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“To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.”6 Rubber balls are meant to be gratefully received and enjoyed.
The Ring of Power isn’t neutral, like sweet cream, to which someone’s personality can be added to make a new flavor of ice cream. It is malum in se—intrinsically evil. It is inalterably bent in a particular direction. In other words, the Ring cannot be put into the service of a good cause. Throughout the story the notion that it could be used for good is the temptation that snares otherwise noble characters. And once snared, they are bent by the Ring until they conform to its intrinsic nature.
The Hebrew word that’s translated “dominion” means something like “skilled mastery.”
Then he makes his own vision of what constitutes true wisdom starkly clear—it is the ability to see the “good” others cannot see, and to accumulate power in order to force “fools” to comply with it.
One of the devilish things about knowledge today is that it has sued for divorce from wisdom. (They’re not even on speaking terms in many minds.)
If you see the world the way Saruman does, you’ll come to resemble a machine yourself. That’s the way things work. Whatever we think is the final truth of things, that’s the image we conform to.
Things belong to themselves, and yet there is a Master. Does that still strike you as odd?
‘But Saruman now! . . . I wonder now if even then Saruman was not turning to evil ways. But at any rate he used to give no trouble to his neighbours. I used to talk to him. There was a time when he was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind. I cannot remember that he ever told me anything. And he got more and more like that; his face, as I remember it—I have not seen it for many a day—became
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Treebeard now knows what Saruman was after with all his questions; he wanted power—power here meaning domination and use: “he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” Intriguing, isn’t it, how the pursuit of a particular form of knowledge closes you off from the world outside your head? Saruman’s knowledge makes him machine-like, unfeeling and unaware of things outside himself. His knowledge is ignorant of the most important aspect of any given thing—what a thing is in itself.
With all of this in mind, perhaps, just perhaps, the reason Tom’s songs seemed like nonsense to readers of The Lord of the Rings (and to the hobbits) is because Tom knows the music of the world, and we do not. And if that’s so, then maybe what we think and say is the real nonsense.
For a man, a house without a wife is a cold and sterile thing. In ages of the world when the wilderness was just beyond the hedge, that was obvious. A man can live alone, but not fruitfully. It’s in the nature of things, for a husband and wife bring a good return. In our time we’ve lost our sense of the nature of things—particularly the fruitfulness of a home where women and the feminine arts are honored.
a flat world things grow in significance at the expense of other things, but in a vertically ordered world, things can freely be themselves, even when they are subject to others. Mastery does not equal ownership—even when people are subject to you.
One of my daughters-in-law, puzzling aloud about Goldberry, asked me, “What is Goldberry good for? Is she some sort of trophy-wife?” As I’ve thought about it, my qualified answer is yes, but perhaps she’s a dangerous one.
So, has Tom redeemed a water spirit? I can’t say. All I can say is he’s brought one home, and they seem happy enough. But I suspect that this is what Goldberry had always hoped for anyway. Perhaps that’s the best description of redemption—the fulfillment of a longing, long suppressed. If that’s so, then Tom truly is a master.
It is because the world to come is more Real and Enduring than our world that our labors in this world matter. The next world infuses this one with meaning because, as the story suggests, in some sense our works in this world will follow us into the world to come.
But for the moment, let’s return to the question, “Will Heaven be boring?” Perhaps it seems like it could be if you don’t have a taste for holiness. (But if that’s the case, Heaven would most likely be terrifying rather than boring.) The very question begs the question; it is also blasphemous because it implies that the creation has something that the Creator does not.
How can we imagine an eternal rest when we can’t even rest for a few moments now? We may look forward to a vacation so that we can “rest and recuperate,” but that way of putting it shows that the point of rest is getting back to work. Perhaps you’ve felt listlessness on the third week of vacation. That’s when “sleeping in” has lost its charm, and you’re looking for things to do. If Heaven is like that, it probably sounds like Hell. Perhaps eternal rest is unimaginable because it calls for an entirely different mode of life. I think that’s what we see with Gandalf here—he needs to have a long
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I think Tom is the ending, as in a happy ending. What does this have to do with dominion? Well, bless my beard, it’s the same thing! In the Bible God doesn’t lay down His dominion when He rests on the seventh day; He enjoys what He has made. And Tom’s dominion and his rest amount to the same thing.
That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.6
Frodo sees the vision in his dream again, this time at the very end of The Lord of the Rings. But this time he’s not dreaming—he’s sailing into the West, and it is at this point that Bombadil is mentioned for the last time.
And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.7
Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?”2 Gandalf tells Frodo that it is impossible to answer a question like that. People don’t have everything that they need before beginning a perilous quest. They must learn on the job. They begin with what they have and rise to the challenges they face along the way.
Each one of us has something sitting right in front of us that really must be done, but we’d rather not do. Other people are meant for other things. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from saying, “I’d rather do what he’s supposed to do. Why can’t I do that?”
the adventure anyone could ask for; doing the thing that must be done, that only you can do—that’s the real adventure. G.K. Chesterton amusingly begins his classic, Orthodoxy, with an account of an “English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.”3 Chesterton’s point is that we already are somewhere strange and fascinating enough to satisfy anyone romantic enough to long for adventure. But do we see it? Seemingly, Bombadil did. And it wasn’t as though the coming of the Dark Lord was the first time
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Here’s a postscript to the postscript, a final thought that occurred to me as I was putting the last touches on this book: the first time that Tom saved the hobbits it was at a tree, and the second time that he saved them it was at a tomb. For those pondering what Tom represents, that’s an even more encouraging thought.
