The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Christina Scull

INTRODUCTION

      In the first part of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are crossing the Old Forest when they are attacked by the malevolent Old Man Willow. By good fortune, they are rescued by Tom Bombadil, ‘a man, or so it seemed’, singing nonsense and wearing ‘an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band’ and ‘stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs. … He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter’ (bk. I, ch. 6). To the hobbits he is a saviour but a puzzle. When Frodo asks Goldberry, ‘who is Tom Bombadil?’ she replies simply, ‘He is’ – he, who at that moment is tending the hobbits’ ponies and can be heard singing

      Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;

      Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

      At this, Frodo looks at Goldberry ‘questioningly’, and she adds: ‘He is, as you have seen him. He is the Master of wood, water, and hill.’ Later, when Frodo asks Tom himself, ‘Who are you, Master?’ the reply is: ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer.’ But he too elaborates, referring to the wider mythology, or ‘matter of Middle-earth’, which underlies The Lord of the Rings: ‘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 [Men and Elves], and saw the little People [Hobbits] 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’ (bk. I, ch. 7).

      One reader of The Lord of the Rings, Peter Hastings, felt that Goldberry’s ‘He is’ implied that Tom Bombadil is God. Tolkien disagreed: ‘Goldberry and Tom are referring to the mystery of names. … Frodo has asked not “what is Tom Bombadil” but “Who is he”. We and he no doubt often laxly confuse the questions. Goldberry gives what I think is the correct answer. We need not go into the sublimities of “I am that am” [God’s words to Moses in Exodus 3:14] – which is quite different from he is. She adds as a concession a statement of part of the “what”’ (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981), pp. 191–2). Tolkien’s readers have advanced many theories about Tom, without consensus; we have touched upon these in The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (2005), and will not rehearse them here. Although one learns more about Tom Bombadil as The Lord of the Rings continues, in the end he does not fit neatly into any category. He does not clearly belong to any one of the groups of intelligent beings established in Tolkien’s private mythology, which also encompasses The Hobbit and the ‘legends’ of earlier days broadly referred to as ‘The Silmarillion’. Nor could there be a definite answer to the question Who (or What) is Tom Bombadil, when his creator did not have one himself. To one reader, Tolkien said that he did not know Tom’s origin, though he could make ‘guesses’, if he chose to do so, but preferred to leave Tom a mystery. To another, he commented that some things in the world of The Lord of the Rings should remain unexplained: ‘even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)’ (Letters, p. 174). And to Peter Hastings, he wrote: ‘I don’t think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient’ (Letters, p. 192).

      This last point can be explained by the fact that Tom Bombadil existed in fiction before The Lord of the Rings was conceived. His name was given first to a ‘Dutch doll’ – a toy made of jointed wooden pegs – owned by one or more of Tolkien’s children and dressed exactly as Tom is described in The Lord of the Rings; and as Tolkien did with other toys in his household, such as the little lead dog that inspired Roverandom and the teddy bears that appear in Mr. Bliss, he put Tom Bombadil into stories. A tantalizing fragment of one of these survives in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, and is printed in the present book as an appendix.

      Around 1931, Tolkien also put Tom into a poem. In this he created not only the now familiar Tom Bombadil, but also Goldberry, Old Man Willow, and the Barrow-wight, all of whom would figure in The Lord of the Rings. The poem was published as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in the Oxford Magazine for 15 February 1934, and is reprinted below. Late in 1937, Tolkien brought the work to mind again when, his recently published Hobbit having proved a success, he was asked for a sequel, but at first was unable to think of one. Instead, he wrote to his publisher: ‘Perhaps a new (if similar) line? Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside [the country near Tolkien’s home for most of his adult life], could be made into the hero of a story? Or is he, as I suspect, fully enshrined in the enclosed verses [from the Oxford Magazine]? Still I could enlarge the portrait’ (Letters, p. 26). In the event, Tolkien focused his new story upon hobbits, but included Tom early on, as he wrote to Peter Hastings, ‘because I had already “invented” him independently … and wanted an “adventure” on the way’ (Letters, p. 192). His ‘portrait’ of Tom in The Lord of the Rings was indeed an enlargement, but also a transformation, to suit a story which, like Tom himself, grew in the telling and became notably complex.

      The character of Tom Bombadil appealed to Tolkien’s Aunt Jane Neave, who asked him near the beginning of October 1961 if he ‘wouldn’t get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of size of book that we old ’uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents’ (quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), p. 244). Tolkien replied that he thought Jane’s request ‘a good one, not that I feel inclined to write any more about [Tom]. But I think that the original poem (which appeared in the Oxford Magazine long before The Lord of the Rings) might make a pretty booklet of the kind you would like if each verse could be illustrated by Pauline Baynes’, the artist whose drawings had embellished his Farmer Giles of Ham in 1949 and the cover of the Puffin Books Hobbit which had then recently appeared (4 October 1961, Letters, p. 308). On 11 October, Tolkien sent this idea to Rayner Unwin, of the publishers George Allen & Unwin, noting that the ‘Bombadil’ poem was ‘very pictorial’, and that if Pauline Baynes ‘could be induced to illustrate it, it might do well’ (Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins, hereafter ‘A&U archive’; quoted in Scull and Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (2006), p. 579).

      Unwin agreed, but asked Tolkien to collect other occasional verses, in order to make up a book of a length reasonable for sales. Tolkien had in mind a small volume like The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter; nonetheless, by 15 November, as he wrote to Unwin, he ‘made a search, as far as time allowed, and had copies made of any poems that might conceivably see the light or (somewhat tidied up) be presented again. The harvest is not rich, for one thing there is not much that really goes together with Tom Bombadil.’ Among the poems gathered up were Errantry and The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon, ‘which might go together’. ‘About the others’, he continued, referring to Perry-the-Winkle, The Sea-Bell, The Hoard, and The Dragon’s Visit, ‘I am altogether doubtful; I do not even know if they have any virtue at all, by themselves or in a series’ (Letters, p. 309).

      Writing on 15 November also to Jane Neave, Tolkien referred to ‘raking up’ and ‘refurbishing’ verses published in obscure places, some of which he sent to her, and to the ‘Hey Diddle song and the Troll Sat Alone’ (The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late and The Stone Troll), both of which he had included in The Lord of the Rings (quoted in Christie’s auction catalogue, 2 December 2003, p. 25). A week later, he wrote again to Aunt Jane, having ‘enjoyed myself very much digging out these old half-forgotten things and rubbing them up. All the more because there are other and duller things that I ought to have been doing. At any rate they have had you as an audience. Printed publication is, I fear, very unlikely’ (22 November, Letters, p. 309). With this letter, he enclosed a copy of another poem, Princess Mee.

      Rayner Unwin sent copies of the verses he had received to Pauline Baynes, and Tolkien