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What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He is fat and jolly and smiles all the time. He is friendly and gregarious and always ready to help travellers in distress.

Except that none of that can possibly be true.

Wow.

#YOU WERE RIGHT TO FEAR THE BOMB

yikes

@systlin Have you seen this?

NO and also ME AND MOM HAVE BEEN SAYING THERE IS SOMETHING UP WITH TOM BOMBADIL and THIS IS WHY

I like the idea, because I love Tom Bombadil. Personally I think I’ll stick with Bombadil as Tolkien intended: He is England, the genius loci of a nation, placed in Middle Earth as ecological and spiritual touchstone. (He is also, weirdly, the embodiment of science, but it makes sense in context.)

Tolkien wrote on the deliberate status of Bombadil, one of his oldest OCs, as an obscurity – a necessary mystery. In his guise as a pre-LOTR OC, Bombadil is explicitly a manifestation of the vanishing chalk downland of England (which is one of the big eco-spiritual themes of Lord of the Rings). And if we refer back to Elodie’s Puck Rant, we see the connections between Tom Bombadil and Puck of Puck of Pook’s Hill – the Oldest Old Thing in England – a breaker of narrative and agent of chaos.

“Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story?” Tolkien wrote to Stanley Unwin in 1937, about his favorite OC, before his more famous works. 

 He is fundamentally neutral, and unconcerned with the strivings of men, wars and modern gods. He is The Land, married to The River – this is a recurring theme in literature from the British Isles, this concept of the anthropomorphic personification of The Beloved Land ™, a descendant of the Roman idea of the genius loci, or spirit-of-place. He does not give a shit about the squabbles of elves and wizards, because he is English hedgerow, woodland and downland. He breaks the narrative – Tolkien knew he broke the narrative and distorted the story – but that’s part of the very mechanism of this character – he’s a namer and a narrator, the land expressing itself, first and fatherless.

Probably the best evidence for this are Tolkien’s own words which explain Bombadil’s construction and inclusion.

“Tom Bombadil is not an important person—to the narrative. […] he represents something that I feel important…”

[…]

“I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…”

[…]

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

Then we can look at descriptions of Puck – shapeshifter, trickster, neutral figure, the wild welsh Pwca bound together with the benevolent English Goodfellow by Shakespeare:

(FAIRY)

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Called Robin Goodfellow […]

(PUCK)

Thou speakest aright;
I am that merry wanderer of the night. 

Puck, being highly folkloric, continues from Shakespeare in this Robin/Puck fusion, and appears in the WEIRDEST fuckin places:

Robin Goodfellow appears in an 1856 speech by Karl Marx: “In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy and the poor profits of regression, we recognize our brave friend Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer – the Revolution.”

In the 1906 fantasy Puck of Pook’s Hill by Rudyard Kipling we come to know Puck as the genius loci of England (in particular chalk downland):

“I came into England with Oak, Ash and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too.”

“England is a bad country for Gods. Now, I began as I mean to go on […] I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up with people all my days.”

it’s also implied in an acoompanying poem that the immortal Puck is required (like the ravens in the Tower of London) for the country to “live”:

England shall bide till Judgement Tide,
By Oak and Ash and Thorn!

When Puck shapeshifts to present himself as a human man in Puck of Pook’s Hill, he calls himself Tom Shoesmith, is silver-bearded/blue-eyed/brown-skinned, wears bright clothing and banters in songs and rhymes – but we immediately know who he is, despite this change in form:

‘Oh, I’ve bin to Plymouth, I’ve bin to Dover—
I’ve bin ramblin’, boys, the wide world over,’

the man answered cheerily. ‘I reckon I know as much of Old England as most.’

This chimes again in Edward Thomas’s 1917 poem, Lob, that describes the same entity – Tom, Robin, Hob [Goblin], Lob – as a mischievous/benevolent immortal who takes the form of an older man; a wanderer within the land he embodies, (spirit) guide to travelers, blue-eyed and brown-skinned, in bright clothing (usually with a blue coat), naming and therefore mastering the world around him – we realize that this Lob also speaks in rhyme, when the reader realizes that the person explaining this is actually Lob himself: 

[…]The man was wild
And wandered. His home was where he was free.
Everybody has met one such man as he.
Does he keep clear old paths that no one uses
But once a lifetime when he loves or muses?
He is English as this gate, these flowers, this mire.
And when at eight years old Lob-lie-by-the-fire
Came in my books, this was the man I saw.
He has been in England as long as dove and daw […]

[…]This is tall Tom that bore
The logs in, and with Shakespeare in the hall
Once talked, when icicles hung by the wall.
As Herne the Hunter he has known hard times. […]

(I’m not the only person to say this, btw)

Puck-Lob-Tom-Rob in these works is also associated with barrows, downs, and Things That Live Under the Hills – although he is portrayed as the master of those things, since he is not from under-the-hill, and because he cannot die. Though this is a pretty subtle thing, to me it continues this British Isles Archetype ™ and the whole thing where The King Is The Land and so on, and I feel this is a deeper understanding of Bombadil-the-character. He is also associated with entities like bees – big, unknowable things – more necessary mysteries. (I don’t know, this is all getting a bit BBC Radio.)

So Tom Bombadil is clearly harkening back to this archetype of England-as-a-character-in-its-own-folklore. And that’s why, when Frodo asks, basically, “what the fuck is he, tho?” Goldberry simply says, “He is.” 

Puck is a breaker and creator of narrative (and in fact a narrator, who tells the stories and gives you dreams – and then tells you that all stories are dreams.) Riddler, wanderer, speaking in rhyme and poetic references, he addresses the audience directly and distorts the stories he’s in.

This is also Tom Bombadil – so… what the heck? Why do this? Why shove Tom Bombadil into a narrative (LotR) where OP (and everyone else) notice he doesn’t fit? In fact, he sticks out so badly that he isn’t included in film adaptations – he would break the immersion too much. Even Tolkien knew this. So why?

Let’s go back to Tolkien quickly:

I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an ‘adventure’ on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. I do not mean him to be an allegory – or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name – but ‘allegory’ is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany, not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture . Even the Elves hardly show this : they are primarily artists.

Also T.B. exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him. You must concentrate on some pan, probably relatively small, of the World (Universe), whether to tell a tale, however long, or to learn anything however fundamental – and therefore much will from that ‘point of view’ be left out, distorted on the circumference, or seem a discordant oddity. The power of the Ring over all concerned, even the Wizards or Emissaries, is not a delusion – but it is not the whole picture, even of the then state and content of that pan of the Universe.

This is first Tom Bombadil as scientist, the means by which the Universe observes itself. More than that: he is the spirit of science.

And this is also Tom Bombadil as reminder that the Land endures, and that the story of the Ring is only a fraction of the Universe. In fact, it’s a small and frankly rather irrelevant part; even though all the other frail mortal characters are wildly obsessed with it, it means nothing to the Big Geology. 

This is Tolkien, startlingly, as an ecologist. After the wars, when the heroes are dead, there is always The Land. After the pettiness and exchange of money and waste of lives, there is still The Climate. All of these dramas are conducted against a bigger backdrop, which cannot really be broken by political trinkets. The bigger picture, always, is England. It’s an interesting thing for a storyteller to pull off – introduce a mechanism into your story that breaks your story, showing how the story itself is not the whole picture. Even though it annoys people. Just to make a point. Very meta. Very Puckish. 

(In a sense Game of Thrones kind of does this, by quietly pointing out that the political squabbles for a single throne are all very cute and distracting, but that Winter is Coming – the zombies can probably be defeated, but the climate itself is the big real story here.)

(This is also something that we could think about in 2018. As interesting as all these money concerns and hobbies and celebrities are, and as much as we obsess over the latest Threat to Our Whole Existence, we are picking over a tiny piece of the picture, which is meaningless against the big backdrop of The Environment.) 

Bombadil is the Big Sublime that makes our concerns trivial and meaningless. We don’t like to see him belittling the One Ring, because we want to believe that our concerns are Actually Very Important. We like to believe that our latest cycle of drama is as significant as it feels to us.

So going back to Tom’s role in the narrative. What does England care for one ring? What does the living earth care about jewelry, however spooky? What promises could a demon offer the land itself? What power – natural or supernatural – could make Puck shut the fuck up? There isn’t anything – not even God. The land is the land. 

Instead (as Tolkien points out, and anyone who feels a Vague Mystical Connection to the Earth will agree) the land is mostly concerned with its trees and kingfishers and poetry. The earth will host and care for you in its benevolence, but it can’t – and won’t – save you from your own machines, and their consequences. Its only interest in little dark magics, fleeting power-obsessions, capitalism, etc is in whether or not these things will affect its kingfishers and its rivers. Today, we would challenge Bombadil not with the spooky dark power of a ring, but some other apocalypse – climate change, or nuclear winter – and we know that he would still laugh merrily, unconcerned, because He Is. Those are our problems.

That, actually, is the comfort and terror of Bombadil. The necessary mystery. 

All of Middle Earth is obviously erased and gone; and also, it was all fantasy. You can’t really turn a corner and meet Elrond, even if you travel in time. Hobbits weren’t really real – Tolkien made them up, borrowing quite a lot of them from Hob-Goblin. But the chalk downland remains.  You could maybe meet Tom Bombadil, or Lob, or Puck. Our governments could fall, our nations collapse, our societies splinter, and he would still be somewhere, watching his bees. 

He cannot – will not – leave, until Oak, Ash and Thorn are extinct. He keeps old paths clear. He, perhaps, could be out there. 

He doesn’t need philosophizing about. He Is. and what He Is is something big – something that makes you laugh at it, almost, rather than facing your own guilt and awe. Something that you read as “jolly,” because the alternative feels increasingly awkward and strange.

And worse, perhaps, he never thinks of you at all.

HERE it is, here’s the only Tom Bombadil meta that I’m going to reblog ever again.

“…[T]he means by which the Universe observes itself” is putting into words the exact thing I’ve struggled to put into words whenever I see this topic.

Before now I kept making vague gestures and saying things to myself like “that one character from Gunnerkrigg Court, who sort of represented humanity’s observation of the world even before humans evolved? It’s like that but also, trees, and the earth doesn’t care if you make it unlivable for yourselves. AM I MAKING SENsE???*”  (*No, no Wesley, you were not).  But now I don’t have to articulate any of those things because Elodie is here and has put it down much better than I ever could have, and that is good, right, and proper. Elodie knows things about England and about Puck that I don’t. And I think this is probably the version, the understanding of things, that the Professor would approve of most and would be happy to know he’d imparted to tree-minded folk who have spent time in the same landscapes he spent time in while he was busy imagining stories. 

I’m mostly equipped for topics relating to Dark Lords and their surface-level squabbles, but I DO like thinking about how the idea of a vast, impartial universe terrifies the absolute shit out of them. (The Uncaring But Beautiful Universe is also the role I ascribe to Varda, and why Melkor fears and hates her the way he does, because he is uncomfortable when things are not about he?? Loving the stars is very much an exercise in learning to love and take comfort in one’s own ephemerality in the face of Time and Nature, even if you’re immortal; and oh boy he just hates that. Melkor himself is a bit of a personification of humanity’s fear of death, discomfort with the unknowable, and the selfish desire to put one’s own ambitions at the heart of everything. He’s sort of a tantrum-y child with demiurgical powers, and I love him very much.)

Gosh I love Place-Spirits. 

Loose Connections – Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil