“Old Tom Bombadil is an armadillo!”

Notes from The Grey Havens on Tolkien’s most confounding character—with asides on Narnia and Never-Land

Definitely not crushing the lilies, or the foxgloves

“An armadillo” is not, of course, the lyric that Tom sang in his signature song—but that’s how our youngest, then six years old, sang it one day, using the silly melody that I made up decades ago the first time I read The Lord of the Rings aloud to my children. (Or maybe I had already made up the melody in my head years before—I have no idea.) The bottom line is, we have no idea what Tom Bombadil is. Probably not an armadillo, but who really knows?

Here at The Grey Havens—as we call the Greydanus homestead—we are huge Tolkien fans (but I repeat myself). Over the years it has become a Grey Havens tradition on the kids’ birthdays for me to break out the dry-erase markers and create celebratory whiteboard designs in some way reflecting the birthday child’s interests or recent activities. The whiteboard above (for James, a particularly keen Tolkien fan, on his 20th birthday) represents Tom Bombadil dancing merrily in the forest. (Negative space shapes the image into “20.” Very unhappily I didn’t have a yellow dry-erase marker—they’re hard to come by—and had to use orange for Tom’s yellow boots. Dry-erase markers are a blunt instrument, but I try to make the whiteboards as much fun as I can.)

What you see when you enter our home. A lovely play on our last name by way of an allusion to source material that looms large in our hearts; a name redolent, for Tolkien fans, both of the sadness and impermanence of this world and of the enduring joy to which our hearts turn.

(Incidentally, as I’ve been trying to think of a better name for this publication than “All Things SDG,” one that inevitably occurred to me was “The Grey Havens.” Of course “SDG” has some name recognition at this point, and “The Grey Havens” doesn’t mean me to most people who know me. Also, as a friend remarked, there are a lot of Tolkien-themed sites out there, and this site is no more than occasionally in Tolkien’s orbit. So, I dunno. What do you think?)

As much as I love Middle-earth, Tolkien is not, of course, beyond criticism—and one frequent target of criticism, from even serious Tolkien fans, is Tom Bombadil. Among the milder critiques I’ve heard was that of a friend who remarked, “I don’t dislike Tom Bombadil, but I’ve always thought he made about as much sense as Father Christmas in Narnia. Change my mind.” (This was in response to the meme below.)

How Tolkien would have reacted to a comparison of Tom Bombadil to “Father Christmas in Narnia,” I can’t begin to imagine! If there was one thing Tolkien disliked about Narnia—and, to be fair, Tolkien’s ambivalence about his friend C.S. Lewis’s popular children’s books has been overstated, as Holly Ordway has gratifyingly shown in Tolkien’s Modern Reading—it was Lewis’s grab-bag assemblage of differing mythologies and influences: Greco-Roman and Nordic mythology, Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame, Genesis and Revelation and the Gospels, Hans Christian Anderson, Arthurian legend, and much more.

In Lewis’s seven slender volumes, Bacchus and Silenus, talking beasts and walking trees, lamp-posts and sewing machines, rumors of Atlantis and Morgan le Fay, and even Father Time and Father Christmas all jostle hugger-mugger, without apology. For Tolkien, this was artistic sloppiness. He felt strongly, on aesthetic grounds, that a lamp-post in fairy-land is an affront, and that nymphs and dryads do not belong in the same world, let alone the same story, as Father Christmas or sewing beavers.

To this objection Lewis had an answer: He argued that all these diverse creatures do happily coexist, in our minds! Tolkien’s retort: “Not in mine, or at least not at the same time.”

As an aside, Lewis was not the first British fantasist to write about a composite fairyland made up of, and indeed corresponding to, all the bits and pieces of other stories and other worlds milling about in one’s mind. He wasn’t even the first to imagine such a world as a magical realm accessible only by children, from which those who have grown beyond a certain point are barred. Here is how J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, described the Neverland, a magical realm with tiny fairies (just the sort Tolkien detested), Caribbean pirates, American Indians, mermaids, crocodiles, flying “lost” boys, flying pirate ships, detachable shadows, talking Never Birds, and a boy named Pan:

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still. (J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, chapter 1)

The quote is significant because it illustrates precisely what Lewis was doing in The Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia is in a way Lewis’s Neverland, not just in the sense that it is his created fairyland, but also in the sense that it is—as his own rebuttal to Tolkien’s objection indicates—a “map” (if a partial one) of his mind, or his imagination.

Tolkien, of course, was doing something quite different in Middle-earth. He had many influences, both ancient and modern, from Beowulf and the Germanic heroic tradition to H. Rider Haggard and William Morris—but his creative process involved reimagining and repurposing the things he borrowed into a unified whole. Or, if not necessarily unified, at least into a thing with its own essential character, existing only in a literary corpus crafted by Tolkien himself, however many traditions and ancient voices he created for it. Whether Arda, the world, was originally created round or flat by Eru Ilúvatar was a question to which Tolkien’s legendarium gave different answers, but nothing went into the legendarium, so to speak, ready-made.

In any case, as a Narnia fan who heartily dissents from Tolkien’s objections to Lewis’s very different project of cheerful pastiche, I feel strongly that that Father Christmas absolutely belongs in Narnia—but it must be admitted, of course, that Father Christmas is not native to the Narnian world. In The Lord of the Rings, everything is in principle “native” to Tolkien’s world, or at least “naturalized” by Tolkien’s creative process. In theory, anyway; it’s certainly possible to question whether some things Tolkien borrowed were successfully integrated with his overall vision.

With Tom Bombadil, on the other hand, we have a figure that was not borrowed from anywhere at all—a figure, I wrote to my friend, “so deeply and essentially a creature of Tolkien’s mythopoeic imagination, so close to the center of Tolkien’s inspiration and genius, and clearly so dear to his heart, that if you don’t love Bombadil, I think it’s safe to say your love of Tolkien’s work is at least qualified.”

Which is not, of course, the same as saying that Bombadil necessarily works in The Fellowship of the Ring! A riposte from another friend:

If Stephen King wrote a cheery children’s book and inserted a terrifying, demonic monster into two pages of that otherwise cheery book, you could rightly say that it the monster was “deeply and essentially a creature of King’s mythopoeic imagination, so close to the center of King’s inspiration and genius, and clearly so dear to his heart...” but it still wouldn’t belong in that book.

Oh dear. What can be said to this? Some thoughts:

1. To begin with, while a “terrifying, demonic monster” certainly might be out of place in what would otherwise appear to be a “cheery children’s book,” startling tonal shifts are not necessarily a damaging or disqualifying characteristic in a work! On the contrary, they can be an important element in a work with a deeper underlying unity. Tonal shifts are tricky and creatively fraught, but they’re not automatically bad. They can be deliberate, and even when they aren’t deliberate they don’t necessarily undermine or harm the integrity of a complex work.
    

2. There is no question that Tolkien’s writings on Middle-earth developed and changed tonally as Tolkien worked on it. In particular, there is an important shift from The Hobbit, with its simple, lighthearted, quick-moving, storybook narrative, to The Lord of the Rings, with its more ambitious epic grandeur, higher stakes, and deeper tragedy.
   
   Actually, this is oversimplifying, because the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring are actually tonally similar to The Hobbit, and the tone of the first book changes as it progresses. The fully mature tone of the work emerges perhaps in the second half of Fellowship at Elrond’s council, and sets the tone for the rest of the work.
    

3. Although tonal shifts can be a deliberate artistic effect, this shift was a natural evolution in Tolkien’s ambitions and approach during the creative process. It was something Tolkien was aware of, moreover, and not entirely comfortable with. In fact, Tolkien went on to made some revisions to The Hobbit, reflecting his later thought. (For example, he made Gollum a darker character, and his encounter with Bilbo more perilous and ambiguous, based on his later conception of the corrupting power of the Ring.)
   
   Tolkien even went on to attempt a more comprehensive attempt to rewrite The Hobbit in the spirit of The Lord of the Rings. This was soon abandoned, though, when his friends prevailed upon him to allow the work to be what it was when he wrote it. So: The tonal shift from The Hobbit, even The Hobbit as we have it, and the early chapters of Fellowship to the dominant tone of The Lord of the Rings, is an essential part of the work as we have it.
    

4. Tom Bombadil, astride the early chapters of Fellowship, is emblematic, certainly, of the creative flux of the work at that point. The hobbits’ encounter with Bombadil reminds me in some ways of Bilbo and the dwarves’ encounter with Beorn, and while it is certainly jarring to think of Bombadil in the same breath as Denethor, say, i don’t find him jarring next to Beorn.
   
   Had The Lord of the Rings continued in the vein of the early chapters of Fellowship, would Bombadil be considered jarring? I think not—and this becomes clearer the more we examine Bombadil’s roots and that of Middle-earth as a whole, and their place in Tolkien’s imagination and mythopoeia. They are not disparate, as a demonic monster might appear to be (and might well be in fact) in what would otherwise seem a cheery children’s book. They are deeply linked—and the ties are obvious.
   
   Obvious how? A few important points:
    

   1. Bombadil’s silly songs are of a piece with other nonsensical verse in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. “Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!” comes from the same place in Tolkien’s heart as Bilbo’s “Attercop! Attercop!” and the “O! tril-lil-lil-lolly / the valley is jolly, ha! ha!” from the elves of Rivendell (who aren’t half so solemn in The Hobbit as they they later become). Nor are Bombadil’s songs the last gasp of such silliness! As late as the Prancing Pony, we get a giddy Frodo reciting Bilbo’s “The Man in the Moon” with its “deedle-dum-diddle” and even “hey-diddle-diddle” and the preposterous conceit that the familiar nursery-rhyme images of the cow jumping over the moon, the laughing dog, and the dish running off with the spoon come down to us from Bilbo himself!

   2. Bombadil’s closeness to the earth and the natural world of his realm links him not only to characters from Treebeard to the elves to hobbits themselves, but also to the overall love of the countryside and the nostalgia for its loss saturating The Lord of the Rings. In letters, in fact, Tolkien identified Goldberry with the seasonal change and Bombadil with the vanishing English countryside. This ties the characters directly to the themes and inspiration of The Lord of the Rings and Middle-earth as a whole.

   3. Tom’s pure benevolence, his freedom from any influence of the enemy, and his great antiquity, his connection to Middle-earth from its prelapsarian beginnings (to “the dark under the stars when it was fearless — before the Dark Lord came from Outside”) link him to the essential goodness of creation in itself. As the star that Sam sees in the heavens from the plain of Udûn in Mordor is a fleeting icon of “light and high beauty for ever beyond [the] reach” of the “small and passing” Shadow, so Bombadil is a memory of the foundations of Arda and of Eä itself in the Music of the Ainur in the plan of Eru Ilúvatar. In some way the Shadow does not touch him, as it did not touch Lothlórien.

   4. Bombadil embodies mystery as well as benevolence. If he cannot be fully explained, this is not because he doesn’t make sense, but because he is too primal, too fundamental, too close to the inspirations of Middle-earth permit explanation. When Gandalf said to Frodo that “I can put it no plainer” than to say that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, the reason he could put it no plainer was not that Tolkien had no fuller explanation in mind, but that to put it into words would shatter the spirit of the work. This is, in fact, precisely what Tolkien said of Bombadil: that some things must remain mysterious in any narrative, “especially if an explanation really exists.”

Bottom line: Bombadil is part and parcel of Middle-earth, as deeply a part of it as Gandalf, hobbits, or the One Ring.

None of this means you have to like him or think that he serves the work! Tolkien was an imperfect artist, and anyone is free to consider Bombadil a horrendous creative mistake. Just be clear, though, that if you reject Bombadil, you are rejecting something very close to the center of Middle-earth, not a foreign conceit wedged into the work because Tolkien had nowhere else to put it, or something. Bombadil belongs.