In the House of Tom Bombadil

by C.R. Wiley

Professor 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.

“To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.”

while allegories can artlessly shove meanings beneath our noses, there is no such thing as a story without some kind of morality running through it.

I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than Frodo did. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlórien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22.16

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

Tom may somehow be from Outside—meaning he represents something outside Middle Earth, or perhaps bigger than that world.

Tom can remind us of what dominion should look like.

White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”’9 ‘“In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”’

There is something which unites magic and applied science [technology] while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men; the solution is a technique.

distinguish Dominion from Domination.

Tom is an image of what true dominion looks like.

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.

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.

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 sheltering the hobbits tells us anything. Paradoxically, it’s because Tom knows where he ends and other people begin that he’s free. He knows his limits.

Not even entertainment is meaningless if we live in a meaningful world—and Tolkien certainly believed that our world is meaningful.

Did Tolkien have in mind Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism—and the diabolical panopticon—when he envisioned Sauron as a “lidless eye”? I wonder.

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.

The magic found in a fairy story is a magic that is intended to satisfy “certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is . . .to hold communion with other living things.”3

I think he’s also telling us something about the nature of good households and how they fit into the Grand Story.

the music is still playing in our world, and what we need in our time is our hearing

Many influential people believe that the biblical doctrine of dominion is behind climate change and the extinction of species, and a myriad of other regrettable things.11 But the problem with this view is that dominion is a fact—human beings simply have it. It’s God’s doing. We can’t abdicate. Human beings possess power over all the creatures of the world. I suppose you could say we have a Ring of Power—whether we want it or not. But dominion isn’t arbitrary power, at least not originally. In the Christian faith human dominion is subject to God’s dominion. And it is informed by God’s Law—his moral standard, his holiness. We can’t just do as we please.

Perhaps dominion should be understood to mean ordering some things for our good, and other things for the good of those things in themselves. If that’s so—and I think that it is—we will not only let elephants run wild, we will commune with them at the same time.

Pursuit and capture, it’s a dangerous game—and it can go wrong in many ways. But there’s no mystery to missing the mark; instead, the mystery is hidden in hitting it. It is when the heart flutters in the capturing embrace that catching and being caught amount to the same thing.

mastery does not amount to ownership—Goldberry belongs to herself, and yet he’s caught her. She is his wife: truths can layer and not displace each other. In 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.

Much like children.

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.

The idea apparently being that in Hell there a food chain in which the higher consumes the lower. This is a reversal of the heavenly food chain we see in Christianity in which the highest of all gives himself as food for all, which results in a trickle-down of goodness and an expanding circumference of life.

the story suggests, in some sense our works in this world will follow us into the world to come.

Niggle

You could say that we’re more like hobbits lost in the Old Forest than we are like Tom Bombadil. As we travel along we see beautiful things, but also dark things—things full of malice for those “that go on two legs.”22 We’re bewildered, over-matched, constantly opposed by obstacles, and our going is easy in only one direction: down, down, down to the last river; and we must cross it. And in the end we are surrounded by fog, the light goes out, and we’re done. But is that it? Is that the end? Not if Someone very like Tom has something to say about it. There will be a day—a great getting-up morning—and a loud rumbling sound, as of stones rolling, and falling, and suddenly light will stream in, the Real Light of Day, and a Final Day will begin that will never end. And we will run free upon the grass of a world that will never fade.

“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.

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 talk with Bombadil because he’s entering a mode of life for which Tom is truly the master.

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. Perhaps this seems unlikely, since we meet Tom at the beginning of the story, before things really get going. But I think that’s the genius of Tom, and Tolkien. He comes at the beginning because he gives us a glimpse of the ending—the happy ending.

we have the ending of The Lord of the Rings, and the end of Frodo’s story, faintly suggested in the house of Tom Bombadil. In the first paragraph in the chapter titled, “Fog on the Barrow-downs,” we read this: 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

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.