The Lord of the Rings: In the House of Tom Bombadil

They cross the threshold and are surprised to see a beautiful yellow-haired lady awaiting them, sitting as if enthroned amidst wide vessels full of the white waterlilies that Tom has brought home. She springs up to greet them and the hobbits enter, awed and awkward. She introduces herself as Goldberry. She has a beauty enchanting as the Elves, less keen and high but deeper and closer to mortal hearts. Frodo unexpectedly recites an impromptu verse of praise and greeting, and Goldberry says with a laugh that she can see that he is an Elf-friend by the light in his eyes and the ring in his voice.

Frodo asks her who Tom Bombadil is, and she answers that he is the Master of wood, water, and hill. Frodo asks if this land belongs to him then, and she says that would be too big a burden for any to bear, but he is the Master of it all. Tom is out tending to their tired ponies (whom he seems to see as guests as much as the hobbits) but he soon enters, crowned now with leaves in his hair. He takes them to wash up, and then the feast begins.

After they’ve had their fill, Goldberry retires and leaves them with Bombadil. Frodo asks him if he’d answered his call for help, but Tom says that although he’d heard that they were wandering in the wood, it was only chance (‘if chance you call it’) that brought him that way. Frodo begins to ask about Old Man Willow, but Tom says that’s a tale better for the light of day. Merry and Pippin hastily agree; they’ve had enough of the Willow for now. Tom takes them to their beds, bidding them ‘heed no nightly noises.’

But the night is filled with strange portents for the hobbits. Frodo dreams he sees a pale glimmering figure on top of a black tower in the middle of a ring of stone. From below comes the howling of wolves and the crying of fell voices. Suddenly the figure raises a flashing staff, and a shadow of wings stoops down and bears the figure away. His dream is full of the galloping of hooves from the East and he thinks, “Black Riders!” Pippin dreams that willow trees are encroaching right up to the house’s windows, and Merry dreams that waters are rising to inundate them all, but they remember Tom’s reassurance and fall back asleep. Sam sleeps like a contented log.

The next day dawns foggy and wet, and Tom declares that the hobbits must stay inside as it is ‘Goldberry’s washing day’ and indeed it starts to rain. Strangely enough, the rain does not seem to touch him. They rest while Tom tells them many tales. He speaks now of Old Man Willow, whose sleepy songs and spells and grey thirsty spirit run all through the Old Forest, whose ancient trees resent all intruders and usurpers. The Great Willow’s heart is rotten, but his strength is green.

Then he tells them something of the history of the land, how the men came and built walls and towns on the hills nearby, how their little kingdoms fought together, and how barrows were built in the nearby hills, graves filled with gold and other treasures, whose green mounds survived long after the kingdoms fell. Then a dark shadow came from far away, and Barrow-wights began to walk in the forgotten tombs, rings clinking on their bony fingers.

Then Bombadil weaves them tales of even deeper history, back and back to the days of ancient starlight, when only the Elf-sires were awake. He finally stops and they see that evening has come. Frodo plucks up the courage to ask him who he is.

Tom says they already know his name, and that is the only answer he can give. He tells them that he was there in the land before the river and the trees, that he saw the first raindrop and acorn, was here before the Men or Hobbits, and when the Elves passed westward, he was already there. ‘He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside.’

Bombadil and the hobbits have a good talk about closer matters, and Tom reveals he gets a lot of news from Farmer Maggot, and now knows something from Gildor and the Elves about Frodo’s situation. So much does Tom know that Frodo finds himself confiding in him about things that he’s never even shared with Gandalf. Tom’s eyes gleam when he hears about the Riders.

“Show me the precious Ring!” he says suddenly, and Frodo to his surprise finds himself handing it over with a murmur. Tom holds it up to his bright blue eye for a moment, then puts it on his little finger and holds it up to the light. The hobbits gasp. He shows no sign of disappearing!

Indeed, Bombadil laughs, then spins the Ring in the air, and it vanishes with a flash! Frodo cries out, but Bombadil hands it back to him with a smile. Frodo looks at the Ring rather suspiciously, and after a while when the conversation resumes, he slips it on to test to make sure that it has not been switched.

Merry turns to him and gives a start; he can obviously not see Frodo. Frodo starts to creep away, but Bombadil looks towards him with most seeing eyes, and tells him to quit playing games and come back and sit by him. Tom must give him counsel for when they set off again tomorrow. They must learn the right way past the Barrow-mounds and not go meddling with cold stone. He teaches them a little rhyme to sing if they get into danger the next day:

Ho, Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!

By water, wood and hill, by reed and willow,

By fire, sun and moon, hearken now and hear us!

Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!

When he’s sure they’ve got the verse memorized and can say it back, he leads them by candlelight to their beds.  

Bits and Bobs

Goldberry, ‘the River-woman’s Daughter’, is apparently some kind of water-elemental, rather like the naiads or water nymphs of Greek mythology, or the more dangerous Lorelei and water nixie of the Norse.  Where she sits in Tolkien’s mythology is never spelled out, whether she and her mother are lesser Maiar or some sort of nature spirits more intimately bound to the land. In a 1958 letter, Tolkien wrote that Goldberry "represents the actual seasonal changes" in "real river-lands in autumn".

Goldberry’s clothes, a reed-green gown with silver beads like dew, golden belt shaped like a chain of flag-lilies, and shoes like fishes’ mail, are full of water imagery, and she appears to have power over the rain, at least on her ‘washing day’. The story of her ‘wooing’ by Bombadil and their marriage is told in the poem, “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil”.

Tom’s ‘Mastery’ consists not so much in having power over other things, but in the fact that nothing has power over him, not even the Ring. The rain does not wet him if he doesn’t want it to. He can see the Unseen. When he looks through the Ring with his blue eye, it seems almost a parody of the later vision of Sauron’s red Eye. In the first drafts of the story, Tom calls himself the ‘Aborigine’, from the Latin ab origine, the First Inhabitant ‘from the beginning’.

The meals that Tom and Goldberry serve contain no meat, but do use honey, butter, and other dairy products.

Frodo has a true dream of what happened to Gandalf at Isengard, though Gandalf tells him later that the dream was late in coming, as at the time he was already headed back to the Shire.

In one of the early drafts, Tom says Old Man Willow was a spirit that had long possessed or become trapped in the tree, rather than a tree-spirit himself. Also there was the concept that Farmer Maggot would be some sort of relative of Bombadil’s, not altogether a Hobbit. These ideas were dropped, of course.

We are told something of the history of the nearby Barrow Downs and the Wights that inhabit them. There are indeed such ancient tumuli near Oxford, the real life analog for the area around the Withywindle. Again, Bombadil faces a Barrow-Wight in “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil”. Such monstrous ‘grave-ghosts’ are common in Norse mythology and are said to have once been human. There is a very famous example in the popular Grettir’s Saga. But the Wights (wight is simply an archaic word meaning ‘being’ or ‘creature’) were evil spirits sent in the old days by the Witch-King to inhabit the grave mounds, and not the ghosts of those buried there.

The Dark Lord that came from Outside is Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, and not Sauron, his lieutenant.

Tom is telling a long, absurd story about badgers when Frodo decides to test the Ring by sneaking off. In the original poem, a group of badgers try to capture Tom in their ‘set’, the name for the long ramifying tunnels of these creatures. The idea of such holes kind of ties them to and evokes the Hobbits themselves; certainly Mr. Badger’s house in The Wind in the Willows sounds very like Bag End.

The fact that Frodo tries to sneak off with the Ring (where is he going?) after Bombadil takes it from him suggests that perhaps the Ring is prompting him to ‘protect’ it from further possibilities of separation.