chapter Five

Yet there is material to work with, a few hints, and telling actions—especially on Tom’s part. But I think I will need to call in help from outside the story once again. My leaping-off point is this: Tom called her “the River- woman’s Daughter.”

The River-Woman’s Daughter

Tom is fatherless; Elrond tells us so. But Goldberry is the River daughter. I think that implies at least that she is the younger of the two—and Tom does call her “young Goldberry” at least once. While Tom’s nature may be bound up with the earth, Goldberry is certainly tied to water, particularly the Withywindle.¹ So it seems that Tom and Goldberry complement each other in an elemental way.² They live at the head of the river, and we never see her far from it. Rivers may meander, and their banks erode, and they can swell with rain, and dwindle in drought, but more or less they say put. Apparently the same can be said of Goldberry.

Let’s take a look at a few references to Goldberry and water in the story.

To begin with, we hear this when we first meet Tom.

He’s bringing something home for her.

Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!
Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.
Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight, Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,
There my pretty lady is, River-woman’s daughter,
Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water.
Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing
Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing?³

This may be a bit like bringing roses home to your wife on Valentine’s Day, but I’m not certain that I understand even that as well as I should. Perhaps we have something here that gets at the nature of things feminine, and not just Goldberry in particular.

Water, Spirits, and Women

We see something along this line in Taoism, with the Yin and Yang apposition—female as wet and cool, and male as dry and hot. And throughout the world the association of a feminine spirit with small bodies of water—streams, ponds, even rivers—seems typical and not merely coincidental. But perhaps this is saying too much; still Goldberry goes with the Withywindle, and the Withywindle goes with her. When the hobbits get to Tom’s house they actually come to its headwaters.

Just as they felt their feet slowing down to a standstill, they noticed that the ground was gently rising. The water began to murmur. In the darkness they caught the white glimmer of foam, where the river flowed over a short fall. The river, now small and swift, was leaping merrily down to meet them, glinting here and there in the light of the stars, which were already shining in the sky.⁴

And when Goldberry’s voice is first heard here is how it is described:

Then another clear voice,...like the song of glad water flowing down into the night from a bright morning in the hills, came falling like a silver to meet them:

Now let the song begin! Let us sing together
Of sun, stars, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,
Light on the budding leaf, dew on the feather,
Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather,
Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water:
Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!⁵

This is delightful, at least I think so, but it is also a little odd. If you have the good fortune to have access to Carol Rose’s Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia, you’ll likely notice that spirits associated with water are often malignant creatures, or at least ambiguous ones. And sometimes they are hideous. One example is Jenny Greenteeth, who was a water spirit believed to dwell in small ponds in the northeast of England. She hid beneath the surface, waiting for unwary children to venture too close; then she’d emerge and grab a hapless child in her long green fangs and pull him under to drown.⁶

It was while I pondered the incongruity of Jenny and Goldberry, and turning the pages of Rose’s encyclopedia, that I came across this entry—

BÜT IAN ÜDERŽƏ

This is the name of a water spirit in the folklore of the Cheremis/Mari people of the former Soviet Republic. The BÜT IAN ÜDERŽƏ, which means Water Devil’s Daughter, is a female fresh water spirit of human shape. This spirit is subordinate to the main spirit venerated for a stretch of water and is therefore called the “daughter” of that spirit, in this case Büt Ian. Büt Ian Üderžǝ may sometimes be seen on a river bank combing her long golden hair with a gold or silver comb. Mortal men may be able to marry her if they can catch her, by touching her with iron, which renders her unable to escape. However, if the true identity of the spirit is ever revealed, she will die like a mortal immediately.⁷

Certain features of Büt Ian Üderžǝ remind me of Goldberry—and the similarities seem too great to be coincidental. There are obvious ones—both are water spirits, and both have long golden hair. But more telling was the matter of being a “daughter.” Yet above all there’s the way that she can be made your wife—specifically that a man may marry her if he can catch her. The reason that’s so telling isn’t because of anything we’re told in The Lord of the Rings; it’s because of something we learn in “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,” a poem about Tom found in a collection of poems published under the same title.

That poem takes up the theme “No one has ever caught old Tom yet!” There’s a familiar cast of characters, and each does his best to catch him. There’s Old Man Willow, the Barrow wight, and even a Badger brock. But the first to try, believe it or not, is Goldberry. In the poem Tom is sitting by the Withywindle when this happens:

There his beard dangled long down into the water: up came Goldberry, the River-woman’s daughter; pulled Tom’s hanging hair, in he went a-wallowing under the water-lilies, bubbling and a-swallowing.⁸

Now here’s something that we’d expect of Jenny Greenteeth. But unlike Old Man Willow, the Badger brock, or the Barrow wight, Goldberry’s attempt to trap Tom strikes me as flirtatious. She takes his feathered hat and asks him, “Hey, Tom Bombadil! Whither are you going?”⁹ I can’t help hearing an undertone of romantic interest here. Tom’s retort seems to say that the attraction is mutual, but he’s not about to live with her on her terms:

‘You bring it back again, there’s a pretty maiden!’ said Tom Bombadil. ‘I do not care for wading.
Go down! Sleep again where the pools are shady far below the willow-roots, little water-lady!’
Back to her mother’s house in the deepest hollow swam young Goldberry. But Tom, he would not follow.¹⁰

The mystery of romantic love is profound, and it does not accord with the democratic temper of our time. In it there is passion and pursuit, fear and flight. Reducing it to a contract between equals drains it of its power. Our ancestors played in pools too deep for us. Deracinated and inter-changeable genders may keep the corporate flow-charts flipping, but the un-sexed don’t know how to play hide-and-seek with the opposite sex. That’s why the happy ending of this poem is lost on us, because it ends when Tom catches Goldberry. And this is a beautiful thing.

But one day Tom, he went and caught the River-daughter, in green gown, flowing hair, sitting in the rushes, singing old water-songs to birds upon the bushes.
He caught her, held her fast! Water-rats went scuttering reeds hissed, herons cried, and her heart was fluttering. Said Tom Bombadil: “Here’s my pretty maiden!
You shall come home with me! The table is all laden: yellow cream, honeycomb, white bread and butter; roses at the window-sill and peeping round the shutter.
You shall come under Hill! Never mind your mother in her deep weedy pool: there you’ll find no lover!”¹¹

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. And if you don’t understand that I’m afraid that I cannot help you.

For a man, a house without a wife is a cold and sterile thing. In ages of the world when the wilderness was just beyond the hedge, that was obvious. A man can live alone, but not fruitfully. It’s in the nature of things, for a husband and wife bring a good return. In our time we’ve lost our sense of the nature of things—particularly the fruitfulness of a home where women and the feminine arts are honored.

Which brings me back to the title of this chapter, “Goldberry is waiting.” We hear this for the first time when we meet Tom going home again, water-lilies bringing. But it isn’t the last time. What the water-lilies are for, Tom doesn’t say. But then we see them in use when we first meet Goldberry.

When the hobbits arrive she’s seated at home, long yellow hair “rippling down,” and she is dressed almost entirely in green, the green of her gown as “green as young reeds,” yet accented with silver, “like beads of dew.” Surrounding her, in large clay vessels filled with water, are the water lilies Tom brought her, now floating, creating the impression that Goldberry is the midst of a pool. Here in Bombadil’s house she is revealed to be someone with authority and, as Tolkien writes, she “seemed to be enthroned.”¹²

Seemed? Tolkien seems to use that word a lot, especially when speaking of Tom or Goldberry. But seeming can amount to being if you believe that appearances can sometimes tell the truth. I think here the cord between the sign and what it signifies can’t be cut. Tom honors Goldberry, and acknowledges her nature. She is enthroned in the house of Tom Bombadil. He is the Master of his house, as he is the Master of “wood, water, and hill.”¹³ And as with those things, his 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.

Goldberry’s Washing Day

Goldberry’s place in the order of things outside the house is not entirely clear, but we do have clues. And one of them I’ve already mentioned—Goldberry’s washing day.

The making and the care of clothing has been women’s work in many traditional cultures throughout the world. And this has included washing days when groups of women trudged down to the nearest stream to scrub and beat dirty clothes clean. But when it comes to folklore, seeing a fairy washer woman was often a bad sign. An example is Ban Nighechain; here’s how she’s described by Carol Rose in her encyclopedia:

In Celtic Scottish folk lore Ban Nighechain, whose name means Little Washer Woman, is a female spirit of foreboding and doom. She is also known as Nigheag na Hath, which means Little Washer of the Ford. She is described as a little old woman with only one nostril, protruding teeth, and red webbed feet. The Ban Nighechain is seen standing in the ford of a river, washing the blood-soaked clothes of the dying taken from battle. Death or disaster are imminent for anyone she sees.¹⁴

And that’s just one example; Rose cites several others. I cannot say if Tolkien had these fay in mind when he describes Goldberry’s washing day, but she makes for quite a contrast nonetheless.

In the morning following their first night at Tom’s house, the hobbits look out of the windows and see rain clouds rolling in. The turn in the weather keeps them from resuming their journey, and the day that they spend with Tom is instructive in many ways. But for the better part of the day Goldberry isn’t seen. She’s busy, we’re told. It’s her washing day. What seems to be a domestic chore, we discover actually serves something much larger.

As [the hobbits] looked out of the window there came falling gently as if it was flowing down the rain out of the sky, the clear voice of Goldberry singing up above them. They could hear few words, but it seemed plain to them that the song was a rain-song, as sweet as showers on dry hills, that told the tale of a river from the spring in the highlands to the Sea far below.¹⁵

Goldberry doesn’t appear again until evening, just as Tom mentions the coming of “the Dark Lord...from Outside.” Then, at that point, something dark goes by a window. The hobbits look out, then in the doorway behind them, she appears, bearing a candle, and she is “framed in light”—light even radiating through the hand she holds before the flame. She then announces that the rain has ended, implying that her washing day is done. And with that she says, “Let us now laugh and be glad!”¹⁶

What could it all mean? Here are a few cautious suggestions. When it comes to the rain, what isn’t at all clear is what’s the cause and what’s the effect. Perhaps that’s a wrong-headed way of putting it. We tend to think of things causing each other directly: does her singing bring the rain? Does it bless the rain? Does it direct the rain? Does it just accompany it, as though the rain is its inspiration? Perhaps it interprets the rain? Who can say? Does it matter? The rain, and the song, and Goldberry all go together.

Jenny Greenteeth wasn’t beautiful; that’s because she reflected a dark undercurrent of the minds of people who live by rivers and ponds: water brings death as well as life. Recall, in “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,” Goldberry pulled Tom underwater, just like malicious water spirits found in the folklore. Most hobbits don’t like boats, and they don’t like rivers. (Both are tricky.)¹⁷ Rivers nourish life because they water the things that live along their banks, but they can also kill those who fall into them. And then there is the sea, a super-abundance of water, teeming with life, but if it breaches its boundaries it can wash the land clean of life and leave dead things littered everywhere.¹⁸

Water must be measured out in the right amount if it is to bring life instead of death. Does this tell us anything about Goldberry? And, by implication, does it say anything about Tom?

Baptizing the Pagan Imagination

It’s important to say up front that what I have to say may not have been Tolkien’s intent when he created Goldberry. But whether it was or not, Tolkien seems to have redeemed a water fay, and I suppose that means Tom did, too.

Think about it this way—Goldberry is the River woman’s daughter, and Tom caught her and brought her home. Goldberry has been domesticated.

When we consider the natural world without some redeeming framework to appraise it, its ambiguity both attracts and horrifies us. On a sunny day, from the safe remove of my porch, I look across a road to the field beside my house, and I am delighted. The calls of the birds, the light breeze that makes leaves flit and flash, the birches that bend gracefully against a white-laced sky in the distance—these things please me. Yet in the small pond in the middle of that field, in its muddy depths, there are creatures swallowing each other whole; and a small child wandering that field alone could fall in. (I knew a man who lost a child in that very way in a different pond.) And you don’t need a pond for death to show his face in the field near my house. The coyotes and hawks I’ve seen there many times can do that. They ever roam and soar, seeking something to devour. So, whenever we look outdoors, we see beauty and death in the same face called Nature. Can the same be said for Goldberry?

One of my daughters-in-law, puzzling aloud about Goldberry, asked me, “What is Goldberry good for? Is she some sort of trophy-wife?” As I’ve thought about it, my qualified answer is yes, but perhaps she’s a dangerous one.

In the history of Christianity, missionaries have tended to follow one of two broad strategies when it comes to evangelizing pagan cultures. One is what I call the “scorched-earth method,” and the other is the “fulfillment method.”

When it comes to the scorched-earth method, like Sherman’s march to the sea, anything that may encourage pagan notions or sentiments is consigned to the flames. The campaign to purify is predicated on the notion that any taint of pagan provenance ruins all. It is also assumed that the Christian faith can be introduced whole, a brand new thing coming down from above like the New Jerusalem. There are many problems with this. One of them is the problem of language. Take the word pagan, for instance—it’s a pagan word. It isn’t found in the Bible. It’s Latin. It originally meant something like “rustic” or “countrified.” In other words, it’s a word that Christians adopted and repurposed to mean “non-Christian.” (How that happened is a story in itself.) Language grows in the soil of a culture, and as Tolkien maintained, it is bound up inextricably with the stories that people make up to understand themselves and the world. Since this is so, the only way a culture could be purified is by burning its vocabulary to the ground and introducing an entirely new language. But is such a thing even possible, let alone desirable?

The word redemption seems to imply something different. For something to be redeemed in at least one sense, it must remain what it is. What that implies is that it must have enough intrinsic value to make it worth redeeming in the first place.

Is there anything intrinsically valuable when it comes to the folklore surrounding water spirits? Is there something worth redeeming? I think so, and I think that Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis were particularly gifted at finding value in pagan stories. Take Lewis’s story The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There we are introduced to a little satyr named Mr. Tumnus. He’s a remarkable person. For one thing he resembles Pan, a god in Greek mythology associated with sexuality and licentiousness. Like Pan, he has a human torso and head, but his netherparts are those of a goat (implying the sexual proclivities of a goat). But Lewis wisely refers to him with the Latin faun, perhaps because calling him a satyr would have had people reaching for their encyclopedias, where they would learn about bacchanalia and all that.

But Lewis does more than just tame the image with a name; he gives his satyr the civilizing accessories of a package and an umbrella. He might as well have been an accountant waiting for the omnibus. But Mr. Tumnus is still a dangerous creature, as a young girl named Lucy discovers after he tries to enchant her with his pipes so that he can hand her over to the White Witch. Mr. Tumnus doesn’t go through with his scheme because Lewis has also given him something of a Christian conscience. And before the end Mr. Tumnus has asked for Lucy’s forgiveness. Through the episode we see both the charm and the danger of the original satyr, but the danger, while still present, is sublimated and, in a subtle way, repurposed.

And this is what I believe we can see in Goldberry. There’s no doubt that Tolkien was fully aware of the danger, and even the malice, in the folklore of water spirits. Whether or not Tolkien intentionally set out to convert a Jenny Greenteeth, who can say? But it doesn’t really matter. Anyone who has ever written fiction in an honest way knows that it is a process of discovery, like journalism in a foreign land. And I suspect that in Tolkien’s literary hands, he had a feel for what could be put to use, even when it comes to a water fay. Perhaps then, it isn’t so much that Goldberry has been domesticated as instead some latent good has been brought to the surface—like a recessive gene that is revealed in the red-headed child.

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.

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1. “‘I know little of Iarwain save the name,’ said Galdor; ‘but Glorfindel, I think, is right. Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself’” (Fellowship of the Ring, 259; Iarwain is an Elvish name for Bombadil). One last note is worth making here. In The History of Middle-earth, volume 10, Morgoth’s Ring, after The Lord of the Rings had been published, Tolkien wrote this: “Outside the Blessed Realm, all ‘matter’ was likely to have a ‘Melkor ingredient’...in this way Morgoth lost (or exchanged, or transmuted) the greater part of his original ‘angelic’ powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world. Morgoth’s vast power was disseminated. The whole of ‘Middle Earth’ was Morgoth’s Ring” (400). I would have made more of this in this book if I could prove that the Good Professor had this in mind when he inserted Tom into The Lord of the Rings. But I think that if he had a sense of this when he wrote about Tom, especially considering Tom could remember a time before the coming of the Dark Lord from the Outside, Tom would then embody the original intent of Eru (aka, Illúvatar), and what was lost for both Elves and Men—Illúvatar’s Children—and their lost dominion. If that’s so, Tom represents Middle Earth untainted—aka, unfallen.

2. In antiquity it was believed that there were only four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Here we have two perhaps represented: Tom—earth, and Goldberry—water.

3. The Fellowship of the Ring, 117.

4. The Fellowship of the Ring, 119.

5. The Fellowship of the Ring, 119–120.

6. Carol Rose, Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998), 167.

7. Rose, 56.

8. A Tolkien Miscellany (Quality Paperback Club, 2002), 169.

9. A Tolkien Miscellany, 169.

10. A Tolkien Miscellany, 169.

11. A Tolkien Miscellany, 173.

12. The Fellowship of the Ring, 121.

13. The Fellowship of the Ring, 122.

14. Rose, 32.

15. The Fellowship of the Ring, 127.

16. The Fellowship of the Ring, 129.

17. This made hobbits outside Buckland suspicious of Bucklanders (a branch of the extended hobbit family) because they lived on the “wrong side” of the Bran- dywine River and used boats. And Frodo’s parents were said to have drowned in the river—see the Gaffer’s account in “A Long-expected Party,” in The Fellowship of the Ring.

18. For your information, Tolkien was a translator of the book of Jonah for the Jerusalem Bible, so it is safe to say that he was familiar with the ambiguous nature of water as it is understood in the Bible.