The Lord of the Rings: The Old Forest

 

The Tale

Frodo wakes up to find the light and the thunder of his dream is Merry entering his room with a candle and banging on the door. It’s 4:30 in the morning, and Sam is already making breakfast. The hobbits set off at 6 o’clock, with Fatty going with them to see them off at the High Hay.

This is an ancient and thick hedge planted long ago as a barrier between Buckland and the Old Forest. When the woods seemed to be attacking the Hedge by planting trees right against this wall, the hobbits had cut down a huge swathe of the forest and burned it in what came to be known as the Bonfire Glade.

The company heads for the iron gate which will let them through the hedge. There Fatty bids them good-bye and good luck and heads back to Crickhollow. The other four hobbits and five ponies (one for baggage) pass through the gate, which locks behind them ominously. Merry announces that they have officially left the Shire and are now Outside.

Pippin asks if the stories of the Old Forest are true, and Merry says if he means the tales of goblins and wolves that have scared Fatty, then no. But the trees do seem to be much more alive, more aware, and harbor a resentment of strangers in their land. Sometimes they seem to move and will drop branches on unwary travelers or trip them with their roots, and at night things are said to become positively alarming. Some say there are queer creatures that live deep in the wood, something that makes paths that twist and change on occasion. But he hopes they can skirt such areas and pass quietly and quickly to the other side. He warns the others not to do anything provoking.

They travel on. The day is warm and still, the forest is close and oppressive. The paths do appear to shift in a bewildering manner, the trees closing in on the direction they wish to go but opening up to lead them astray. All attempts to keep up good cheer fall flat; Frodo tries to sing an encouraging song that fails and fades out before the oppression of the trees. About eleven o’clock they find themselves on top of a hill looking down at the Withywindle Valley, formed by a small river. Merry says they don’t want to go that way. That is said to be ‘the queerest point of the whole wood – the centre from which all the queerness comes, as it were.’ They move along in the opposite direction.

As the afternoon wears away they struggle along, but always seem to be blocked and diverted by the forest itself, until they find themselves turned almost entirely around, with the stream of the Withywindle right in front of them. Willows grow all along the river. There is a suspiciously open track leading along the riverbank, but they seem to have little choice but to follow it. Hopefully, if they follow the water, it will eventually lead them out of the woods. There is nothing else to do.

The day grows hot and drowsy and the hobbits more tired as they go.  They are suddenly overwhelmed with sleepiness and feel they must stop for a nap. Frodo looks up to see before them an enormous and ancient willow, its knotted trunk gaping here and there with fissures that creak with the wind. Merry and Pippin struggle forward and lie down in the hollows made by cracks in the trunk. Frodo climbs over to where the roots of the tree dip down into the river, trying to bathe his tired feet in the cool. Sam stands blinking stupidly. This sudden torpor seems to him uncanny and alarming. With an effort, he staggers off to find the ponies, who have strayed away aimlessly. Some sinister noises bring him hurrying back to the willow.

One is the splash of Frodo falling into the stream, where a branch seems to be holding him down. Sam rescues him, and Frodo swears that the tree roots just twisted and threw him in! They go around the willow to check on the others, and find Pippin entirely swallowed by a closed crack and Merry half in and half out of another, with only his kicking legs visible.

All efforts to pull him out are vain. Lacking an axe, Sam and Frodo build a fire in an effort to intimidate the tree, but it only seems to anger it. In a muffled yell, Merry says the tree is threatening to squeeze him in two if they don’t put the fire out. The willow rustles in anger as if a wind is rising in the valley. Sam hastily stamps out the fire, and Frodo, in a sudden panic, starts running down the path shouting help! help! help!

To his surprise he is answered by a deep, glad voice approaching, singing what sounds like nonsense. The song seems to quell the angry tree and the rising wind, and Frodo and Sam stand still as if enchanted. Suddenly a strange figure appears hopping and dancing towards them, taller than a Hobbit but not quite as tall as a Man. He wears a tall, feathered hat, a blue jacket, and yellow boots, and carries a small pile of waterlilies on a broad leaf. His red face is wrinkled with smiles over his big brown beard. He stills the panicky hobbits with a gesture, introduces himself as Tom Bombadil, and asks them what’s the matter.

Frodo and Sam explain that their friends are caught in the tree. Bombadil laughs and says he knows the tune for Old Man Willow, as he calls him, and steps over to the trunk. Merry has been pulled further in, down to his feet. Tom sings into the crack, then jumps away, breaks off a hanging branch and thumps the tree, commanding it to let the hobbits go. He grabs Merry’s feet and pulls him out, and Pippin is shot out of his crack as if he had been kicked.

They thank him profusely, and Tom invites them to his home for supper. Then taking his lilies he goes prancing down the path ahead of them, singing joyfully and telling them not to fear the trees anymore. They struggle after him with their ponies through the growing dusk, hearing strange noises and seeing odd ‘gnarled and knobbly faces’ leering at them out of the darkness until it seems they are stumbling through some ominous dream. But they safely reach the welcoming house of Tom Bombadil, lit with twinkling lights and lying up, down, and under hill. They are greeted by song, and standing upon the threshold, a golden light is all about them. 

 

Bits and Bobs

In this context, the term 'Hay' refers not to straw but is an archaic word for 'hedge'.

The Withywindle valley evokes the willow-laden stretch of the Thames that flows through Oxford. This is especially obvious when you realize that Tolkien has said that Tom Bombadil originally represented ‘the vanishing Oxford countryside’. It seems odd, given Tolkien’s love for trees, that the first antagonist Frodo actually faces (he is merely fleeing the Black Riders) should be Old Man Willow. This can be explained by the fact that he is a ‘legacy character’ from the earlier poem about Tom Bombadil, later adapted and printed in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

Tom Bombadil himself is based on a jointed wooden Dutch doll belonging to Tolkien’s son Michael that was dressed in exactly that manner. Although Michael once attempted to flush him down the loo, Tom was rescued and went on to feature in his own series of poems. It would be interesting at this late date to find a doll of the same make and model; attempts have been made to do so, but so far only approximations have been offered as examples of the type.

Bombadil was drawn into Middle-earth along with Old Man Willow, the Barrow-wight, and Goldberry the River-woman’s Daughter, and some of the oddity of the episode may be attributed to his ‘foreign’ origin. What Tom ‘is’ in the Legendarium is never precisely explained, but that just adds in a way to the verisimilitude of the tale, as there are anomalies in the real world that never get explained either. They just are. This irritates some readers as unnecessary, and Bombadil is left out of many adaptations, though not, oddly enough, the Russian television one.

Tom sings as often as he talks, and his speech is in the same meter as his songs. These approximate the verse-form of the Finnish epic The Kalevala, a profound influence on Tolkien’s own mythology. It evokes an ancient time when speech and song were as one, and both could be a powerful spell that tamed and influenced the world around the singer. Tom has been described as having the power of the pre-Fall Adam, who named things, and it was so.

The gnarled and knobbly faces in the wood recall the artwork of the classic illustrator Arthur Rackham.

Rumors are circulating that the 2^nd Season of The Rings of Power will be desecrated with an appearance by Tom Bombadil, but wilder and rougher than the merry Tom we know. God help us all.