LotR re-read: FotR I.7, "In the House of Tom Bombadil"

[kate_nepveu]

Look, I haven't abandoned this!

What Happens: The hobbits spend one night with Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, being fed and sharing stories. At the end of the chapter, they resolve to set out the next day, armed with a rhyme to call Tom in need.

Comments

Relatively short domestic interlude, with hints of danger to come.

* * *

I did spot the rhythms of Tom's speech this time, so that's an improvement.

I will have to look whether Goldberry speaks in a manner similar to Galadriel, who I think she prefigures.

Is anyone able to picture Tom and Goldberry as a married couple in any psychologically realistic kind of way? Because I tried and I can't.

(I did notice, this time, that for all that Goldberry's barely present, she was the one to successfully reassure the hobbits that they were safe over the night.)

* * *

Have I remarked on Frodo's dreams yet? This time, he gets a direct hotline into plot elsewhere, seeing Gandalf escape Orthanc. Even though he doesn't recognize Gandalf, I still don't like it.

* * *

This is really a remarkable paragraph:

Suddenly Tom's talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up on to the Downs. They heard of the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight.

That shift of voice starting with "Sheep were bleating" is very effective.

This reminds me that if I didn't know the underlying myth, I'd be trying to catalog what we've been told to date and what one could get out of it. I remember skipping a lot of the long poetry when I was a kid, and I don't know if I ever understood about Earendil until I read The Silmarillion, or whether I could have if I tried.

* * *

Tom's description of himself:

"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. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless — before the Dark Lord came from Outside."

If he fits into the cosmology established by The Silmarillion, I think this would make him a minor Maia.

* * *

I like the psychological realism in Frodo's reaction to Tom's handling of the Ring.

* * *

Action next chapter, which Le Guin has already analyzed, saving me some effort, so I hope it won't take me so long to get around to it.

[ more LotR re-read posts ]

Comments

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

I think it's more fair to Tolkien to say that the Valar and the Maiar are like angels, that the Elves probably understood this, and that the Men probably by and large did not and therefore fell into worshipping them.

Also, all the Istari were Maia, but I know you know that.

Finally, I don't think anyone-- probably not even Tolkien-- had ever pinned down exactly what Tom Bombadil was. Maia certainly makes sense, and is a good framework to put him in, but I'm not enough into Tolkien to know if there's ever any direct evidence for that.

My thought is that Tom Bombadil might be a Maia who said, politely, "Deal me out. I'm not on anyone's side any more." It works for me because if the Valar and Maiar are equivalent to Angels, and Morgoth and his followers are equivalent to Fallen Angles, then Tom would be equivalent to the fey... who in some Christian/"baptized" traditions are angels who didn't really fall all the way, but tried to assert neutrality. (Didn't work real well for them.)

I have zero evidence for it, I just think it is a thing that makes sense, and I can see Tolkien being aware of those myths as well.

I don't think he ever really settled on what Ungoliant was, either. Ungoliant always seemed vaguely... Lovecraftian to me.

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, I know that there's a supreme deity over the Valar, but don't they *feel* like polytheistic deities in the opening bits of _The Silmarillion_? Angels, AFAIK, don't go around raising mountains and making things grow and living in the sea and whatnot.

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I think they were meant to. Even as a kid, it seemed clear to me that the Valar were meant to serve both roles-- the Pagan gods of old and the Angels subservient to God. The tricky part for Tolkien, mostly glossed over as far as I can tell, and certainly not something I scrupled to worry about as a kid, was where all the blood sacrificed came from.

[kate_nepveu]

where all the blood sacrificed came from

Unpack?

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

Well, my understanding is that Tolkien intended (always, or only later in life, doesn't matter to me) for Middle Earth to be in some sense the same place that we inhabit now. A few minutes of spare-time scrounging led me to a snippet of a letter where he was saying that we, right now would be at the close of the Fifth Age, if Ages retained their roughly 3,000 year lengths. (And more specifically, that the close of the Third Age was about 6,000 years ago.)

Tolkien was also a Catholic, and while I don't think he ever lost sight of the fact that he was writing a fantasy story, I think reading them from a Catholic viewpoint brings them more to life they would otherwise come. So I see Iluvatar, I think God the Father. I see Ainur, I think Angels. I see Men, I think Men. I see Elves, I think "halfway between Angels and Men," with all the theological freight and questions of free will and necessity of redemption that implies. (Specifically, I think Elves have less chance for redemption because they Fall from greater heights, as it were; in strict Catholic theology, Fallen Angels are denied redemption because they Fell with perfect knowledge.) And for the record, I see Istari, I think proto-typical Christ-figure/Messengers.

Now we know that 6,000 years ago there were all sorts of pagan blood sacrifices going on. Catholic co-opt theology often ascribes this to ignorant peoples worshipping Fallen Angels on Earth who were masquerading as gods, so my thought was, "How the heck do you get from Third Age descriptions to that sort of thing?" Or in other words, how did the Valar get to be worshipped in that way?

It occurred to me as I was writing that up, though, that there's probably still all of Morgoth's and Sauron's petty servants lying around that would still appear fairly godlike to mortal men, and if the Elves and Valar and Maiar withdrew, that would answer that without much further thought.

I am also aware that this is perhaps reading a bit more deeply than any reasonable person would, without even having the grace to do the hard work of slogging through all the collections that Chris Tolkien has put out over the years.

[kate_nepveu]

Ah.

My solution to this is pretending that the "this is really the past history of our world" thing doesn't exist, for, oh, any number of reasons.

(As we've talked about before, I don't like the theological underpinnings of _The Silmarillion_, because IMO replacing a Fall with "never had the chance to be somewhere where they could Fall _from_" is not an improvement.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I think one of Humphrey Carpenter's books would have the details, but at one time T and Lewis were considering what we'd call a 'shared universe.' T was to write its past and Lewis its future (ie SILENT PLANET, PERELANDRA, HIDEOUS STRENGTH).

In HIDEOUS STRENGTH, there's a chapter "Descent of the Gods" where Mars, Venus, et al visit and explain that they always were servants of /Jehovah/ but were mistaken for gods in the past; but I think he's talking about the Classical past, not Tolkien's.

[kate_nepveu]

And yes, I agree, even though Ungoliant appears within _The Silmarillion_, she's not much explained there either.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Interesting in this context to compare Tom and Melian. They were both Maia, they both made themselves little safe places, but they were so different. Most obvious difference of course, is Tom is childless. (Can you imagine a child of Tom and Goldberry? Goodness me!)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

A child with serious ADD, but a profound love of nature and a gift for extempore poetry and song. Either someone you'd love to hang out with or would cower from in terror, no middle ground.