In the House of Tom Bombadil

by C.R. Wiley

Bombadil was able to reign over his land and have command of it through proper spells, taming it. No Bombadil existed for the outskirts of Mordor, however, and the land became so corrupt as to become nearly irredeemable, except through an act of God, perhaps by letting the ocean wipe it clean in a new flood.

Tolkien didn’t want children to grow up into the sort of people who read stories looking for preaching. Instead he wanted children, as well as adults, to be taken up into stories, to experience the wonder, the mystery, and even the terror that can be found in them.

I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.

many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

everything around him. But unlike you or me, he actually has the power to get the job done. When he made his Ring, Sauron poured enough of himself into it so that anyone who put it on would have access to his power. But here’s the catch: all this bending includes the wearer of the Ring.

the ring of Gyges. That ring merely revealed how bad people are; the Ring of Power actually makes its wearer worse. In time he comes to resemble its maker.

J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t write a thriller, even though it is thrilling. It’s more than that, and that’s why people thrill to read it again and again. Most thrillers skim along the surface, each thrill topping the last. Speed is essential. But if you know what comes next, the thrill is gone. However, The Lord of the Rings is better the fourth or fifth time through,

Tom is sui generis—he’s a breed apart.

Bombadil isn’t the Creator; he’s a creature, like the rest of the characters in The Lord of the Rings—and like you and me in our world.

The reason this explains nothing is the same reason scientific explanations of natural phenomena that reduce everything to material causes explain nothing. They substitute a means for an end. The end in this case is the purpose Bombadil serves in the story. Saying that Tom Bombadil was inspired by a Dutch doll tells us nothing about that.

what these two very different explanations actually do (namely, Bombadil is really Illúvatar, or Bombadil is just a Dutch doll) is they appeal to things outside of Middle Earth to explain the enigmatic man with the blue jacket and yellow boots. And I think that there is something to that.

Tom does have “some kind of function”—and he is a “comment.”

enigmas invite inquiry. The word enigma comes into English in the 16th century via Latin, but originally from Greek. It means to “speak allusively,” from αινος, for “fable.” I’m sure Tolkien knew this, and I’m sure that he knew what happens when people stumble upon enigmatic things—they stop and wonder about them, particularly noble-minded people. As Solomon said, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Prov. 25:2).

mystery comes into English from the outside—through the Old French mistere, but further back, from the Latin mysterium, and ultimately to the Greek mysterion. And at each step in the journey of the word down to our time, a mystery is not a problem; it is a hidden truth.

The best mysteries are never solved. Solutions in the sense we associate with Sherlock Holmes are like equations that can be mastered, not things worth knowing for their own sakes. My hope is that you will come to love Tom for his own sake,

Frodo’s inference that mastery means ownership doesn’t follow for her. So she says: ‘The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master.

Tom is Master. But his mastery is not the sort that Frodo is accustomed to.

Remember what he said about allegories? He “cordially” disliked them; he disliked them because they tend to be bossy, leaving little room for the reader to think for himself. That’s because they work by simple one-to-one correspondences—THIS means THAT—as we see in The Pilgrim’s Progress.

When something is an analog, it is both itself and like something else at the same time. In allegories characters don’t really have lives of their own; they just represent other things; they’re like cardboard standees. Analogs, on the other hand, are real in themselves.

in an allegory the reader is at the mercy of the author; when it comes to analogy, the association is made in the mind of the reader—or not.

Tom can remind us of what dominion should look like. Dominion without Domination

The exercise of dominion in some sense is inevitable. After all, we must make a home for ourselves in the world—a domus, which is Latin for “home.” Domus, by the way, is the source of the words dominion, domination, domain, and, of course, domestic. For Christians and Jews, and anyone else who believes in the God of the Bible, human beings have been given this world in order to make a home.

The Hebrew word that’s translated “dominion” means something like “skilled mastery.” And that’s definitely what we see when we look at Tom.

skilled mastery can be a problem, as we see with the Ring of Power. When we see the Ring in action we see something very different than Tom Bombadil. When it comes to the Ring we see skill is used in a domineering way.

“the white light can be broken”? Saruman is willing to break more than light to learn what he wants to know.

Human wisdom was once believed to be based on a deeper wisdom written into the world, and it could only be acquired through dedicated and grateful converse with it. But for many modern people, there is nothing to be grateful for because there is no one to thank. Instead of wisdom, many people are after the facts that can be wrested from a stuttering and dim-witted world. This underlies much of what goes by the name “science” today.

Throughout The Lord of the Rings the Good Professor is careful to distinguish Dominion from Domination. We need to learn how to distinguish them for ourselves, because very often they get blended in unprincipled and tendentious ways.

Tom is an image of what true dominion looks like.

In the modern world the quest for knowledge is premised on the belief that the natural world is nothing more than a vast machine. Since it is merely a machine, learning how it works entails disassembly, breaking things down into their constituent parts. Unfortunately for the things themselves, this is something of a downgrade from the ways they were once understood, everything from trees, to rivers, to people. Nothing is exempt. Now, because they are just things, they can be reassembled in novel ways.

Gandalf spoke up for an older way of knowing—a way that knows things without breaking them. In the old way of knowing, things are “more than the sum of their parts.”

you are more than the sum of your parts. You are not a machine; you are a human being, with a name, and an identity, and a will of your own.

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. Later in The Lord of the Rings we’re told that Saruman “has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”

Saruman’s mind set a trap for Gandalf, but Tom set the hobbits free from Old Man Willow. What this demonstrates isn’t just that Tom is good and Saruman isn’t, but how two different understandings of knowledge work themselves out in different ways of life—one catches things to control them, and another frees them in order to commune with them. When Frodo asked Goldberry “Then all this strange land belongs to him?” he had something like Saruman’s attitude in mind; but when she said, “The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master,” she had Tom’s wisdom in mind.

Things belong to themselves, and yet there is a Master.

Tom’s mastery is limited. He doesn’t own things, and he doesn’t break them. Instead, he knows them in a very different way.

What can we say about Tom’s freedom? Well, we can say at least one thing: it isn’t freedom from responsibility. Tom cares about Goldberry; he cares about the hobbits; he even cares about their ponies. But the point here I think is this: Tom is nobody’s fool and nobody’s tool.

Tom doesn’t set traps. He sets people free from them. Presumably Tom lives by the Golden Rule—no one can trap him, that’s why he frees others. He has no fear, and he even frees other people from their fears—if

it’s because Tom knows where he ends and other people begin that he’s free. He knows his limits.

Limits are terribly frustrating for ambitious people. But limitless living isn’t possible; thinking it is, is a kind of trap. We learn as the story goes on that Saruman has fallen into a trap himself, he is serving the Dark Lord. He has become Sauron’...

No one can catch Ol’ Tom—not even the Lord of the Rings.

Some people don’t like reading between the lines because it strikes them as opening the door to all sorts of fanciful nonsense. They prefer plain language, and a direct and literal approach to interpretation. But is reading always so simple? Maybe life is art all the way down. And maybe when the original Artist said, “Let there be light,” He had more than one thing in mind. Perhaps, just perhaps, the world doesn’t read like the manual that came with your washing machine.

Tolkien says that Tom’s singing only seemed like nonsense.

The efficacy of Tom’s singing is the best argument that it isn’t nonsense. Tom’s singing saves the hobbits more than once. And when we’re first introduced to Tom, he tells the hobbits that it i...

When it comes to what Tom and Treebeard know, they’re open and generous.

Treebeard now knows what Saruman was after with all his questions; he wanted power—power here meaning domination and use:

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.

etymologically the word ignorant actually means “on your own”—as we can see from the word idiosyncrasy. A person who shuts himself up like Saruman is ignorant in a very dangerous way, even though he knows many things.

a genuine fairy story is generous in the way Bombadil and Treebeard are generous.

Communion is a goal, not control.

powerful characters who are good—Elrond, Gandalf, and Aragorn, among others—honor the free choices of those who are not as powerful as they are.