I think that Professor Tolkien would have believed that I am up to no good. He didn’t altogether approve of preachers, you know, being suspicious of us when we venture beyond our pulpits. He thought that we are particularly dangerous when we sit down to write stories, and he warned small children about us. Here’s an example taken from his unpublished introduction to The Golden Key by the Reverend George MacDonald:

I must warn you that [George MacDonald] is a preacher, not only on the platform or in the pulpit; in all his many books he preaches, and it is his preaching that is valued most by the grown-up people who admire him most.¹

I think it is safe to conclude that Professor Tolkien didn’t want children to grow up into the sort of people who read stories looking for preaching. Instead he wanted children, as well as adults, to be taken up into stories, to experience the wonder, the mystery, and even the terror that can be found in them.

Perhaps it will surprise you to learn that (for the most part) I agree with him. In a review of Tolkien’s story “Smith of Wootton Major” (my favorite when it comes to his short stories, by the way), Roger Lancelyn Green said something about stories that Tolkien later thanked him for: “To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.”² Rubber balls are meant to be gratefully received and enjoyed. (Even preachers know that.) When it comes to Tolkien’s stories, it’s their bounce that he wanted us to enjoy. And yet, balls can be admired and even talked about without cutting them open. Tolkien did that sort of thing himself quite famously in a talk he once gave titled “On Fairy Stories.” In that talk we learn (obliquely) that what irritated the Good Professor when it came to preaching with stories was allegory. After repeatedly being accused of committing the sin of allegory in his own stories, he said this in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.³

My intent with this book is to exercise my freedom as a reader. And taking Professor Tolkien at his word, I intend to apply Bombadil to all sorts of things, not the least being principled resistance to “purposed domination.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to the matter of application, while allegories can artlessly shove meanings beneath our noses, there is no such thing as a story without some kind of morality running through it. And when it comes to fairy stories, the morality very often doesn’t hide at all. Tolkien says something along this line when discussing the prehistoric origins of many fairy tales.

Even where a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practised long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of the tale’s history because of the great mythical significance of prohibition. A sense of that significance may indeed have lain behind some of the taboos themselves. Thou shalt not—or else thou shalt depart beggarded into endless regret. The gentlest ‘nursery-tales’ know it. Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick. The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation.⁴

Speaking of temptation, The Lord of the Rings is a story about temptation. It’s impossible to miss. Of course, I’m speaking of the Ring of Power and the Temptation to Use It. Tolkien was not the first to conceive of a ring that can make its wearer invisible. He wasn’t even the first to note that such a thing would inevitably be used for wicked things.

Another well-known story of this kind is told in book two of Plato’s Republic. It is the story of “The Ring of Gyges.”

The moral of that story is that a ring that would make a wearer invisible would inevitably reveal the wickedness of the wearer. The subject for discussion at this point in Republic is the nature of justice, and Socrates, the great protagonist of Plato’s dialogues, is speaking with a fellow named Glaucon. Glaucon cynically contends that justice is nothing but an agreement among people who want to “get away with murder” but who are all afraid of being murdered. And Glaucon uses the story of the ring of Gyges to make his point.

According to Glaucon’s telling of the tale, the ring of Gyges was found by a shepherd on the corpse of a giant. Then the lucky finder soon discovers the power of the ring to render him invisible, and being an ambitious fellow, he uses it to secure a position in the royal court. Before long he has seduced the queen, killed the king, and become king himself. The moral of the story is to keep an eye on shepherds, and everyone else, because you never know what they’ll do if you don’t—such is the sum of justice.

While the ring of Gyges is a powerful ring, the Ring of Power in The Lord of the Rings is even more impressive. Not only can it render you invisible—get this—it gives you the power to bend other people to your will.

It had been forged by Sauron—a giant, I suppose you could say—but not physically: it’s his power that is gigantic. Like evil giants everywhere (including those real ones in our world), he is hell-bent on dominating everything around him. But unlike you or me, he actually has the power to get the job done. When he made his Ring, Sauron poured enough of himself into it so that anyone who put it on would have access to his power.

But here’s the catch: all this bending includes the wearer of the Ring. That’s the other important difference from the ring of Gyges. That ring merely revealed how bad people are; the Ring of Power actually makes its wearer worse. In time he comes to resemble its maker.

The Ring of Power isn’t neutral, like sweet cream, to which someone’s personality can be added to make a new flavor of ice cream. It is malum in se—intrinsically evil. It is inalterably bent in a particular direction. In other words, the Ring cannot be put into the service of a good cause. Throughout the story the notion that it could be used for good is the temptation that snares otherwise noble characters. And once snared, they are bent by the Ring until they conform to its intrinsic nature.

But there is one curious exception; we learn that the only person over whom the Ring cannot exercise a corrupting influence is the only person who would never, ever, think of using it for any reason whatsoever.

As you may already know, this book is about that person. And it is the bounce in his step that I admire and I’d like to talk about. I hope that I don’t cut him open, or even bend him, in the process.

And if Professor Tolkien ever picks up this book, I hope that he will forgive this preacher for wondering aloud about the joyful bounce of Bombadil.

If you’ve forgotten that bounce, read the tale that Tolkien told about him again. It isn’t long. Much of what I have to say about him is found in the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, in the chapters titled “The Old Forest,” “In the House of Tom Bombadil,” and “Fog on the Barrow-downs.”

~ C.R. Wiley

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1. Smith of Wootton Major, ed. Verlyn Flieger, 2nd ed. (1954; New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 71–2.

2. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 388.

3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, xv.

4. “On Fairy Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), 33.