which are not that wonderful, but having taken the notes and made up my mind I will take the plunge - I'm prepared for the aftermath).

Many posts above make the connection of Tom and water in so many of its manifestations - the river, the stream, pools of mists and fogs, the gentle rain, the billows and plumes of clouds, dewy grass, the silver-netted hedges ... all the Tom chapters are suffused with water imagery, while Tom himself is partnered to the river-daughter, water manifest. Our first view of her is so symbolic! "About her feet in wide vessels of green and brown earthenware, white waterlillies were floating, so she seemed to be enthroned in the midst of a pool."

In the Silmarillion, in the Ainulindalë, we find this passage: "And they observed the winds and the air and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron and stsone and silver and gold and many substances but of all these water they most greatly praised. And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any other substance else that is in this Earth."

Tom's connection to the creation music has been remarked upon earlier, but I would like to emphasize again how integrally he is tied to it - not only does he sing his world, but he is master of the music:

"Old Man Willow? Naught worse than that, eh? That can soon be mended. I know the tune for him." (Metaphor? I think not! )

During the day of rain, when he speaks to the hobbits and weaves that spell of timelessness, he visualised for them the Ainulindalë backwards, does he not?

He does not sing the story for he is not creating it - that has been done already. Still, he goes back and back through the history of the creation of Arda.

"Under the spell of his words, the wind had gone, and the clouds had dried up and the day had been withdrawn and darkness had come from East and West and all of the sky was filled with the light of white stars.[...] Whether the morning and evening of one day or of many days had passed Frodo could not tell. He did not feel either hungry or tired, only filled with wonder. The stars shone through the window and the silence of the heavens seemed to be round him. He spoke at last out of his wonder and a sudden fear of that silence".

The silence of the Void, the silence before the music, and Frodo felt awe, which is close to the thrill of fear.

The song he teaches them to sing if they need to summon him describes nature itself (he is even clothed in the colours of the natural world: brown, green, blue!):

Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!
By water, wood and hill, by the reed and willow,
By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!
Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!

And so he sings away the barrow wight, and sings the hobbits back to the world.

I won't touch the issue of the Ring - it's been dealt with above in any case - but I will quote this:

"‘Show me the precious Ring!’ he said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom...It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand."

Frodo would not/did not hand it over thus to anyone else; could not imagine doing so. But if Tom is the splinter of Eru...

And the ring grew larger in his hand. Why did it do so?

There are other passages but I've not the time to quote them all, and in any case, these above are the essence of it for me, the reason why the Tom passages have always seemed so ethereal and yet at the core of it. It has always confused (and somewhat saddened) me when others don't find any depth in Tom, when he's been reduced to an annoyance babbling bad poetry. I have wondered whether it is all my inference and none of Tolkien's intent.

But if, for the while, we can indulge the conceit that there is no "author", well, then...Tom can be the echo of the Music that was, and the vessel for the music that is still to be played out, the song of Eru that remains to be sung unto the very ending of the world, the echo of it which remains in the fabric of Arda - in the soil, in the grass, the air and sky but mostly in the water. He is Master... of the music. The keeper, the carer, the stone which has gathered the moss of all the melodies and harmonies of the Ainulindalë.

I am not supposing that the above expands understanding for anyone else but I really enjoyed my personal voyage of discovery. Onward, ho!

Despite previewing many times I still did something screwy with the formatting codes...had to fix. (I bet there are typos, too, which I haven't caught.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

What a wonderful post, Imp! I'm so happy that you decided to share it!

You really have no idea how much I appreciate -- and miss -- your observations about Tolkien's work.

Tom can be the echo of the Music that was and the vessel for the music that is still to be played out, the song of Eru that remains to be sung unto the very ending of the world, the echo of it which remains in the fabric of Arda - in the soil, in the grass, the air and sky but mostly in the water. He is Master... of the music. The keeper, the carer, the stone which has gathered the moss of all the melodies and harmonies of the Ainulindalë.

[Impenitent]

Thanks Vinnie - I'm a reluctant (insecure, paranoid, self-doubting) poster, as you know but this re-reading business is proving to be quite fruitful and energising.

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

It has always confused (and somewhat saddened) me when others don't find any depth in Tom, when he's been reduced to an annoyance babbling bad poetry. I have wondered whether it is all my inference and none of Tolkien's intent.

I, too, am grieved when others treat Tom as if he were some goofy fluff that Tolkien tacked onto LOTR on a whim. I believe if people were to read the Bombadil chapters with an open mind they'd see that Tom is far more profound a character than he seems on the surface.

As far as what you have written, Impy, I feel that Tom is strongly connected to the earth--besides the strong nature imagery we witness in the Bombadil chapters we also are told so directly at the Council of Elrond--while Goldberry the River-daughter is strongly connected to the water. Goldberry tells us that Tom is the master of wood, water, and hill.

I also very much like Impy's connection of Tom, who uses song to quell Old Man Willow and to banish the Barrow-wight, with the Music of the Ainur. I don't know that Tolkien ever fully developed that idea, but it seems to me that he had something very much like that in mind.

[Alatar]

Great post Imp. I've often considered that all "magic" in Middle-Earth seems to be music based. From Bombadil to Lúthien, thay all use music in their enchantments. Only Gandalf seems to be an exception.