If Tom’s masterful handling of Old Man Willow and the Ring of Power left you wondering, Just who is this guy? what can we say about his encore with the Wight on the Barrow-downs?
Let’s begin with some definitions. Just what is a down, what about a barrow, and what in the world is a Wight? The terms are all somewhat archaic.
Downland, according to Wikipedia, is an area “of open chalk hills... The term is used to describe the characteristic landscape in southern England... The name ‘downs’ is derrived from the Old English word dun, meaning ‘hill.’”¹ There’s no mention of chalk-lands in The Lord of the Rings as far as I know, but the term downland can be used for any treeless, hilly, or rolling countryside. The Old Forest has its hills, ravines, and valleys, but those were forested. On the downs the hills continue, but without the trees.
So, what’s a barrow? If you look it up you’ll see a range of definitions. But the obvious meaning for this story is “a large mound of earth or stones over the remains of the dead.”² So, it’s a kind of tomb. And here on the Barrow- downs we have a graveyard of them, all on hills.
And finally, what’s a Wight? This is the most interesting word of all. It originally meant creature, or a certain person, regarded as unfortunate. But it came to mean a “spirit” or a “ghost.”
After leaving Tom’s house, the hobbits must travel alongside this haunted graveyard in order to get back to the road that they must take if they are going to continue on their quest. Just who is entombed in the barrows, and what is haunting those tombs, becomes clear as the chapter is told. Tom knows the answers to both questions. After all, he saw the tombs raised.
But before the hobbits leave his house, Tom gives them this warning: “Don’t you go a-meddling with old stone or cold Wights or prying in their houses, unless you be strong folk with hearts that never falter!”³ He warns them more than once; and he advises them to pass the barrows by on their westward side. Then he teaches them a rhyme to sing just in case by ill-luck they fall into any danger.
Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!
By water, wood and hill, by reed and willow,
By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!
Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!⁴
Naturally the hobbits don’t follow his advice. It says something about Tom’s estimation of them that he felt the need to teach them the rhyme.
As the story goes, after saying goodbye to Tom and Goldberry, the hobbits set out with their five ponies. It’s a warm day, and they’re in good spirits, and after a morning of steady travel, they believe that they’ve made good progress. At noon, as hobbits are wont to do, they stop for lunch. But they make a terrible choice when it comes to where to have their picnic.
There are signs that things are not quite right with the place. We’re told that the Forest seems to be smoking in the distance to their left, a mist rising from the hard rain of the previous day. And they come to a hill “whose top was wide and flattened, like a shallow saucer.” From the top of this hill they look north and espy a dark line in the distance that they mistake for the road they are aiming for. The narrator remarks, “The distances had now all become hazy and deceptive.” Then Frodo glances eastward and sees hills “crowned with green mounds, and on some were standing stones, pointing upwards like jagged teeth out of green gums.”⁵
It turns out that those are not the only stones—there’s one right in the center of the saucer they’re in, “standing tall under the sun above.... It was shapeless and yet significant: like a landmark, or a guarding finger, or more like a warning.”⁶ But the hobbits don’t heed the warning, and they forget Tom’s warning as well about staying clear of old stone. They even lunch next to it, backs leaning up to it. They eat well, and then, unfortunately, they fall asleep. Tolkien hints that more may have been at work than eating too much and being too comfortable.
What happens next seems to indicate that some wickedness was at work. They awaken very late in the afternoon, and the mist rising from the Forest, which was safely in the distance during their morning ride, has filled the entire area with dense fog. They quickly gather their things and lead their ponies down the north side of the hill. The air is like soup, and soon they are dripping wet and can’t see where they are heading. Before long they’re separated, and instead of passing through the valley they had seen proceeding in the direction of the road, Frodo finds himself passing between two huge standing stones he had not seen until that very moment. His pony rears and he falls off. Desperate, he wildly calls for his friends. He can hear them calling back from a distance, but ominously their voices are extinguished one by one with “a long wail suddenly cut short.”⁷
Night falls and Frodo wanders aimlessly. Then the fog is at last blown away and Frodo finds himself on a round hilltop in front of a great barrow. He thinks that he hears a muted cry and he makes for it. He calls, “Where are you?” The answer, “here” seems to rise from the ground. Then a black silhouette against the star-illumined night- time sky rises and looms over him. It has eyes, lit with a cool light, as from “some remote distance.” Then the Wight—for that is what it is—takes a hold of him, and Frodo loses consciousness.⁸
When Frodo awakens he discovers that he is inside a barrow and that he is lying alongside Sam, Merry, and Pippin. The other hobbits are unconscious. What’s more, by a “pale greenish light” glowing all around, he sees that they are clothed in white and bedecked with circlets of gold, and gold chains, and many rings. But most disconcertingly, there is a naked sword lying across their necks. Then Frodo hears a chanting rhyme as from a great distance, rising from the ground:
Cold be hand and heart and bone,
and cold be sleep under stone:
never more to wake on stony bed,
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.
In the black wind the stars shall die,
and still on gold here let them lie,
till the dark lord lifts his hand
over dead sea and withered land.⁹
The incantation mentions the Dark Lord. But we learn that the tombs were raised for the kings of the lost kingdom of Arnor. A little research reveals that the men laid in them were Númenóreans. The origin of the Wight isn’t entirely clear, but there are hints that it is the spirit of one of the enemies of the kings of Arnor. Probably one of the men of Carn Dûm. That was a wicked place, located at the extreme northern reach of the Misty Mountains and subject to the Witch-realm of Angmar. The Witch-king who ruled there is one of the black Númenóreans, and a servant of Sauron. And he is none other than the chief of the Nazgul, the black riders in The Lord of the Rings, who are pursuing Frodo and his friends.
There is a great deal to think about here regarding the nature of evil. Calling it “the nature of evil” is ironic, because we think of nature as a place for living things— things with potential for growth and good, which by their natures contribute to the good of other things. But evil tends “naturally” towards death.
Look at the incantation for a moment; it is an exposition on the theme of death. Not only are hand, heart, and bone cold, the sun fails, and the moon and stars die. This is a picture of entropy, what scientists in our world bloodlessly call “heat death.”
Just before we hear the incantation we are told that as the voice of the Wight grows intelligible, it seems, “immeasurably dreary”—and when the words grow distinct they are “grim, hard, cold words, heartless and miserable.” If night could envy day, and cold, warmth, these are the words they would form to curse the things they are not.¹⁰
This is a good description of damnation, if the word good may be so employed. It is also painful to think about, in part because it describes you, or me, at our worst moments. There are things in us that really do deserve to go to Hell. The question is whether or not we will let those things take the rest of us with them.
The allusion to the Dark Lord is also worth pondering. What’s the nature of the Wight’s fealty? Is it devotion? Is it fear? Is it a common hatred for things with natures not subject to the Darkness? The mystery of ungodliness is great. The Dark Lord is a “lord”—he exercises a form of authority. And authority is good; it arises from the power of making. (Author and authority have six letters in common for a reason.)
Jesus said that even Satan keeps an ordered house (Matt. 12:22–28). But it must ape another rule of order, because evil by definition can’t make anything good; it can only corrupt good things that have been made by someone else.
Hierarchy is another one of those words that has gotten nothing but bad press. It doesn’t deserve it; it means “sacred-order”—and there’s nothing sacred in Mordor. Yet in some sense Mordor is ordered, like the Devil’s house. If we can ferret out how it is managed, perhaps we can redeem the word hierarchy, at least in our minds.
Just one more word to define before getting on with it: the word pandemonium. It literally means “devils everywhere.” What we’re referring to when we use it in everyday speech is chaos. Throughout The Lord of the Rings, when we get glimpses of the inner-workings of the forces of darkness, things do seem to be on the verge of breaking down into mere anarchy. So how does the Dark Lord hold it all together?¹¹
Bureaucracy: namely, instrumental control and management.
C.S. Lewis reflected extensively upon the psychology of evil throughout his works, but one book stands out: The Screwtape Letters. In The Screwtape Letters a senior demon named Screwtape mentors a junior demon named Wormwood. The names are worth noting: Wormwood is a name you can find in the Bible; it connotes bitterness—the Hebrew literally means “curse.” Screwtape, on the other hand is a bureaucrat, and I can’t help thinking of “red-tape” when I hear his name. That wasn’t a coincidence. Lewis found the impersonality and amorality of bureaucracy repellent. Here’s a sample taken from the preface to The Screwtape Letters:
I live in a Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut finger nails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.¹²
Tolkien evidently agreed with Lewis if we take his description of the Shire near the end of The Lord of the Rings as an indication of his thinking on the matter. The Shire has been reduced to an over-managed industrial wasteland. Lists of rules are posted everywhere, and thuggish and officious sheriffs confiscate the goods of industrious hobbits and redistribute them—primarily to themselves. Everything is controlled from Bag End (the old home of Frodo and Bilbo), where Saruman, aka Sharkey, now resides.
What keeps the hobbits in line is the same thing that kept Wormwood in line. Years ago a mentor of mine let me in on the secret. The primary emotion in any bureaucracy, and the real thumbscrew of managerial control, is fear.
And this is why Heaven is not a bureaucracy. Instead, it is a harmonious communion of natures, ruled by love. Hell, by contrast, is managed by fear. In The Screwtape Letters, when it comes to the end of that story, after Wormwood fails to damn his patient, Screwtape relishes the thought of consuming his charge. The idea apparently being that in Hell there a food chain in which the higher consumes the lower. This is a reversal of the heavenly food chain we see in Christianity in which the highest of all gives himself as food for all, which results in a trickle-down of goodness and an expanding circumference of life.
When Frodo awakens in the barrow and sees that his companions are “deathly pale,” he thinks that his adventure has come to a “terrible end.” It appears as though he and his friends are as good as dead.
Everyone dies. In the Christian faith death is a curse. But mysteriously, in The Lord of the Rings we’re told that death is a gift from Illúvatar to his younger children, implying that something better is in store for them. Elves can die, but it is not inevitable, and in their case, it is not understood in the same way. But when it comes to men, a shadow of doubt weighs heavily upon men about it.¹³
The best that men (and hobbits) can do is meet it stoically, with an air of resignation. Anyone familiar with Stoicism can smell something like it in Frodo’s resolution to face it heroically in the following passage:
There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow. Frodo was neither very fat nor very timid; indeed, though he did not know it, Bilbo (and Gandalf) had thought him the best hobbit in the Shire.¹⁴
Then we’re told that the thought of death “hardened” Frodo. He finds himself “stiffening, as if for a final spring”; he no longer feels limp, “like a helpless prey.”¹⁵
But what can he do? When he sees a hand walking spider-like to the hilt of the sword lying across the necks of his friends, Frodo is tempted to flee. But his newly discovered courage won’t allow it, so he takes another sword lying nearby and hacks the hand off. At this point the pale light goes out and he hears a “snarling noise.”¹⁶
In spite of his courage, he has not saved himself or his friends at all. If possible, he’s made things worse. So, he falls forward over Merry—and what he feels at that moment isn’t courage; what he feels is Merry’s deathly- cold face.
Then Frodo finally remembers Tom’s silly song, and its promise:
Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!
By water, wood and hill, by the reed and willow,
By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!
Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!
And he sings it. This is followed by a “sudden deep silence,” as though the Wight, and even the world itself, are called to witness—along with the water and fire and everything else—something about to happen.
Then there is a response! Frodo hears faint, coming from a distance, as though passing through earth and stone the sound of someone else singing:
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master;
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.¹⁷
Just how Tom could possibly have heard Frodo, we’re not told. Had he been looking for the hobbits? Did he already know where they were? If so, why did he wait for the song? We are not told that either. What we are told is just how strong Old Tom’s songs are.
There was a loud rumbling sound, as of stones rolling and falling, and suddenly light streamed in, real light, the plain light of day. A low door-like opening appeared at the end of the chamber beyond Frodo’s feet; and there was Tom’s head (hat, feather, and all) framed against the light of the sun rising red behind him.¹⁸
Does this bring anything to mind? I can’t help thinking of Easter morning. And this brings us back to the question: Who is this guy? Who is Tom Bombadil?
Many people have noted that the offices of Christ—prophet, priest, and king—seem to correspond to particular characters in The Lord of the Rings: namely, Gandalf is like a prophet, Frodo is like a priest, and obviously, Aragorn really is a king.
However, the “return of the king” and the end of the Ring of Power don’t bring an end to evil in Middle Earth. Instead, the end of The Lord of the Rings ushers in the Age of Men, and the further greying of the world. The beauty and heroism of the first three ages are reduced to legend as the last of those for whom those were living memories leave Middle Earth. If this is all we had to go by in The Lord of the Rings, it would be a melancholy story, a last taste of good things never to be tasted again. But this isn’t the only thing that we have to go by: there is Bombadil, and in particular, this scene, where he delivers the hobbits from the Shadow of Death.
When Tom appears he not only delivers the hobbits from the tomb; he does a number of other remarkable things, the most significant being this: he casts the Wight out of the tomb, and even beyond the circle of the world:
Get out, you old Wight! Vanish in the sunlight!
Shrivel like the cold mist, like the winds go wailing,
Out into the barren lands far beyond the mountains!
Come never here again! Leave your barrow empty!
Lost and forgotten be, darker than the darkness,
Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended.¹⁹
Following this we’re told there was, “a long trailing shriek, fading away into an unguessable distance; and after that silence.”²⁰
Well, if that isn’t a picture of eternal damnation, I don’t know what is. But there’s more here to consider than that. We’re given a hint of something glorious, “till the world is mended.”
This line says something that’s easy to overlook in our impatience to move on to the next stage of Frodo’s adventure. It is a promise. There is a better ending to come—an ending that’s better than the ending of The Lord of the Rings. Some day the world will be mended.
That world is not consigned to fiery obliteration, or even a slow, entropic process ending in a cold, eternal night. Instead, the darkness itself will be cast out. This reminds me of the end of our world, as it is promised in the Bible. It is the damned who will “escape” to another world, when someone very like Tom here will cast them into the Outer Darkness. I would feel as though I’m reading too much into this episode if this were the only thing we had to go by in the body of Tolkien’s work. But it isn’t. There is something else, something I’ve referred to before in passing—something I believe that Tolkien wrote in order to console himself in the face of death. I’m thinking about his marvelous story Leaf by Niggle.
This story appears to have nothing to do with The Lord of the Rings. But I think it actually expresses Tolkien’s hope for Middle Earth and much more.
Obviously, Tolkien was a maker of stories. People who make things can’t help but wonder what will become of what they’ve made after they are gone. We all know about entropy; we see it everyday. Things fall apart; we fall apart. Even the best of us will die and eventually be forgotten. But what about our works, the books we’ve written, the paintings we’ve painted? Is it inevitable that everything will just fade away?
Ironically, as much as Tolkien looked down on allegory, many people believe that Leaf by Niggle is one. And it seems impossible to deny. The Niggle of Leaf by Niggle is a painter. And one painting has become an all-consuming project, a life’s work—a painting of a vast tree. The painting keeps growing, and everything else he’s painted is either forgotten or pinned to its edges. But the painting’s scale, along with the distractions that lay claim to his time, cause Niggle to despair of ever finishing it.
Tolkien actually wrote Leaf by Niggle before The Lord of the Rings was published. And we know that even The Lord of the Rings was something tacked on to the edge of his great work—his legendarium. (Perhaps that is how Bombadil got into The Lord of the Rings.) Like Niggle, Tolkien felt that he was a niggler, and that he was niggling his life away. His vast legendarium might never be completed, or, perhaps worse, might be reduced to some practical purpose. (In Leaf by Niggle that’s precisely what happens to Niggle’s painting; the canvass it is painted on is used to patch a roof.)
In the story Niggle knows that he must eventually go on a journey that will put his labors to bed for good. (The journey is death; there’s no doubt about it.) And wouldn’t you know it, he does have to go before his painting is finished. And just as he feared, nearly everything he’s worked on, so long and hard, is lost—everything, that is, except for one little leaf. The leaf manages to get a frame and find its way into a forgotten corner of a museum. (I can’t help but think that Niggle’s leaf was Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit, because it was the only part of Tolkien’s vast project that had actually been published by that time.)
But in Leaf by Niggle death isn’t really the end—it’s not even the end of Niggle’s tree. Somehow the tree is there at the end of Niggle’s journey, but it’s no longer just a painting; instead, it’s Real, and it’s complete, and it’s more wonderful than he ever envisioned.
The story can raise questions in the reader’s mind (at least in my mind, anyway): is the tree there because Niggle painted it? Or was the tree there all along, and Niggle just saw it somehow and painted what he saw? We’re not told. Perhaps the question is irrelevant in the great scheme of things.
It’s a marvelous story, a consolation for makers, and rather than praising the next world at the expense of this one, Leaf by Niggle produces the opposite effect. It is because the world to come is more Real and Enduring than our world that our labors in this world matter. The next world infuses this one with meaning because, as the story suggests, in some sense our works in this world will follow us into the world to come.
Now, leaping back to jolly Tom—I suspect that something like this is the secret source of his infectious joy. Tom’s seen it all; nevertheless he sings and dances over water-lilies as though he’s seeing them for the first time. Yes, he is able to feel melancholy, as, for example, when after delivering the hobbits from the Wight, he comes out of the tomb with an armful of treasure, and something in it brings someone to mind.
He chose for himself...a brooch set with blue stones, many-shaded like flax-flowers or the wings of blue butterflies. He looked long at it, as if stirred by some memory, shaking his head, and saying at last:
‘Here is a pretty toy for Tom and for his lady! Fair was she who long ago wore this on her shoulder. Goldberry shall wear it now, and we will not forget her!’²¹
And just like that, jolly Tom is back.
Elves grow old, but they’ll never be as old as Tom. And their melancholy doesn’t fade with time; it only seems to grow. In a sense, their best days are behind them. They’ve fought a long defeat. But somehow Tom manages to live in the present. Could it be that it is because Tom knows how things end? Is that what gives his life between the Perilous Land and the Shadow of Death its lightness and joy?
You could say that we’re more like hobbits lost in the Old Forest than we are like Tom Bombadil. As we travel along we see beautiful things, but also dark things— things full of malice for those “that go on two legs.”²² We’re bewildered, over-matched, constantly opposed by obstacles, and our going is easy in only one direction: down, down, down to the last river; and we must cross it. And in the end we are surrounded by fog, the light goes out, and we’re done.
But is that it? Is that the end?
Not if Someone very like Tom has something to say about it. There will be a day—a great getting-up morning—and a loud rumbling sound, as of stones rolling, and falling, and suddenly light will stream in, the Real Light of Day, and a Final Day will begin that will never end. And we will run free upon the grass of a world that will never fade.
1. Wikipedia, s.v., “downland,” last modified November 15, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downland.
2. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “barrow,” accessed March 5, 2021, https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/barrow.
3. The Fellowship of the Ring, 131.
4. The Fellowship of the Ring, 131.
5. The Fellowship of the Ring, 133, 134.
6. The Fellowship of the Ring, 134.
7. The Fellowship of the Ring, 136.
8. The Fellowship of the Ring, 136–37.
9. The Fellowship of the Ring, 138.
10. The Fellowship of the Ring, 137.
11. In Morgoth’s Ring, the tenth volume of The History of Middle-earth, Tolkien had this to say about Sauron in the beginning: “He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction...his ‘plans’, the idea coming from his own isolated mind, became the sole object of his will, and an end, the End, in itself” (396–97).
12. Preface to the 1961 edition, in C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, annot. ed., ed. Paul McCusker (1961; New York: HarperCollins, 2013), xxxvii.
13. In Tolkien’s legendarium this is somewhat ambiguous—some among the Elves refer to death as Illúvatar’s “gift” to men, his younger children. But men disagree, believing instead that Melkor had robbed them of lives similar to those lived by the Eldar, Illúvatar’s older children. See Morgoth’s Ring.
14. The Fellowship of the Ring, 137.
15. The Fellowship of the Ring, 137.
16. The Fellowship of the Ring, 138.
17. The Fellowship of the Ring, 138, 139.
18. The Fellowship of the Ring, 139.
19. The Fellowship of the Ring, 139.
20. The Fellowship of the Ring, 139.
21. The Fellowship of the Ring, 142.
22. The Fellowship of the Ring, 282.