chapter two

The hobbits are now enjoying the atmosphere of a comfortable and well-ordered house. Goldberry attends to her domestic chores, but her movements are so graceful the hobbits sit entranced. And from the outside, Tom comically sings to himself. Then Frodo, no longer able to contain himself, asks the question you have already heard him ask, but here it is again, along with Goldberry’s response, this time in context:

‘Fair lady!’ said Frodo again after a while. ‘Tell me, if my asking does not seem foolish, who is Tom Bombadil?’

‘He is,’ said Goldberry, staying her swift movements and smiling.

Frodo’s incomprehension is plain to see, so Goldberry repeats herself, but she adds that Tom is master of “wood, water, and hill.”

So Frodo naturally asks, “Then all this strange land belongs to him?”

Now it is Goldberry’s turn to be puzzled. 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. No one has ever caught old Tom He has no fear. Tom Bombadil is master.’

A door opened and in came Tom Bombadil. He had now no hat and his thick brown hair was crowned with autumn leaves. He laughed, and going to Goldberry, took her hand.²

There it is: Tom is Master. But his mastery is not the sort that Frodo is accustomed to. And Tom doesn’t look like a master; he looks and sounds more like a jester. There’s the blue jacket, the ridiculous yellow boots, the nonsense rhymes. There’s a paradox to Tom’s mastery. And everything in the world of Middle Earth (and I think our world as well) hinges on that paradox.

For the moment, let’s focus on Goldberry’s statement: “Tom Bombadil is master.” What could she mean if it doesn’t imply ownership?

Remember, the Good Professor said that Tom represents something that he felt “important.” Here he is again, in his own words:

Tom Bombadil is not an important person—to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a “comment.” I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.³

Tolkien seems to dance around a bit here himself. At one moment he says that Tom Bombadil is a comment; then he says that he doesn’t write like that. He also says that Bombadil isn’t important; then he says that he represents something important. Why does he equivocate?

He’s equivocating because he’s trying to be clear without saying too much. 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.⁴ A lot of people think that if a story doesn’t work this way it isn’t saying anything important—it’s just entertainment. But allegory isn’t the only way to write meaningful fiction.⁵

Tolkien was a philologist—a connoisseur of languages. He knew all about speaking on more than one level without resorting to allegory. One way it can be done is by analogy. 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. Characters in a story should have lives of their own, even if they remind readers of other things.⁶ That’s the essential difference between an allegory and an analogy: 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.

The characters in The Lord of the Rings are as rich as any you’ll find in literature. But they can remind us of other people, sometimes from other stories. Or they can just remind us of things, such as courage or loyalty. So, what does Tom bring to mind? Well, with Goldberry’s words in mind, allow me to make a suggestion: Tom can remind us of what dominion should look like.

Dominion without Domination

Dominion has gotten a lot of bad press. It’s an odd thing in a way because without it we wouldn’t have many of the things that make life livable.

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. Here’s the pregnant passage from the Book of Genesis:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen. 1:27–28)

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

Going forward I’d like to reflect on the way that Tom exercises dominion, but I need someone to contrast him with. He needs a foil; or better, we can consider Tom to be a foil to our normal, which is to say, abnormal, way of thinking about dominion. (Think of it like a mirror, a foil flips things, providing an image in reverse, just like a mirror does.) So, who can we contrast Tom with in The Lord of the Rings? How about Sauron, the Dark Lord himself? Throughout The Lord of the Rings he looms in the background like a dark, malignant shade. But the problem with Sauron is this, when we look at him we just see a lidless eye looking back.⁷ He’s too remote to be useful in this regard; we don’t really know enough about him.

Rather than Sauron, my candidate for Tom Bombadil’s foil is Saruman. When it comes to him, we have material to work with. (And tellingly—his name means “man of skill.”) The corruption of Saruman is an important subplot running throughout The Lord of the Rings. We first learn of his fall from grace at the Council of Elrond. He had been a member of another council—the White Council—and he had even been its chief.⁸ But according to Elrond, Saruman’s undoing had something to do with his long study of Sauron and his dark arts.

The degree to which he has been bent by those arts is revealed when he takes Gandalf captive; and it is in Gandalf’s account of his captivity (and his escape) that we learn something important about Saruman’s method of acquiring knowledge, and through knowledge, power.

Gandalf recalled how Saruman captured him by means of a skillful ruse. If that were not enough to reveal his fall from grace, at the Council of Elrond Gandalf recounts their conversation when the trap was sprung:

‘“You have come... And here you will stay, Gandalf the Grey, and rest from your journeys. For I am Saruman, the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!”

‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

‘“I liked white better,” I said.

‘“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.”’¹⁰

This is followed by Saruman’s curt dismissal of Gandalf’s insight into the nature of wisdom. 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.

Oddly, this is followed by Saruman’s invitation to Gandalf to join him in his quest for power. But when Gandalf refuses Saruman coldly mocks him, informing him that he is now an unwilling “guest” who must remain with him until “the end.” Gandalf asks: “Until what end?” “Until you reveal to me where the One may be found. I may find means to persuade you.”¹¹

We can guess what that means. Did you notice the telling line “the white light can be broken”? Saruman is willing to break more than light to learn what he wants to know.

Gandalf’s statement about “break[ing] a thing to find out what it is” is a subtle yet profound allusion to a long debate on the nature of knowledge in the Western tradition.¹² Let’s look at that.

Knowledge and Power

You’ve probably heard the statement attributed to Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.” That’s true so far as it goes, and power can be a good thing. But devils can hide in the nooks and crannies of otherwise good things.

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.) 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. Perhaps surprisingly, Tolkien’s good friend C. S. Lewis actually saw a connection between this and what used to be called magic.

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.¹³

When the story of Western history is told, most historians leave out the strange fascination with magic that characterized the Renaissance.¹⁴ That is supposed to have belonged to benighted times—like the “Middle Ages.”

What does this have to do with Tom Bombadil? I think quite a bit.

The Lord of the Rings contains many things, and one of those things is an important distinction. 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. So, here’s my point in a nutshell: Tom is an image of what true dominion looks like.

Is this really something that Tolkien had in mind when he wrote about Tom? Yes, I think so—at least in part. He could be very clear about his beliefs, especially in the context of anything he wrote on the subject of fairy tales. Take this for instance:

The love of Faery is the love of love: a relationship towards all things, animate and inanimate, which includes love and respect, and removes or modifies the spirit of possession and domination. Without it even plain ‘Utility’ will in fact become less useful; or will turn to ruthlessness and lead only to mere power, ultimately destructive.¹⁵

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. (Think Frankenstein’s monster here.) All this is implicit in Saruman’s attitude and behavior. He’s a magician in the sense C. S. Lewis so aptly described in the earlier quotation from The Abolition of Man.

In contrast, 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.” (If you’ve heard that before, now you know what it refers to.) Hopefully you can see the wisdom in this way of knowing. After all, 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.”¹⁶ But Saruman didn’t start out that way. How he came to be that way should serve as a warning. (Hint: it was by studying the dark arts of the Enemy.)

Let’s contrast this with Tom. 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.¹⁷

“No one has ever caught old Tom”

Things belong to themselves, and yet there is a Master. Does that still strike you as odd? Think of it this way: 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. In the next chapter I’ll look into what Tom knows, but for the remainder of this one, let’s look at what Goldberry said next: “No one has ever caught old Tom walking in the forest, wading in the water, leaping on the hill-tops under light and shadow. He has no fear.”¹⁸

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.

Let’s go back to Saruman for a moment—he catches people so that he can use them. And he lied in order to catch Gandalf.

Saruman gloated when he noted that Gandalf had come at his summons. Gandalf mentions that it had been Radagast—another wizard—one less powerful than either Saruman or himself—who had conveyed the summons. This amuses Saruman.

‘“Radagast the Brown!” laughed Saruman, and he no longer concealed his scorn. “Radagast the Bird-tamer! Radagast the Simple! Radagast the Fool! Yet he had just the wit to play the part I set for him. For you have come, and that was all the purpose of my message. And here you will stay.”’¹⁹

Radagast had been Saruman’s tool, and that was because he was gullible—he was Saruman’s fool.

Based on what we know about Tom, can we even imagine him doing such a thing? 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 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.

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’s fool and tool. And we also learn that Saruman is full of fear—for good reasons.

Among the things that we see with Tom (at least so far!), the most surprising thing is what we don’t see. The Ring of Power has no power over him. Here’s the marvelous scene that reveals this:

‘Show me the precious Ring!’ [Tom] said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom.²⁰

Tom then treats the Ring with a nonchalance, and even bemusement, that is without parallel in The Lord of the Rings. It seems to grow in his hand. He then peers through it like a monocle. He puts it on the little finger of one of “his big brown hands” and then admires it, like someone shopping for jewelry in a store. Then the hobbits realize, Tom hasn’t disappeared! Instead, this follows: “Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air— and it vanished with a flash. Frodo gave a cry—and Tom leaned forward and handed it back to him with a smile.”²¹

There is so much I could say about this, but here are just a few observations. First, Tom commands to see the Ring. He doesn’t ask; he doesn’t say please; he says, “Show me the precious Ring!” And Frodo promptly does so. When others ask to see the Ring, in Rivendell with the Council, for instance, or Boromir at Amon Hen, Frodo is reluctant; he resists. And Tom calls it “precious,” calling to mind someone else’s own word for it, but Tom does so almost mockingly.²² Then, when Tom receives it, it seems to grow in his hand. This isn’t the only time we see this happen: other times when it seems to grow it seems to indicate that the Ring is working to bring people under its spell. Then Tom isn’t impressed. Then he holds it up to his eye, bringing to mind the eye of Sauron. Then Tom laughs. And then, so as to demonstrate that its power doesn’t possess him, he places it on his little finger (note: his little finger), and nothing happens! He’s as visible as ever, no disappearing for Tom. And later, when in a fit of spite Frodo puts it on his finger and attempts to sneak away from the table, the hobbits can’t see him—but Tom can!

But most intriguingly, Tom performs a little magic himself. He makes the Ring disappear—like an uncle performing a trick for his nephews after dinner. Then, with a final demonstration of indifference, he casually hands the Ring back to Frodo.

No one can catch Ol’ Tom—not even the Lord of the Rings. But how does he manage it? This is where the Illúvatar hypothesis seems most compelling. But if we take Tolkien at his word, that won’t do.

Instead, I have another idea; it has to do with what Tom knows and how that informs his dominion. That is the subject of the next chapter.

‍

1. By the time I’m done I hope you will see that this isn’t hyperbole.

2. Fellowship of the Ring, 122.

3. Carpenter, 178.

4. As far as allegories go, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress may be the best ever written. Unfortunately, ever since it was published Christians have tried to imitate it without much success.

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

6. By the way, you are an analog—and so am I. We are images of God, a subject I’ll get to in a minute.

7. 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.

8. We learn later that the Lady Galadriel had misgivings about Saruman from the start and had actually wanted Gandalf to serve in this capacity.

9. Isaac Newton famously broke light into a spectrum with a prism in 1672. I suspect that this is a subtle reference to Newton’s experiments with optics.

10. The Fellowship of the Ring, 252.

11. The Fellowship of the Ring, 253.

12. Gandalf in effect is saying that there are moral limits to what we can know, and that transgressing those limits is foolish—in other words, there will be Hell to pay.

13. The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 48.

14. See Tom Shippey, “New Learning and New Ignorance: Magia, Goeteia, and the Inklings,” in Myth and Magic: Art According to the Inklings, eds. Eduardo Sequra and Thomas Honegger (Zollikofen, Switzerland: Walking Tree Press, 2007), 22–46.

15. Smith of Wootton Major, 131.

16. The Two Towers, 462.

17. The Fellowship of the Ring, 122.

18. The Fellowship of the Ring, 122.

19. The Fellowship of the Ring, 252.

20. The Fellowship of the Ring, 130.

21. The Fellowship of the Ring, 130.

‍