chapter two

If a threadbare story is what you’re after, and a thrilling race to the finish, then there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to Bombadil. He might as well be left out of The Lord of the Rings. That’s what Peter Jackson did with his film adaptation.

But J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t write a thriller, even though it is thrilling. It’s more than that, and that’s why people thrill to read it again and again. Most thrillers skim along the surface, each thrill topping the last. Speed is essential. But if you know what comes next, the thrill is gone. However, The Lord of the Rings is better the fourth or fifth time through, and that’s saying a lot, because reading it just once can change your life. It changed mine.

The Lord of the Rings is a deep book. It’s the depth that justifies re-reading, because the reader misses so much the first time through. (And the second, third, fourth, and fifth times through.)

But even people who have read The Lord of the Rings with patience and attention to detail can lose patience when it comes to Bombadil. What’s the point of the enigmatic and apparently ridiculous fellow in the blue jacket and yellow boots? What purpose could he possibly serve? Even characters in the story are as mystified by him as the reader. And scholars who have plumbed the depths of Tolkien’s legendarium¹ are flummoxed when asked, “Who is Tom Bombadil?”

So, who is Tom Bombadil?

Let’s begin with his appearance. I mean both his physical appearance and his appearance in the story. Here’s his entrance. This is from The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of the trilogy, from the chapter titled “The Old Forest.”

Then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band. With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed.

Tolkien then describes an odd creature—someone too big to be a hobbit, yet too small to be a man. That’s a subtle hint, I think. Tom is sui generis—he’s a breed apart. Furthermore, he’s loud, not just in speech, but in manner. Hobbits are wary, and even stealthy, as any small creature with an interest in survival should be. But Tom is heedless, and I think that this is another clue. He doesn’t care who knows he’s coming—in fact, he announces it. Then the Good Professor tells us more:

He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was as red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter. In his hands he carried on a large leaf as on a tray a small pile of white water-lilies.²

Well, he does appear odd, but he seems nice enough. He turns out to be better than nice; he turns out to be good, and just as importantly, surprisingly powerful—he’s just what a hobbit needs when he’s at the mercy of a malevolent willow-tree.

Speaking of trees, the dilemma the hobbits face when Tom shows up is itself a bit surprising because Tolkien was something of a tree-hugger.³ Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin have gone into the Old Forest to escape the pursuit of black riders—black figures on black horses. The story has hardly begun, and the four hobbits that the story follows are nearly done in by a willow-tree. But the Forest proves to be nearly as dangerous as the riders. Later we’re told that even though trees are large, and strong, they’re not invulnerable. Things that move about on two legs, or four, or even more, prey on them: eating them, cutting them down, burning them. But they remember when they were the Lords of the forest. And this combination of age, memory, and malice has made them dangerous, especially the Great Willow, the most powerful tree in the Old Forest. He holds the other trees under his sway—his songs are “invisible root-threads” that pull other trees along after him according to his will.

It is while the hobbits are under the spell of the willow that Tom Bombadil comes romping and stomping along. We learn his name before we even seen him because the fellow can’t stop singing about himself. As he comes traipsing by, this is what the hobbits hear:

Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadilo!...⁴

This is just a snippet of what he sings—and it has the feel of something impromptu. It not only describes him, it announces his intentions. He is going home to his beloved Goldberry, and he’s bringing something important—white water-lilies. And he’s in a hurry—so watch out Willow-man! When Tom arrives on the scene Merry’s feet are sticking out of a crack in the tree, and Pippin has been swallowed alive. Frodo and Sam run up to Tom begging for help. Tom then, with what amounts to mock alarm, asks:

‘Whoa! Whoa! Steady there!’ cried the old man... ‘Now, my little fellows, where be you a-going to, puffing like a bellows? What’s the matter then? Do you know who I am? I’m Tom Bombadil!’⁵

After Frodo and Sam tell Tom about their predicament, Tom says this:

‘What?’ shouted Tom Bombadil, leaping up in the air. ‘Old Man Willow? Naught worse than that, eh? That can soon be mended. I know the tune for him. Old grey Willow-man! I’ll freeze his marrow cold, if he don’t behave himself. I’ll sing hit roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. Old Man Willow!’⁶

And that’s pretty much what Tom does—with the exception of a wind blowing leaves and branches away. He puts his mouth to the crack containing Merry, and he sings in a low voice. Evidently that produces an effect: Merry’s legs begin to kick. Then Tom says:

‘You let them out again, Old Man Willow!... What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!’⁷

Then Tom takes one of its fallen limbs and beats the tree with it—but that’s not what does the trick; there’s no mistake—it’s the singing that sets the hobbits free. Soon Tom is pulling Merry out of the tree by his feet, and Pippin is (in effect) kicked out by the tree itself.

After that, the Great Willow shudders and is still. In all of The Lord of the Rings there’s no other deliverance so amusing, yet so striking. (Well, there is one other, but it is also Bombadil’s doing—and that can wait.)

After this, the capering and boisterous Tom invites the hobbits to his house, and then, without waiting for them, he bounds away and out of sight.

The bewildered hobbits trudge along after, and just as the sun is going down, making the way difficult to see, they spy Tom’s house in the distance. A door opens, light streams out, and Tom’s wife, Goldberry—a figure nearly as mysterious as Tom—sings them the rest of the way home. Once they cross the threshold they hear, “Come dear folk!... Laugh and be merry! I am Goldberry, daughter of the River.”⁸

With the grace of a ballerina, she then shuts the door and bars it with her arms. Then she comforts the hobbits, promising that wild things, and shadowy things, cannot come in. Then she says, “Fear nothing! For tonight you are under the roof of Tom Bombadil.”⁹

What follows is a delightful stay lasting two nights and a day. The house of Tom Bombadil proves to be as safe as the land surrounding it is perilous. Speaking of peril, not only is the house hemmed in by the old and malicious trees of the Forest, it is nestled right in the valley of the shadow of death. Rising behind the house are the Barrow-downs, a series of hills, which are the home to a series of burial mounds for forgotten kings; and among those mounds is at least one creature that the hobbits will soon meet and wish that they hadn’t.

So I’ve finally got you where I want you. We’re in the house of Tom Bombadil. Now I can return to the question that serves as the title to this chapter: Who is Tom Bombadil?

As I’ve already said, the hobbits are just as puzzled by Tom’s appearance as the reader is, but the first to raise the subject of Tom’s identity is Tom himself. When he asks them, “Do you know who I am?” he’s giving everyone permission to wonder.

Significantly, the second person to wonder aloud about Tom is Frodo—the Ring-bearer, and primary protagonist of the story. And the person to whom he addresses his question is the person who knows Tom best, his wife, Goldberry.

Here’s her response: “He is.”¹⁰

Anyone familiar with the Bible, and especially the book of Exodus, can’t help hearing in Goldberry’s answer an echo of the words that came from the burning bush. When Moses asked a similar question the voice from the bush replied, “I am that I am.”¹¹

This has led some of Tolkien’s more intrepid fans to suggest that the Bombadil is none other than Illúvatar incarnate, the One, the creator of Middle Earth in Tolkien’s legendarium.

There are reasons for thinking that they may be right, and one very big one for knowing that they are not.

One thing in favor of the Illúvatar hypothesis is the fact that Tolkien was a very serious Roman Catholic. And even though religion in the forms we generally associate with it—you know, temples, and rituals and the like—are almost completely absent in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien described the story as a fundamentally Catholic work.¹²

If Bombadil is Illúvatar, then a number of odd things about him might be explained. But other things wouldn’t be. Even so, the best reason for dismissing the Illúvatar hypothesis is that Tolkien did. Here’s what he said on the subject as it pertains to The Lord of the Rings: “There is no embodiment of the One, of God, who indeed remains remote, outside the World.”¹³ If we take him at his word—and I’m all for that—that settles the matter. Bombadil isn’t the Creator; he’s a creature, like the rest of the characters in The Lord of the Rings—and like you and me in our world. This is a good spot to review a few of the other theories that people have come up with to explain Bombadil. One of them—which is no explanation at all—is that Tom was inspired by a Dutch doll in the Tolkien home that had the misfortune of almost being flushed down the lavatory.¹⁴ The reason this explains nothing is the same reason scientific explanations of natural phenomena that reduce everything to material causes explain nothing. They substitute a means for an end. The end in this case is the purpose Bombadil serves in the story. Saying that Tom Bombadil was inspired by a Dutch doll tells us nothing about that.

But what these two very different explanations actually do (namely, Bombadil is really Illúvatar, or Bombadil is just a Dutch doll) is they appeal to things outside of Middle Earth to explain the enigmatic man with the blue jacket and yellow boots. And I think that there is something to that.

Getting back to the Dutch doll hypothesis, the story goes that Tolkien made up Tom Bombadil initially to entertain and perhaps console his children. He even wrote a poem about Tom that predates the writing of The Lord of the Rings by years.¹⁵ Then seemingly one thing led to another, and before you know it, he had inserted Tom into The Lord of the Rings either to suit his fancy or to buy time. That second notion seems to have some basis in fact because of Tolkien’s admission that he was stumped for a while about the direction of the story just about the time he was writing about the hobbits in the Old Forest. Concerning that, this is what he said:

I met a lot of things along the way that astonished me. Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than Frodo did. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothlórien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22.¹⁶

But if Tom was just filler, why didn’t Tolkien just go back and edit Tom out when he knew where things were headed? He was a notoriously fussy and precise writer. We know that he cut out huge swaths of material many times when he wasn’t satisfied with them. But he left Tom in for a reason. And he said so in a letter.

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.¹⁷

So Tom does have “some kind of function”—and he is a “comment.” What does Tolkien mean?

Generally speaking, people can sense that there is a lot more to The Lord of the Rings than what is visible on the surface. Throughout there are allusions to events and people found in a past that is ancient and remote even to characters in the story. There are layers upon layers of the stuff, much of it already written or sketched out by Tolkien by the time he came to write The Lord of the Rings.

And as I’ve already said, some of Tolkien’s most devoted fans have combed through those stories looking to find the backstory of Bombadil. No such luck; he’s just not there. But rather than give up, some of them have resorted to speculation. Working within the framework of the legendarium, there has been the suggestion that Bombadil and his wife Goldberry are Maiar gone native.¹⁸ (Maiar are elemental spirits, somewhat like angels, junior to other more powerful beings known as Valar,¹⁹ but of the same nature.) When authorities on Tolkien weigh in on the matter, this seems to be a favorite explanation. And it appears to fit. We have other Maiar in The Lord of the Rings; a prime example is Sauron himself, the Lord in the title of the book. And we learn that Gandalf the wizard is one, as is Saruman, another wizard.

But if Tom has gone native, he’s also gone a little rogue. I don’t mean that in a bad sense. Obviously, he’s good. I merely mean that he has his own agenda. He’s not caught up in the story of the Ring. But even that doesn’t feel quite right, and I’ll explain why in chapter two. This brings me back to the idea that Tom may somehow be from Outside— meaning he represents something outside Middle Earth, or perhaps bigger than that world.

Two more theories I’ve run across that posit a version of the “Outside” argument are either that Tolkien has written himself into the story and he’s Bombadil, or that Tom is the personification of the English countryside before industrialization. Concerning the second, Tolkien said as much in a letter to his publisher, Stanley Unwin.²⁰

But will either of these possibilities really do?

The notion that Tolkien would make a cameo appearance doesn’t seem plausible. A story that we can say reflects Tolkien’s self-concept is Leaf by Niggle, where Tolkien is like Niggle, or better, where Niggle is like Tolkien—a little man prone to getting lost in the details—like obsessing over the way light is caught on an individual leaf—and undertaking projects far too large for him.²¹ If that’s so, how can we harmonize Bombadil’s preternatural potency with Niggle’s impotence? It doesn’t seem possible. As for expressing the spirit of the English countryside, you might as well say that the Shire itself (the home of the hobbits) does this just as well, if not better.²²

Instead, I believe that Tolkien was up to something else with Tom, something large and ambitious in its own way, something integral to the story as a whole. I even think that Tom is so important it would take a book to explain why. This book is my attempt to do this very thing.²³

But before I begin, there’s one proviso to make.

Enigma and Mystery

Would you be surprised to learn that Tolkien was sometimes enigmatic on purpose? He actually admitted that he was when it came to Bombadil. Here’s the telling line from one of his letters: “even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).”²⁴

So, if Tolkien meant for Bombadil to be an enigma, who am I to try and clear things up? Well, I’m not sure that I can—at least not in the way most people think about clearing things up. But that doesn’t mean that the Good Professor didn’t intend for readers to ponder the meaning of Tom. Au contraire, enigmas invite inquiry. The word enigma comes into English in the 16th century via Latin, but originally from Greek. It means to “speak allusively,” from αινος, for “fable.” I’m sure Tolkien knew this, and I’m sure that he knew what happens when people stumble upon enigmatic things—they stop and wonder about them, particularly noble-minded people. As Solomon said, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Prov. 25:2).

But you may think that this makes any guess a wild guess. But that presupposes we have nothing at all to work with. Tolkien said that Bombadil represented something important for him, something that he wanted us to see.

Here’s something else to consider: Tom is more than enigmatic; he’s also mysterious. Speaking of mystery, when someone mentions the word, we tend to get out our magnifying glasses, light our pipes, don our deer-hunter caps, and get set to practice the science of deduction. But this is a very modern way of thinking about mysteries. Tolkien wasn’t Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.²⁵

If you look into the etymology for the word mystery, you’ll see that for time out of mind it referred to something other than a puzzle that needed solving. Like the word enigma, mystery comes into English from the outside— through the Old French mistere, but further back, from the Latin mysterium, and ultimately to the Greek mysterion. And at each step in the journey of the word down to our time, a mystery is not a problem; it is a hidden truth.

Tom Bombadil is mysterious in this sense.

This is important to note before going any further because if you hope that this book will provide the final and definitive answer to the mystery of Tom Bombadil, you will be disappointed. When you’ve read the final line you won’t be able to say, “Well, that solves that!” (At least I hope not.) The best mysteries are never solved. Solutions in the sense we associate with Sherlock Holmes are like equations that can be mastered, not things worth knowing for their own sakes. My hope is that you will come to love Tom for his own sake, and that the mystery of Tom Bombadil will haunt you for the rest of your life.

1. The legendarium is the enormous backstory of The Lord of the Rings. It covers thousands of years and contains hundreds of characters. If that seems like it would take a lifetime to come up with, that’s because it did.

2. Fellowship of the Ring, 117. Douglas Wilson once pointed out to me that the most common color in The Lord of the Rings is grey—Grey Havens, grey eyes, Gandalf the Grey, etc. But he noted that when Bombadil appears, he comes in the primary colors: yellow, blue, and red. He’s the full spectrum. This will be important when I contrast him with someone else in The Lord of the Rings.

3. For a marvelous treatment of Tolkien’s ecological vision, see Matthew Dickerson and John Evan’s book Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2011).

4. Fellowship of the Ring, 116, 117.

5. Fellowship of the Ring, 117.

6. Fellowship of the Ring, 117.

7. Fellowship of the Ring, 118.

8. Fellowship of the Ring, 121.

9. Fellowship of the Ring, 121.

10. Fellowship of the Ring, 122.

11. Exodus 3:14 (kjv).

12. What Tolkien meant by this is itself the subject of many essays and even some books. For example, see Bradley Birzer’s book J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002).

13. Carpenter, 235.

14. Daniel Lauzon, “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Poetry,” J.R.R. Tolkien Estate, https://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writing/other-tales-and-poetry/the-adventures-of-tom-bombadil-and-other-poetry.html.

15. The poem can be found in a collection of poems usually published under the title: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

16. Letter to W. H. Auden, June 7, 1955, in Carpenter, 216–17, emphasis added.

17. Carpenter, 178.

18. Robert Foster, The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: From the Hobbit to the Simlarillion (London: HarperCollins, 1998).

19. Valar are like angels, creatures like us, but far more powerful than we are.

20. Carpenter, 1.

21. If you’ve never read Leaf by Niggle, I commend it to you. It is a beautiful fable, and a very Catholic one. Tolkien published it not long after The Hobbit, but years before The Lord of the Rings. In the story, Niggle has undertaken the project of painting a very large and beautiful tree. But he is afraid that he will never finish it, fearing it is both too ambitious for his skill, and that he will never have the time needed to work on it as he’d like. In the fable the painting isn’t finished before Niggle has to go on a long journey. Then his painting is destroyed with the exception of one small leaf.

22. This summary of the theories proffered concerning Bombadil’s origin and identity isn’t meant to be exhaustive—it is merely intended to give you the gist of what people have said.

23. I can’t say conclusively that what I have to say about Tom has never been said before, but as far as I know, I’m the first.

24. Carpenter, 174.

25. Although Doyle wrote several Sherlock Holmes stories before Tolkien was born, Holmes was the epitome of modernity in certain ways.

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