7. In the House of Tom Bombadil
We will not delve into that debate, as our text is not a study of Tolkien’s mythical world as a literary work, and we have no ambition whatsoever to clarify what Tolkien “meant” (we do not believe that Tolkien meant anything specific, any more than he would have meant something specific with a dream he recorded). However, the question of who or what Tom Bombadil is has been a subject of debate since the book was published. The reason is that he does not seem to have a place in the saga’s internal logic. Not least, he is the only one in the saga who is immune to the Ring, which is, of course, utterly spectacular. That a being with this unique and potentially world-altering characteristic simply comes and goes in the saga is a mystery. How are we to fit him into the saga’s otherwise coherent internal logic?
We are convinced, and can demonstrate, that Tolkien wrote what came to him. We plan to elaborate on this later, but in brief, The Lord of the Rings is a story written on intuition; that is, Tolkien did not himself know what it was about when he began writing, or often what would happen next as he wrote. If nothing else, this is frequently evident from his own letters. But it is also suggested literarily in the strange coincidences – the fox, the riders, the elves, and now the mystery of Tom Bombadil – that seem to surprise the author as much as the reader. We see it also in this detour: the Old Forest with the devouring tree, Tom Bombadil with his Goldberry – a curiously naïve character – and soon the Barrow-downs; this is a sequence of events that, as far as one can tell, has nothing to do with the Ring adventure. In film adaptations of the saga, this symbolically significant detour is summarily erased because it does not seem to follow the saga’s internal logic and becomes cumbersome when retold for entertainment purposes.
But for Tolkien, it was important. He retained these chapters in the book despite repeated revisions with the red pen; he did not even adjust them to fit better into the overarching narrative. As we shall see, this “detour” is also highly significant for our understanding of the story – indeed, absolutely crucial. We believe that Tolkien sensed this intuitively and would consider it a kind of mutilation of the saga to remove Old Man Willow, Tom Bombadil, and the Barrow-downs – a series of events that are thus unsentimentally excised in film adaptations and other interpretations of his story. Since they do not work dramatically, it is, of course, a wise decision when the purpose is solely entertainment.
That said, we argue that Tom Bombadil does not need to function well with the saga’s broader logic as a literary work, because he has a clear and decisive place in the psychological development, in the unconscious dynamic that drives the narrative forward with its archetypal images and themes.
When Tom Bombadil surprises with his appearance, the author describes his peculiar attire. Clothing is described when it matters. We have no detailed knowledge of what the hobbits’ clothes look like, for example, or the elves’ for that matter. However, Gandalf’s attire is described when he first arrives in the Shire, Tom Bombadil’s clothes when he appears in the forest, and Aragorn’s clothing when Frodo sees him at the Prancing Pony inn. Their respective outfits thus carry symbolic significance.
Tom Bombadil, we are told, wears yellow boots, a blue coat, and a blue feather in his hat. We understand that he is a father figure and consequently represents the sky, in contrast to Old Woman Willow – if the naming is permitted – who belongs to the water and earth. He also has clear, lively blue eyes, which again contrast with the Mother’s murky river and soporific influence. The yellow boots thus symbolize the sun, and his blue coat the sky. At the top of the figure waves a blue feather. In this way, Tom Bombadil, symbolically speaking, resides in the sky above the sun and belongs to the air. Indeed, the wind around the willows by the river “subsides” when he materializes before the hobbits. He is the wind – that is, Tom Bombadil is, in symbolic terms, a spirit. The spiritual pertains to the father image; and the archetypal image of the Wise Old Man, in turn, represents the spiritual principle. Jung says that the spiritual principle in the form of the Wise Old Man “appears in a situation where insight, understanding, advice, determination, planning, etc., are needed but cannot be mustered with one’s own resources.”[1] We recall, of course, that Tom Bombadil unexpectedly appeared when Frodo’s own mental resources were exhausted.
We have also referred to Gandalf as the “Wise Old Man”; one could even say, to use one of Jung’s favorite expressions, that Gandalf is the Wise Old Man par excellence. But now we are also calling Tom Bombadil this. Are there two? No, not really. Gandalf and Tom Bombadil are two different aspects of the same principle. We recognize the phenomenon from our dreams, where a certain content – say, the anima – appears as, for example, a cat in one dream and as a woman in another. It is still the same content, but the image is shaped by the specific situation and our relationship to it. A symbol, as we have touched upon earlier, has many facets, and we cannot see all of them at once. In fact, we usually see only one facet, one image, and conclude that it is the whole. But as time passes, we discover new facets in the symbol, and its content grows and ultimately becomes contradictory. The symbol is, we might say in this context, a whole that contains opposites. When the content that these old men represent appears in the Shire in connection with a feast, it manifests in a certain way; but when the same content appears in the Old Forest in connection with the Terrible Mother about to devour Merry and Pippin, it manifests somewhat differently, simply because the situation is different and the observer is governed by a different attitude. The archetype itself does not change, but the archetypal image – what we perceive – is mutable.
At the very top of the image of Tom Bombadil sits, as mentioned, a blue feather, an unmistakable symbol of spirituality (sky, air, bird). Gandalf, for his part, has a blue pointed hat, which also represents the sky with its color and upward striving, and thus spirituality. We have seen, and will see again, that Gandalf is associated with fire (as spirits often are in folktales), both literally and as creativity, inspiration, and so forth. At the same time, Tom Bombadil, with his yellow boots, has a close connection to the sun and thus to fire.
For the hobbits to encounter the Terrible Earth Mother and be saved by the Good Sky Father, it is necessary that Gandalf is not present. In Gandalf’s company, the Old Forest would hardly have been particularly dangerous for the hobbits, and therefore not experienced as particularly menacing; and there would clearly have been no need to compensate for the situation with Tom Bombadil. In other words, if Gandalf had not been absent, this entire episode would have been lost; it would never have happened, because Gandalf and Tom Bombadil cannot be in the same situation at the same time when they are, in fact, only one figure.
A further detail that supports the assumption that Gandalf and Tom Bombadil actually represent the same archetype is that Gandalf rides to Bombadil’s home when the adventure is over. When the Ring is destroyed and Aragorn has become king of the human world and the goal is achieved, everyone returns to their own – elves, dwarves, hobbits, and humans. That Gandalf travels to Tom Bombadil’s house outside the Old Forest, of all conceivable (and inconceivable, as we know little about the wizard) places, indicates that he actually lives there; that they, once again, represent one and the same content.
We return to the sequence of events: When the hobbits step into Tom Bombadil’s cottage, they meet Goldberry. This fair woman is more explicitly than Tom Bombadil a spiritual being. She is beautiful, of course. All the “women” the hobbits encounter on their adventure are lovely and good, as an illustration of their closeness to the Good Mother. The Terrible Mother, as is known, is unconscious and, as a compensatory element, precisely terrible – from Old Woman Willow to Shelob. The content of the unconscious, that which has been pushed into the darkness because it is unacceptable and unbearable, returns as something alien and dreadful. The representatives of the Good Mother are extraordinarily pleasant, while those of the Terrible Mother are proportionately terrifyingly unpleasant and are thus represented by monsters, not women.
Goldberry has a green dress “as young reeds, shot with silver like beads of dew … About her feet in wide vessels of green and brown earthenware, white water-lilies were floating, so that she seemed to be enthroned in the midst of a pool.” She is thus a water spirit or a water nymph. She also calls herself “the River’s daughter.” The green and brown colors indicate that this spirit, alongside water, belongs to earth and vegetation, while Tom Bombadil belongs to sun, sky, and air. Together, they form, through the complementary elements and, for that matter, sexes, a union of opposites that is highly unusual in the tale. At the same time, there is, as in the encounter with the elves, a streak of infantilism. Tom Bombadil sings nonsense songs, and Goldberry laughs seemingly without reason and flits about like a leaf in the wind.
“Laugh and be merry!” she urges the hobbits as they step inside the door, whereupon she rises “and ran laughing on light feet” toward them but sweeps past them, closes the door behind them, and exclaims: “Let us shut out the night! … Fear nothing!”
One gets a growing sense that Goldberry is hysterical, or at least that something is not quite right. It may be impolite to say, but the matter is evidently that Frodo’s world is terribly unbalanced and swings between extremes. For these reasons, it becomes clear that the driving force behind the development reasonably strives for balance. We cannot, on the feminine side, have either an irritating and thieving Lobelia back in the Shire, a devouring tree in the forest, or Goldberry’s unrestrained, uncanny benevolence.
The next woman Frodo meets in the saga is Galadriel, who is a far more balanced character – but that is a long way off. Frodo must confront the Black Riders again and pass through the dangerous tunnel system of Moria’s mines before he meets her. These adventures, which Frodo would rather avoid, cause the “woman” in the saga to evolve from the somewhat hysterical Goldberry to the wise Galadriel.
We have now almost filled the intended space for this chapter and are still on its first page. The reason for this arrangement is that not much happens at Tom Bombadil’s. However, there are a few events in the house that are essential for our consideration. We can note in passing that the food served consists of honeycomb, cream, white bread, butter, milk, cheese, and green herbs. Spiritual beings – such as Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, and (to some extent) elves – evidently do not eat meat. The reason is that meat represents the concrete, the physical, and the bodily; it is associated with hunger, desire, and animalistic needs, that is, entirely incompatible food in relation to any form of spirituality. One does not even need teeth to eat the food offered by spiritual beings. We mention this only to emphasize the spiritual quality of these figures and the absence of the concretely masculine in the hobbits’ world.
When Goldberry goes to sleep, she again tells the hobbits not to be afraid, even though they are sitting refreshed with the evidently powerful Tom Bombadil in his “safe stone house,” as Tolkien calls it, with the Old Forest behind them. One cannot help but wonder why she unprompted repeats this. Is she herself afraid of something? Is her exaggerated manner a compensation for something? We do not know, but she seems to belong to the brown river that flowed by Old Woman Willow. This leads us to wonder: are Tom Bombadil’s almost incessant nonsense songs a distraction from something? What is it that these two oddballs are constantly avoiding, if so? And why do three of the four hobbits have nightmares when they sleep in Tom Bombadil’s safe stone house? The questions may deserve more space, but we can probably conclude that, just as Goldberry is linked to the terrible Old Woman Willow, Tom Bombadil is linked to the dreadful Barrow-wights. One gets the impression that they must constantly keep these respective shadows at arm’s length. There is something unresolved in these forcibly cheerful individuals. We note that the seemingly loving couple, who unite opposites, have no children. That is, the union is not fruitful.
At the end of the chapter, Tom Bombadil tells the hobbits “many strange tales.” He speaks of the Barrow-downs, which makes the hobbits uneasy. Then Goldberry arrives and exclaims unprompted: “Let us now laugh and be merry!” Even in this scene, she holds a candle in her hand. She seems to be afraid of the dark.
Tom Bombadil asks to borrow the Ring from Frodo. Then he laughs and handles the Ring as if it were any piece of jewelry. But then he does something strange: He looks at the hobbits through the Ring’s circle; “a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold.” We who have read the book or seen the movie know that the Eye is closely associated with the Ring. The Eye is Sauron’s, the foremost representative of evil, the one who created the Rings of Power. New questions arise – why does Tom Bombadil make this connection between himself, the cheerful old man in the forest, and the Dark Lord in Mordor?
Indeed, there is good reason for Tom Bombadil to run around singing all day long, for something very dark and dangerous lurks in the shadows. Tom Bombadil, we have established, is the Good Father. But if there is a very good and powerful father, there must also be a very evil and powerful father, “where the shadows lie.” These, of course, belong together.
Tom Bombadil puts the Ring on his finger. But he does not become invisible. He is thus immune to the Ring’s effects, as mentioned earlier. If the Ring still, as it did in the Shire, represents the bond to the Great Mother, it is expected that the Great Father is unaffected by it. When Frodo gets the Ring back, he wants to ensure it is truly the one he received and puts it on his finger. He becomes invisible, which satisfies him. But the Great Father tells him to stop fooling around, so Frodo takes the Ring off again.
Then Tom Bombadil tells them the path they should take next. He repeats several times that they must avoid the Barrow-wights’ “dwellings.” Then he teaches them a verse to sing if they get into danger on the Barrow-downs…! Just as when Bluebeard forbids his wife to open a certain door, making it impossible for her not to do so while he is away, Tom Bombadil lays out both the Barrow-wights and the rescue before the hobbits. His intention is evidently that they should go to the Barrow-downs and endure the terror this entails, only to be delivered by him, the Great Father. The question is why.
Footnotes
[1] Carl Gustav Jung, “The Phenomenology of Spirit in Fairytales,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed., vol. 9, part 1 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 398.