The Great Tolkien Reread: In the House of Tom Bombadil

Tom Bombadil by Dan Wolff

'Good morning, merry friends!' cried Tom, opening the eastern window wide. A cool air flowed in; it had a rainy smell. 'Sun won't show her face much today, I'm thinking. I have been walking wide, leaping on the hill-tops, since the grey dawn began, nosing wind and weather, wet grass underfoot, wet sky above me. I wakened Goldberry singing under window; but nought wakes hobbit-folk in the early morning. In the night little folk wake up in the darkness, and sleep after light has come! Ring a ding dillo! Wake now, my merry friends! Forget the nightly noises! Ring a ding dillo del! derry del, my hearties! If you come soon you'll find breakfast on the table. If you come late you'll get grass and rain-water!'

Fucking Tom Bombadil.

Look, I try. Every time I reread The Lord of the Rings, I tell myself that I'll give "In the House of Tom Bombadil" a fair shake, and maybe this time I'll find myself appreciating it. After all, this whole project is in large part about standing up for the aspects of Tolkien's writing that are commonly derided, so it's a little embarrassing to have to join in the consensus opinion that Tom Bombadil is incredibly annoying and possibly pointless. Nevertheless, that is where I inevitably land, and this reading was no different.

What's particularly frustrating is that in principle, I think Tom Bombadil is a very good idea. As a story, The Lord of the Rings can feel somewhat totalizing. The entire history of Middle Earth, it turns out, is leading up to this one final conflict; to one mission to destroy one object, the failure or success of which will affect the lives of every person in the world. There's merit in suddenly introducing the notion that there are beings who exist outside and sideways of this conflict. Who predates the elves and their millennia-old melodramas. Who were never drawn into the epochal conflict between the Enemy and the forces of good. Who stand for nature, for the land itself. And who, like the land, will persist long after the novel's events are settled, however they are settled.

It's an idea that tracks with how Tolkien perceives nature, and how he has been writing about it all the way through the novel so far: "Tom's words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers." If nature in Middle Earth is possessed of sapience and intention, then why shouldn't it throw up an elemental creature who simply is? Why shouldn't this creature's wife be a river?

It's a strange and promising idea, but Tolkien's approach to it in this chapter is more twee than weird. The fa-la-la folksiness of Bombadil punctures, for me, all sense of the otherworldly about him. When Frodo first meets Goldberry, he compares her to elves: "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." That's true to an extent—there is something elvish about the way that Tom and Goldberry seem able to impose their will, their benevolence, and their inner peace on the world around them. But I disagree about the delight they bring. The elves, to me, have a core of humanity that inflects and deepens their ethereal grace. (And as we will learn in The Silmarillion, that grace is what comes after fiery passions and bloody feuds have been allowed to run their course for millennia.) Tom and Goldberry, in contrast, feel weightless. Their wonder feels entirely informed.

This is not to say that there aren't things to admire in "In the House of Tom Bombadil". The brief scene in which the hobbits, sleeping under Tom's roof after much toil and peril, experience vivid dreams—Frodo about Gandalf's imprisonment by Saruman; Merry and Pippin about the the trauma of their entrapment in Old Man Willow's roots—is both evocative and ends with an amusing flash of wit ("As far as he could remember, Sam slept through the night in deep content, if logs are contented"). Tom's potted history of the kingdoms that rose and fell near where the Old Forest stands now, and left behind them merely their burial mounds, is not only a good setup for the next chapter, but a lovely illustration of what the rest of the chapter mostly fails to convey: his utter timelessness, and the impermanence of everything else in the face of it.

Then, of course, there's the Ring. Tom's indifference to it is startling enough in itself—"suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold." It also sets up a fascinating payoff at the council of Elrond, when Gandalf points out that yes, the Ring could probably be safely given to Tom, who would be unaffected by it and able to defend it. But that he is so outside the story of The Lord of the Rings that he would inevitably forget to play his part in it, and would only end up mislaying the Ring and starting the whole mess all over again.

In this chapter, however, that outsider quality only makes Tom more frustrating. It is too early in the story to introduce a character who is immune to the Ring, and who will also clearly play no further part in its adventures. If Frodo's journey is a set of concentric circles, each one more wild and more dangerous than the one before, then Tom's standing outside the story is a disruption to that pattern before it has even been properly established.

Still, I set out on this project with the goal of praising Tolkien's weirdness and his idiosyncrasy, and there might not be any better expression of both qualities than Tom Bombadil. It seems only fair, therefore, to let the author have the last word on the topic, with this observation from the introduction to the second edition to The Lord of the Rings.

It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved.

"I will have you know that some people like Tom Bombadil, and have written me letters to say so!" Well, who am I to argue, then.

Next time: It's Hammer Horror time on March 10th, with "Fog on the Barrow Downs"

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