The thing that delights many readers about Tom Bombadil is the thing that exasperates many others. I’m talking about Tom’s nonsense singing. I suppose it’s something of a Rorschach test. Your response to Tom’s nonsense may say something about you.
Is the person who finds Tom irritating an artless person who drains life of its serendipity? Or, is the person who delights in Tom’s nonsense some sort of flower child, traipsing through life with finger-paint on his hands? Or is this dichotomy the real nonsense?
Tom’s singing isn’t actually nonsense, although the rhymes may annoy you. (I enjoy them myself, but I have no pretense when it comes to taste—at least so far as poetry is concerned.) But I think that you need to read between the lines to see the sense in them.
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.
No matter, to the point here: Tolkien says that Tom’s singing only seemed like nonsense. The line that tells us so is the title of this chapter.
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 is his songs that will save them from Old Man Willow.
How do the songs work? We’re not told. (And the hobbits never think to ask.) We do have clues to work with, but in order to see those clues we’ll have to pan out a bit and look at the larger world in which The Lord of the Rings is set. But even more than this, we’ll need to pan out still further to see the things that Tolkien thought are true in our world.
Our first clue is Tom’s lore. I’m using the old-fashioned word lore for “knowledge” in part because Tolkien does. But I’m also using it to contrast Tom’s knowledge with what Saruman knows. Saruman knows things by breaking them. But what about Tom? We’re told something about Tom’s lore during the account of Tom’s time with the hobbits over the course of a rainy day, “He...told them many remarkable stories...of bees and flowers, the ways of trees, and the strange creatures of the Forest,” both the good and the bad when it came to them. Then we’re told, “It was not comfortable lore.” In particular he told them about, “the hearts of trees” and the bitter grudge they hold against creatures that can move about freely. To the trees they’re all late-comers—nothing but usurpers, creatures who entered the world long after the trees.¹
So, Tom knows things, good and bad things. But he doesn’t seem to be interested in using what he knows, at least in the way Saruman does. Speaking of trees, it is worth recalling that later on, in another forest, two of the hobbits meet a distinctly tree-like person that actually walks and talks. For readers who have read the rest of the story, you know that I’m speaking of Treebeard. Treebeard is an ent, and ents are like shepherds, we’re told, but instead of shepherding sheep, they shepherd trees. (And in Middle Earth, trees do need shepherds, if the episode with Old Man Willow tells us anything.)
Getting back to Saruman’s way of knowing, Treebeard knows all about him because of his long history living near the wizard. What does Treebeard have to say about him? I quoted a portion of this before, now here’s that quotation in context:
‘But Saruman now!... I wonder now if even then Saruman was not turning to evil ways. But at any rate he used to give no trouble to his neighbours. I used to talk to him. There was a time when he was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind. I cannot remember that he ever told me anything. And he got more and more like that; his face, as I remember it—I have not seen it for many a day—became like windows in a stone wall: windows with shutters inside.
‘I think that I now understand what he is up to. He is plotting to become a Power. He 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.’²
When it comes to what Tom and Treebeard know, they’re open and generous. But Treebeard can’t say the same for Saruman.
Treebeard now knows what Saruman was after with all his questions; he wanted power—power here meaning domination and use: “he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” Intriguing, isn’t it, how the pursuit 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. As a side note that may be of interest: 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.
Before you infer from this that Tolkien considered power evil in itself, remember that Tom is powerful—very powerful—in his own way. (The same could be said for Treebeard, or Gandalf, or Aragon, for that matter.) But Tom’s power is based on a different kind of knowledge, and his knowledge is based on a different way of knowing.
You may be wondering if I’m making too much of this. If Tolkien were your typical writer, you’d be right to wonder. But that’s not the sort of writer we’re talking about here. We have some of his reflections on the matter in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” Among the memorable things he says is that a genuine fairy story is generous in the way Bombadil and Treebeard are generous. 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
Did you catch that? Communion is a goal, not control. This is why we can be fairly certain that if Saruman were to leap off the pages of The Lord of the Rings and take up residence in our world, he’d have no interest in fairy stories—not even the one he sprang from.
Saruman isn’t interested in communion. He’s a closed book—or as Treebeard put it—a stone wall with shuttered windows. You don’t commune with things that you intend to use. Throughout The Lord of the Rings, 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. And getting back to Treebeard, when Merry asks the Ent, “Would you think it rude, if we asked what you are going to do with us...?” the old Ent replies, “I am not going to do anything with you: not if you mean by that ‘do something to you’ without your leave. We might do some things together.”⁴ We can be sure that Saruman would not have been so considerate had he gotten his hands on Merry and Pippin—he would have done very unpleasant things to them in order to learn the whereabouts of the Ring of Power.
Tolkien invented languages as a hobby. When I first learned this years ago I thought, “Well, to each his own, some people collect stamps.” But even stamp collecting can reflect a deeper interest. And that’s certainly the case with Tolkien and his languages. People in the know inform us that he didn’t invent his stories first and then add languages later. Instead, first came the languages, then came the stories. First there was the Word, then came the world.
Words, when strung together in the right way, can stir us deeply, and even change us. They’re magical in a sense. On the surface their meanings are derived from the world itself, but beneath the surface there is the Word—as in the logos—and this is the true source of all meaning, since the Word is what gives the world its form. Humans possess the power of speech, and in a limited sense, we can actually create meaning. But the meanings we make are derivative. We “subcreate,” as Tolkien put it. And when we speak we cast spells. Think about the word spell for a moment. The sentences “She’s a good speller; she won the spelling bee,” and “She’s a witch; she casts spells!” are getting at the magic of words. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien said, “Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.”⁵
If stories cast a kind of spell, what sort of magic are we talking about? Well, two kinds: good magic and bad magic. If our spells are good, they’re based on things that are true. If we’re talking about bad magic—or black magic—then the words are woven so as to deceive people and contradict what it true.⁶ They’re lies. The most powerful lies are those that are the most deceptive, those that closely resemble truth but actually conceal evil. And in The Lord of the Rings we see this with Saruman and his voice.
In The Two Towers (the second book of the trilogy), after the battle of Helm’s Deep, Saruman is trapped in his tower by an army of angry Ents, and Gandalf and his companions pay him a visit. What follows is an enlightening encounter that illustrates the way speech can cast a kind of spell.
Gandalf warns his companions that they should be prepared for what they are about to hear.
‘What’s the danger?’ asked Pippin. ‘Will he shoot at us, and pour fire out of the windows; or can he put a spell on us from a distance?’
‘The last is most likely, if you ride to his door with a light heart,’ said Gandalf. ‘But there is no knowing what he can do, or may choose to try.... And Saruman has powers you do not guess. Beware of his voice!’⁷
Later on the spells Saruman casts from a distance are described in this way:
Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.⁸
Seeing that there are both good spells and bad ones, how can anyone tell the difference? As Gandalf asks, are we wise enough to detect counterfeits?
To start with, we can subdivide the matter. There’s truth in the everyday, quotidian sense: “Tell the truth, Jimmy: did you take a cookie from the cookie jar?” Then there is truth in the largest sense—Truth with a capital—about life, the universe, and the meaning of things. Any theory of good spells must include both, but especially the latter. But is there anything else that can be said about good spelling? Tolkien gives a little glimpse of one way to tell the truth with names when he has Treebeard describe Entish. The language of the Ents is long and ponderous, reflecting the age and the significance of the things they talk about. For instance, when Treebeard finds Merry and Pippin he’s momentarily at a loss when it comes to the word they used for the thing that the three of them are standing on.
‘Let us leave this—did you say what you call it?’
‘Hill?’ suggested Pippin. ‘Shelf? Step?’ suggested Merry.
Treebeard repeated the words thoughtfully. ‘Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.’⁹
Treebeard implies here that names should reflect the histories of the things they name. Doing so not only tells you about those things; it also in some sense gives you power over them. This is why, when the hobbits introduce themselves to Treebeard, he is surprised by their rashness: “You call yourselves hobbits? But you should not go telling just anybody. You’ll be letting out your own right names if you’re not careful.” They then tell him their names without hesitation. “‘Hm, but you are hasty folk, I see,’ said Treebeard. ‘I am honoured by your confidence.’”¹⁰
Like Merry and Pippin you’re probably puzzled by Treebeard’s caution. That’s probably because you share with them a modern view of language. In our time, names are not believed to be intimately connected to the things that they name; instead, they’re believed to be arbitrary labels with no real relationship to the things themselves. But Treebeard doesn’t subscribe to this understanding of language—he’s too old for that.
Tolkien isn’t just having fun here; he’s actually describing an old way of thinking about the world. For instance, if you’ve ever wondered about the significance of names in the Bible, and why they are so significant, or why Isaac, after he learned that he had given his second-born (Jacob) the blessing intended for the first-born (Esau), couldn’t just say, “Oops! I take it back,” what you wondered about is this older understanding of words and their power.
The idea that true names and the things they refer to are somehow inseparable comes up in Tom’s house. After a long day of tale telling, Frodo has the temerity to ask Tom the same question he asked Goldberry earlier.
‘Who are you, Master?’...
‘Eh, what?’ said Tom ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless? But you are young and I am old. Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.’¹¹
“Mark my words,” Tom says; and why should they do that? Because Tom’s the “Eldest.” Both Treebeard and Tom can name things because of long experience with them. That’s explicitly stated by Treebeard, and implied here by Tom. But Tom seems to be saying even more than that. He tells the hobbits that he remembers the beginning of things. And that’s saying a lot, but it isn’t the only suggestion that we have that Tom knows more than Treebeard. The clue that this is so is his nonsense singing—or as Tolkien puts it, singing that seemed like nonsense.
There’s a lot of singing in The Lord of the Rings—in its prequel, too (The Hobbit). What does this mean? I believe more than is generally supposed; I think that it’s a hint about the nature of things in Middle Earth. But what’s being hinted at?
Let’s begin with The Hobbit. There we have the deep and stirring song of the dwarves as they sing about their lost treasure in the evening shadows of Bag End; later we hear the elves tease Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves in song as they descend into Rivendell. It seems like good creatures in Middle Earth love to sing. Even wicked creatures sing, but their songs have a wicked, sadistic character. The goblins (like the Orcs of The Lord of the Rings), sing as they drive Bilbo and the dwarves through their tunnels beneath the Misty Mountains.
Clap! Snap! the black crack!
Grip! grab! Pinch, nab!
And down down to Goblin-town
You go, my lad!
Clash, crash! Crush, smash!
Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!
Pound, pound, far underground!
Ho, ho! my lad!
Swish, smack! Whip crack!
Batter and beat! Yammer and bleat!
Work, work! Nor dare to shirk,
While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,
Round and round far underground
Below, my lad!¹²
Tolkien adds, “The general meaning of the song was only too plain; for now the goblins took out whips and whipped them with a swish, smack!, and set them running as fast as they could in front of them.”¹³
In The Lord of the Rings another wicked character sings—Old Man Willow. Tom tells the hobbits, “Old Grey Willow-man, he’s a mighty singer; and it’s hard for little folk to escape his cunning mazes.”¹⁴ While the Willow is as malicious as the goblins, their song merely described their glee as they torment Bilbo and the dwarves. But when it comes to Old Man Willow, not only are his songs bewitching, they’re hardly audible, and their general meaning isn’t easy to discern.
All of this can be compared to and contrasted with the songs of Tom Bombadil. His songs have a peculiar power, and this is what I’d like to explore now.
But first let’s take a little detour into a subject that might not seem like it has much to do with singing. Let’s talk about Nature for a moment.
What we mean by the word “nature” is different today than the way it was once understood. Today nature is believed to be a single, self-contained thing. In antiquity, and the medieval world as well, people spoke of natures plural. For instance, in the old way of thinking you could actually speak of something called, “human nature” as distinct from the natures of other living things.¹⁵
Many people today blur distinctions between things in nature, arguing that these distinctions are not really Real, or permanent. For instance, we’re told that human beings and orangutans share a remarkably high amount of DNA—over 97 percent—the implication being that there really isn’t that much that separates people from apes.
But the blurring of distinctions goes even deeper than that. Humans and apes are said to still be evolving, and if that’s so, we can’t say anything conclusive about them. What’s true today wasn’t true once upon a time, and it may not be true tomorrow. This is one reason why we can’t truly name things; we just name the impressions they make on us at the moment.
But it was once generally believed that the world as a whole, and the natures of things within it, reflected the wisdom of God. Paradoxically, the contemporary view has led to a revival of very ancient notions concerning how things came to take the forms we see today. In pre-Christian ways of thinking, the world as we know it is the product of a violent process. Different myths tell different versions of the same story: one set of gods defeated another set of gods, and the world in which we find ourselves now is made up of the rotting corpses of the defeated. Things are not quite as colorful when it comes to the modern creation myths; that is because these new myths are about impersonal mechanisms. But the processes described are just as violent. As examples of what I mean, two contemporary theories which assert that violence is instrumental to human origins and the development of human society are Darwinism and Marxism.
But according to Tolkien’s story, Middle Earth wasn’t formed through a violent process. His world was made through creative intelligence from the Outside.
In The Silmarillion—Tolkien’s posthumously published legendarium that informed both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—we’re given the story of that beginning. And there we learn that music played a key role in creation. Middle Earth is actually sung into being. Violent domination isn’t the basis of its order; instead, the basis of order, and of being itself, is harmony. If you’re not familiar with The Silmarillion, here’s how the music is described in the first chapter.
In the beginning...
There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Illúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but a few together, while the rest harkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Illúvatar from which he came, and in understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.¹⁶
What follows this is a grand chorus. And as the song moves along, many themes run through it. But as the song is sung, a singer named Melkor introduces disharmony to the music, and some near him join in the dissonance. What follows is a conflict that threatens to descend into chaos. But Illúvatar introduces a new theme, and then another, and saves the song and even enfolds the disharmony into it. When the music is complete this follows:
Then Illúvatar spoke, and he said: ‘Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Illúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show forth, that ye may see what ye have done.’¹⁷
Illúvatar then reveals that the song has become the flesh and blood of a new world, the world in which The Lord of the Rings, and every other story in Tolkien’s legendarium, is told.
Today many people rely on science to define Reality. According to these folks, if science can’t know something, there’s nothing to know. But science can’t even explain its own story scientifically. On the other hand, and on its own terms, Christianity is the revelation of ultimate Reality. And like Tolkien’s Arda, according to the Christian faith, the world that we live in was made from the Outside. In Christianity, if anything is unnecessary it is the world. But what is necessary is the One who made it. Here’s how the Apostle John put it in the introduction to his gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1-3)
This is one of the senses in which The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work—it is Catholic from the beginning.¹⁸ The story that Tolkien wrote, with all of its strange creatures and imaginary people, is like our world; it was voiced into existence.
Perhaps you’re beginning to see where this is leading: Bombadil’s singing isn’t nonsensical at all if it in some sense recalls the music of the Ainur.
When you’re old, you should know more than young folks. Since Tom is the oldest of all, he should know the most. And, by the way, Tom isn’t the only person to say that he is incredibly old. Elrond does as well. At the Council of Elrond he said this:
‘I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ban-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless.’¹⁹
In case you didn’t know, Elrond is pretty old himself. When Frodo confesses his astonishment at the length of his memory, Elrond tells him, “My memory reaches back to the Elder Days I have seen three ages in the West of the world.”²⁰ Three ages adds up to thousands of years, so when Elrond says someone is old, he’s really old.
With these things in mind, a question occurred to me: is Tom old enough to remember the Song of the Ainur? If so, perhaps he knows the songs that gave created things their natures.
We’re told in Genesis that the animals were brought to Adam so that he could name them (Gen. 2:19). But how did he go about that? Did he just make up names arbitrarily, or did he base their names on something? If the latter, it must in some way express the natures of the things named. With this in mind, it was once believed that recovering Adamic language might help restore the dominion that was lost when Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise.
One hypothesis was that Hebrew might be Adamic in nature; after all, the Old Testament was written in it. Another theory was that all human languages are some how adulterations of an original language. Philologists didn’t get very far in their quest for that language though. Families of languages could be traced to common ancestors, Indo-European is the classic example—the mother tongue for many European tongues, Finnish and Basque being notable exceptions. But philology proved to be a dead end when it came to distilling an original Adamic language.
But odd as this may sound, there was another way back to an original primordial language, and that way was mathematics.
How can math give us a language with which to exercise dominion? Here’s Galileo explaining how:
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about a dark labyrinth.²¹
The notion that you could use mathematics to understand the world may seem like a modern idea, but in fact it is a very old one. It is the way of the quadrivium, which is a branch of the liberal arts. And what this way was believed to lead you to may come as a surprise.
Classical education was something the Inklings understood well. (That honorary Inkling, Dorothy Sayers, actually wrote a book calling for its recovery, The Lost Tools of Learning.) It consisted of seven fields of study broken down into two groups—the trivium (for three), which followed this progression: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and a second group, the quadrivium (for four) which followed another progression: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and (get this) music.
While the trivium focused on human language, the quadrivium was dedicated to the study of mathematics— the language of the physical world. The progression of the trivium is easy to follow. Grammar is the study of the structure of human language, logic is the structure of human reasoning, and rhetoric is a study of human persuasion. The progress of the quadrivium is also easy to follow. First comes arithmetic, which could be called the grammar of numbers; then comes geometry, in which physical bodies are described with numbers; then astronomy, which today might go by the name physics, (or perhaps, cosmology), in which physical reality as a whole is mapped mathematically. So far so good, but what about music, the final art of the quadrivium? It seems like an odd thing to end this progression with; but actually, not so—not if you understand the elegant mathematical harmonies of the physical world.
The connection between mathematics and music goes back at least as far as Pythagoras, a name you may recall from his famous theorem. Pythagoras believed that numbers were the key to unlocking the secrets of Reality. But rather than making a materialist of him, mathematics made him a mystic. He thought that people should attune themselves to the grand music of the cosmos. In the old way of thinking, that music was known as the “Music of the Spheres.” Essentially, someone who is attuned to the music of creation lives in harmony with all things.
As I conclude a chapter that has ambled on longer than I thought it would go, you may find yourself wondering if you’re any further along in your understanding of the nature of Tom Bombadil’s singing.
But there is one more thing to consider when it comes to Tom’s songs. It’s found in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories.” As he introduces the subject of fairies to us, he says this:
Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.²²
I take Tolkien here to mean that fairies in some sense belong to this world. Their natures are bound up with it. When it comes to Tom and Goldberry, there are subtle allusions to this—as when Galdor, pondering Tom’s nature aloud at the Council of Elrond, says, “Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself.”²³ And when Frodo beholds Goldberry, delighting in the sound of her voice, we’re told, “He stood as he had at times stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange.”²⁴
And this brings me back to the nature of good magic— or perhaps it would be better to say, the magic of nature. Throughout The Lord of the Rings good characters are puzzled by the term magic when referring to their crafts. One example of this can be heard in the conversation of the Lady Galadriel and Sam Gamgee at the Lady’s mirror. Sam had said that he would like to have a glimpse of “Elf-magic,” and now he gets his chance. She says to him:
‘[T]his is what your folk would call magic,...; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy.’²⁵
In some sense ‘Elf-magic’ works within given limits, because nature is a given, and in some sense not entirely subject to anyone’s control. Good magic doesn’t break things to know them, or pulverize them to repurpose them. Instead, it brings out latent goods in given things. We see it in the elven rope that Sam is given, or with lembas— the elven waybread—that the Fellowship is given (which is both delicious and sustaining), and especially with the elven cloaks they all receive that “magically” conceal their wearers, causing them to blend into the grass. Speaking of those cloaks, when the “three hunters”—Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli—emerge from the grass when the Riders of Rohan nearly pass them by without seeing them, a rider says incredulously, “Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?”
To this Aragorn replies, “The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!”²⁶
Returning once more to the music of Ainur and Tom’s songs, it’s worth recalling that a song lies beneath the green grass of Rohan. And when it comes to the two branches of classical learning—the word-centered trivium and the number-centered quadrivium—when those branches come together, joining the inner life of the speaking mind to the mathematical harmonies of the given universe, the will of the speaker and the given Reality of creation can be harmonized. One does not have to obliterate the other, but instead there can be growth and fruitfulness. The dominion of the speaker is not a simple “Amen” to things as they are; and nature isn’t merely a tyrant. Instead, creation leaves room for subcreation, and even elaboration—and a consummation of given things.
With all of this in mind, perhaps, just perhaps, the reason Tom’s songs seemed like nonsense to readers of The Lord of the Rings (and to the hobbits) is because Tom knows the music of the world, and we do not. And if that’s so, then maybe what we think and say is the real nonsense.
1. The Fellowship of the Ring, 127.
2. The Two Towers, 461–62.
3. Tree and Leaf, 18.
4. The Two Towers, 455; italics in original.
5. Tree and Leaf, 32.
6. Once again, see Tom Shippey, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” in Myth and Magic, 22–46.
7. The Two Towers, 562–63.
8. The Two Towers, 564.
9. The Two Towers, 455.
10. The Two Towers, 454.
11. The Fellowship of the Ring, 129.
12. The Hobbit (1937; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 56, 58.
13. The Hobbit, 58,
14. The Fellowship of the Ring, 124.
15. For an in-depth analysis of the history of the word nature, see C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words.
16. The Silmarillion, 2nd edition (1977; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 15.
17. The Silmarillion, 17.
18. There is some discussion as to whether by ‘Catholic’ Tolkien meant some- thing close to what C.S. Lewis called, ‘Mere Christianity’ or something more in keeping with Roman Catholicism. I’ll leave that to you to decide.
19. The Fellowship of the Ring, 258.
20. The Fellowship of the Ring, 237.
21. The Assayer (1623), translated by Stillman Drake in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 237–38.
22. Tree and Leaf, 12.
23. The Fellowship of the Ring, 259. The Hebrew word for “soil” sounds like the name Adam. I’m sure that Tolkien knew this. Take that for what it is worth.
24. The Fellowship of the Ring, 121.
25. The Fellowship of the Ring, 353.
26. The Two Towers, 424.