The Unsolved Riddle of Tom Bombadil
The nature of the jolly, blue-coated, feather-crowned figure remains an enigma in Tolkien’s grand fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings
When Frodo meets Tom Bombadil, he’s desperately afraid.
A willow tree has imprisoned his friends Merry and Pippin inside its trunk and won’t let them go-faced with the threat of fire, the tree promises to squeeze the captured hobbits to death. Alone and lost, Frodo runs along a path in the Old Forest, shouting for help.
Enter Tom Bombadil. Preceded by his merry singing voice, he bounds into view with yellow boots and a blue coat, bright blue eyes and a jolly face, ‘red as a ripe apple, but creased with a hundred wrinkles of laughter’.
Singing ‘Old Man Willow’ to sleep, he saves Merry and Pippin, inviting all four of them to the home he shares with his wife, the river maiden Goldberry. Everything we have seen so far from him-going from his nonsense rhymes to the lily-flowers he carries make Bombadil appear like a benevolent host and forest warden. Kind and funny but not remarkable.
Until the tight-knit group tells him about the aim of the quest and Bombadil asks for the Ring.
He puts it on and remains visible (anyone who knows their LoTR lore knows that mortals who put on the Ring become invisible!), its magic and compulsion having no apparent influence on the now established immortal. Bombadil makes it vanish as part of a magic trick in front of the astonished hobbits and then gives it back to Frodo with a casual disregard that makes even Galadriel and Gandalf look evil. It’s clear that to him, the Ring is nothing more than a worthless bauble. His disregard for it is so large that he cannot even be entrusted with it for safekeeping-as he would ‘forget that he had it or lose it’, as Gandalf explains in the Council of Elrond.
In the core narrative of the trilogy, Bombadil plays only a minor role, with Gandalf only saying once to Frodo in The Return of the King that he intends to have a long talk with the ‘moss-gatherer’, who, in the wake of the momentous events that occur, appears as content and disinterested in the world outside the Old Forest as ever.
Yet, despite this, hardcore fans of the books have long enjoyed puzzling over Tom Bombadil’s true nature and purpose.
Some have speculated that he is a Maia, a lesser god or spirit sent to shape the world (Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast fit the bill here) under the guidance of the infinitely more powerful Valar. This theory seems fallible, given the fear and greed that the Ring evokes in them in contrast to Bombadil’s own unaffectedness. Bombadil as a possible Vala, a greater God or angel, seems even less likely. There were only 14 of them and only 7 were male. And of these, only Orome cared to stay in Middle-Earth, with even him having left for the land of Aman after the advent of the Elves. Also, if this was the case, Gandalf would have have known Bombadil intimately and would have named him as a Vala to the hobbits, which he does not.
I confess to being partial to another, even more far-fetched theory-the idea that Tom Bombadil is truly God. Notwithstanding the fact that Iluvatar is already named as the All-Father in The Silmarillion, I liked the thought of a benevolent God waiting in the wings, guiding and protecting the heroes without taking away their will or super-imposing his own upon them. Given Tolkien’s proclivity of merging myth with his own, Catholic sensibility, I felt justified in this reading.
Cheekily, I’d refer to the instance when Frodo asks Tom Bombadil who he is to support this view:
‘Who are you, Master?’ he asked.
‘Eh, what?’ said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer.
Or the passage where he poses the same question to Goldberry:
‘Fair lady!’ said Frodo again after a while. ‘Tell me, if my asking does not seem foolish, who is Tom Bombadil?’
‘He is,’ said Goldberry, staying her swift movements and smiling.
Later, I found out that Tolkien himself firmly rejected this interpretation, presumably for being too neat a conclusion.
Yet, simultaneously fuelling the flames of that other, reader-led quest, the one that seeks to eke out meaning from all aspects of a story, Tolkien wrote that Bombadil represents something important that he is at pains or unwilling to define but that he ‘ would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.’
What do we know about Tom Bombadil?
That functions seems to be to delight and uplift the spirits of all those who encounter him. Bombadil, who lives with Goldberry just east of the Shire in the Old Forest, is the quintessential ‘jolly old fellow’.
He is old, being described as ‘the Master, the First and Eldest’. Bombadil ‘remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn’, ‘was here before the river and the trees’ and ‘knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless-before the Dark Lord came from Outside’. Going from this description, it’s safe to consider him Middle Earth’s equivalent to Adam.
The character’s jolliness is documented in an entirely different source.
Though the eponymous figure only plays a side role in his epic, Tolkien included some of Bombadil’s back story in the aptly titled poetry collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. It contains two poems specifically relating to him, Bombadil Goes Boating being the most joy-inducing (in my humble opinion!).
With a freshness and vivacity that brings to mind Mole’s own river escapades in The Wind in the Willows, Bombadil has a series of similar, light-hearted encounters. From bantering with a willow-wren, teasing a Kingfisher, meeting Old-Swan and Whisker-lad (an otter) and fighting a Barrow-wight, there’s much to unpack and enjoy here.
Yet, for all this, what is definitely known about Bombadil is scarce, with Elves, Men and Hobbits only unanimous in declaring him an ancient presence.
Who could Tom Bombadil be?
In a recent piece on the subject for the German magazine philosophie Thema, Johan Wientgen argued that Bombadil corresponds to the Kantian idea of ‘the thing-in-itself’-in laymen’s terms, the idea of something, irrespective of individual observation. Kant himself explained the concept using the idea of a rose, unfiltered by phenomena such as colour, smell or form, which would be perceived differently by different people. Wientgen also points out that Bombadil could be a Barthian ‘symbol, sign or form’ without a fixed meaning-that is, however, open to multiple interpretations.
Others have taken a slightly different approach. Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger posits that Bombadil’s role serves as a counter-point- specifically to Sauron, who seeks to subsume and undermine all life in Middle Earth.
There’s some support for the idea that he is a nature sprite, with Tolkien having at some point written that Bombadil represented ‘the spirit of the vanishing landscapes of Oxfordshire and Berkshire’.
Irrespective of the answer to this conundrum, it’s evident that Tom Bombadil captivates because he mystifies-in a thoroughly planned out world that spans several millennia (try The Silmarillion, I dare you), storytelling motifs that throw up unanswerable questions promise complete immersion in a time where mind-bending fiction and puzzle-box tv series proliferate.
Maybe someone (hint: Amazon Prime) will grace us with the untold sequel to The Hobbit centred around Tom Bombadil that Tolkien never got around to. Better yet, he will remain the question without an answer, prompting ever new speculation and engagement around a story that I will always fondly remember for the friends it helped me gain-the kind that won’t let you off till you learn how to be a Nazgul.
