Transcript
[0:00] Hello. Welcome to a Mythmakers Sidecast, Lord of the Rings, an author's journey. My name is Julia Golding, and in these episodes, I'm taking us through my favorite book, The Lord of the Rings, looking at it from a writer's perspective. And today we have reached chapter seven in the Fellowship of the Ring. That is the chapter called In the House of Tom Bombadil. Right, well, this is a chapter which will be completely unfamiliar to anybody who only knows the story from the films, because Tom Bombadil has been jumped over by most people who have told the story because there is a feeling that he doesn't fit. I was looking at this at the end of the last episode. There are things about Tom which make him unlike any other character in the story. And one of the things that emerged for me when I was looking again at this chapter for this sidecast is how, in a way, he is exceptional.
[1:07] But he's also more Middle-earthy than anybody else.
[1:12] And so I've got a renewed appreciation for him. It's almost as if Tolkien has put in, in his early chapters, through the synthesis of his imagination, a character who is a kind of touchstone. Because you remember, all the elves want to go west. That's their ultimate destination. They may love Middle-earth, but they're not here for the duration. They're heading out. else. Whereas Tom, as we see, is in a way the first and last of everything that goes on in Middle-earth, the Alpha and the Omega. And those religious overtones, I think, are entirely deliberate.
[1:49] Anyway, let's think about it in terms of where we are in the story. So we're emerging from the frightening episode with the willow tree and also a rather spooky journey through the old forest because Tom Bombadil has gone ahead but then we get this break we've entered into one of those little havens that Tolkien gives us in the story you can probably think of the others we've got the haven of Rivendell even the Inn at Bree which to a certain extent is a bit of a haven, but certainly Rivendell and Lothlorien and also one of my favorite is Ithilien the episode when Frodo and Sam meet Faramir, but that's jumping way ahead. We're not anywhere near that part yet.
[2:41] And the house of Tom Bombadil is a haven. And this is given to us in very clear language. It's the language of generosity. Note he calls it the wide stone threshold, not a narrow gate. It's wide and it's full of the light of lamps and many candles. So we get a sense of the doors being open, the lights are on, and everybody is welcome inside.
[3:06] So the first person we meet in Tom Bombadil's house is actually Goldberry. And I want to point out here one of those stylistic ticks that Tolkien has, which is to invert the normal sentence structure. English is quite flexible. It's fine to do this. But it gives, in this case, a more, I suppose, more storytelling, more portentous introduction. Introduction, so you could have said, in a chair sat a woman, but we have to wait. It's like we're approaching her. The sentence makes us approach her slowly with appreciation.
[3:46] In a chair at the far side of the room facing the outer door sat a woman. And we land like in front of her, brought to her very feet. And he uses this quite often in the speech of characters of a higher register, the sort of rangers and wizards and Denethor. They quite often have an inversion of speech which feels to us almost a little bit medieval. It's something more less like the natural speech patterns of the hobbits. And when the hobbits start doing it you know they're sort of acting up to their company anyway um one of the ways to learn about this is just to read out that paragraph to yourself because it goes on to a lovely description of what she's wearing all the time making her comparisons to things to do with the river and river foliage because she is in a way a river personified she is the river daughter quite what a river daughter is we are never really told but but we get the sense that she isn't human, she isn't an elf, she has come out of the natural world. She's the spirit of the local river in some way.
[5:05] And I don't think we need to totally understand it because it's part of being mysterious, which is the heart of Tom and Goldberry. There are things in nature we as humans slash hobbits never get to understand completely. We also see all the way through this chapter just how they are reflections of each other. So she, like Tom, is impetuous and quick. She moves, she jumps, she leaps, and her speech falls into a similar pattern to his. And she also is depicted laughing.
[5:41] So his and her, you can imagine they have matching pyjama sets as well. They are very much made for each other.
[5:49] I think it's worth pausing here that this is probably, aside from the odd mention of someone like Labilia, Sackville Baggins, this is the first time we meet a woman. Oh, there was Mrs. Maggot, wasn't there? But she was very much just serving supper.
[6:04] But in this case, the first proper introduction to a woman we get, a woman who's got her own opinions and extended things to say. And we note that Tolkien doesn't do ordinary run-of-the-mill women. In um they're all queenly with the exception of yoris and we have to wait all the way through to uh return of the king before we meet her it's just what you get with tolkien um that's his world anyway back to goldberry's welcome note that her speech patterns have the rhythm of something like an incantation or a song or a poem. And they act like a counter charm to the evil that they've just passed through. And we also have the almost religious banishing. You can imagine it a bit like a priest coming in and blessing a house, because obviously Tolkien had a Roman Catholic upbringing. But there's a sense of she's sprinkling her holy water and getting rid of all the bad vibes in our terminology with her language and her speech. Speech has power in the Goldberry and Tom Bombadil world.
[7:23] So Tolkien is saying they're not elves, and he makes this very clear because he talks about the kind of magic they do have. And there's this intriguing phrase that the magic is less keen and lofty than the elves, deeper and nearer to mortal hearts, marvellous and yet not strange. Range and this connects to what I was saying that in a way Tom Bombadil and Goldberry are even more of Middle-earth than the elves. They have every right to be there and they will still be there when everybody else has come and gone and just on a bit of character development here we see that Frodo again is the first to find the right words and he also shows his memory for verse because he He repeats the song they heard from Tom Bombadil on the path near the willow. He does have this ability to rise to the occasion, Frodo. And you can see why he does become the friend of wizards and kings, because there is something noble in the way he conducts himself in courts. This is the court, in the sense of king and queen, of Tom and Goldberry. And he is the approaching ambassador from the Shire, with the right words. There's always something a little bit finer about Frodo, which others do also remark on.
[8:48] So what I like about Tom and Goldberry and the way they're imagined is the association with the seasons. Goldberry is very much spring and summer, which hops over to spring again, which is referenced in the little rhyme about her. There's almost a sense that if you went to see her in winter, would she be awake? Would she be there? Would she be hibernating? She's associated with those seasons. So she's surrounded by the last of the lilies and her colors are all spring-like colors they're green they're white they're silver and her hair is sort of golden fair these are the colors which we also will associate with Galadriel there's a little bit of a repeat going on here but the effect with her isn't the ethereal starlight feel of a Galadriel it's very much a spring enduring and earthy feel and frodo asks her because she seems friendly and approachable and has got rid of their fears they ask the key question that hovers over this chapter and will come up again which is who is tom bombardier now critics have been trying to answer this one for many years and of course one answer is well tom bombardier is a character based on a children's toy made who was entered into the story by Tolkien to please his family.
[10:14] Yeah, that's one perfectly reasonable answer. But in terms of the lore, Tom Bombadil is, I think we're coming to see, the voice of Middle-earth is like the natural world personified speaking out in a way that no other character does. Yes. And Goldberry's answer is almost biblical. Well, it is biblical because her first answer is, he is.
[10:47] Now, if you know your Genesis and your Bible, that I am, he is, is attributed only to God.
[10:58] So it's probably maybe talking, you thought, hang on a minute.
[11:01] I don't want to go too far down that road. Road so goldberry goes on to give it a bit of a gloss she says that he is master of wood water and hill a bit like adam and eve in fact there's something very adam and evie about the two of them a bit like adam he's in charge but he doesn't possess he's in charge of the garden but he he's there to tend it and name it and talk to it but he's not there to exploit it or possess it and that lack of the hold of worldly goods over him is what makes him truly free and what you're seeing here is a version of living which is in harmony with nature and is totally free it's a beautiful image of the possibility of living in the natural world in balance so that his mastery is absolutely the opposite kind of mastery to sauron which is all about possessing.
[11:59] And sauron's ring makes the person who wears it want to also possess like a dragon acquire everything swallow it up in themselves whereas Tom Bombadil wants everything to be their own thing so if you're trying to answer the question of why have this chapter I think it's this thematic opposite that we understand more what the darkness of Sauron is if we understand what the lightness of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry means.
[12:31] So I said that Goldberry is here associated with spring and summer. We also get Tom coming in associated with autumn. He moves with the season. He comes in crowned with autumn leaves. And also note the rhythm of everything he says and the simple nouns and plain adjectives that he uses. They're just colours and the word ripe for the apples. It all seems incredibly wholesome. there's nothing sophisticated it's rustic the the scene where i sometimes find my sort of taste buds reminding me is in beyond's house in the hobbit when they're served the things that beyond tends that his honey his honey cakes there's an element of that rustic charm which is that down-to-earth magic here of Tom and Goldberry. And the sentence pattern is, it feels like rocking to and fro. Try reading it out, you'll see what I mean. They are, of all the characters, aside from Gollum, they are the ones with the most.
[13:44] Idiosyncratic speech pattern i guess maybe treebeard also has something very unique in his sort of prolix nature yeah so i'll allow him into the group so we've got tom and goldberry with this rocking rhythm and if you ever hear an audio version of it you'll find that the readers are almost trying to sing it as they speak it it's well worth reading it aloud yourself and then you've got obviously Gollum's incredible speech which I'm looking forward to exploring how that's put together and Treebeard's with his long pauses and his run of words so he runs at things and they're long extensions whereas Goldberry and Tom are sort of bounding, leaping.
[14:33] Echoing rhyming so it's very distinct another thing i noticed here is this is the first place they stop outside the shire and there's something very much like a hobbit hole in this house it doesn't seem to have an upstairs maybe it does but we don't go upstairs and the kind of hearth the food the comfortable bedrooms the facilities for washing it does seem very close to the shire in the way it's set up. And maybe Tom was the architectural consultant on how they actually lived in the Shire, but there seems to be a real kinship between Tom and the hobbits just in the way he lives, which means it's not so very foreign.
[15:18] And note that even in the furnishings, we're still harping on these colours of yellow, green, white. Those words are being struck like a bell again and again. And we even get green slippers, which I would rather fancy a pair of. And the spell that this house is weaving, a totally benign spell, affects the hobbits. And we get this charming description of them sitting at supper and they all almost seem to be singing as they speak. And this is one of the really strong talents of the many, many talents of Tolkien, is this ability to make an atmosphere of a place feel so real that we all feel as though we could go for a walk in middle earth and visit it and this is how he does it you see his characters not just passing through a place they become the place they take it on board they are their behavior changes in those places and we are sort of living through them vicariously and we feel what they are feeling very brilliantly done then there's a transition in this chapter where we We started off with all the lights were on.
[16:33] And now, as the mood changes, the light concentrates around the hearth. And this is the shift to the storytelling.
[16:42] And Goldberry, at this point, leaves them. And there's this wonderful description that it's almost as if when she leaves them, she transforms back to being the river. I sometimes wonder if she is actually really real. She almost feels like a hallucination at times. But anyway, so when she leaves, the sound of her footsteps was like a stream falling gently away downhill over cool stones in the quiet of night. Just a little sidebar, if you're watching the Rings of Power series, Goldberry appears in that off screen. I don't know if she's going to pitch up in later episodes, but I can see why they chose to do that, because there is something...
[17:27] She does seem to vanish um ebb and flow which is great for a river daughter anyway tom very much stays with them and he begins to tell them tales giving them the answers to some of their questions without them even having to ask ask for them and what i think i'd want to point out here is the way Tom talks about himself. He talks about we, and he also talks about himself in the third person. And what I think, you'd sometimes say that this is not the royal we, it's as though he cannot think of himself separate from the world in which he lives. It could, of course, be him and Goldberry, but you suspect it's also him and all his ponies, plus all the creatures and the trees, that that's the we he's talking about. And when he's talking about himself in the third person, I get the impression here that the mindset behind that is his identity is spread beyond himself.
[18:30] So Tolkien has created a unique version of the third person here, a person talking about himself, which isn't self-absorbed.
[18:41] And then we get a very good example here of how Tom drifts from speech into verse. He just drifts from one to another. You can see on the page there's two clumps of verse, but it's the second one is most like a conversation because he's giving them the answer to why he was passing the willow tree at that particular time. He says, and that proved well for you, for now I shall no longer go down deep again along the forest water, and so on. This is freshly minted verse in answer to the particular thing that happened today. He lives on this cusp where speech is song and song is speech. And that's when Frodo asks about more information about the willow man. But mary and pippin who have had the worst of the experience being trapped inside the tree don't want any dark thoughts before bed very sensibly and tom agrees with them and he sort of sends them off to bed and note what he does here is a bit like the the charm that goldberry wove when they first arrived he does this thing where he speaks in imperatives to them he tells them to sleep till the morning light rest on the pillow and those kind of imperatives particularly the double one two things um where he says do this do that he uses that same.
[20:10] Formulation to quell the willow tree and to defeat the barrow white it's like it's the way he He exercises his power, do this, do that, but not, it always seems not bossy. It's just, oh yeah, that's the right thing to do. That's, that's the, that's the sane, good thing to do. So it's no, I think it'd be a jolly good idea if you go up to bed now. It's right, go up to bed. Heed no nightly noise.
[20:39] So now we get the break between the two days that we spend in Tom's house. And that is the nighttime dreams. Tolkien often uses dreams to foreshadow and reflect on the themes in his story. And this is one of them, actually one of the most extended of them, because we get three of the Fellowship having a dream.
[21:04] Frodo's dream is different because he dreams of Gandalf escaping from Isengard, but we don't know the meaning of this until later. We don't know who exactly is escaping though there are some elements here which would lead us to think of it as being Gandalf. And we don't really know anything about Isengard at this stage, so it's a glimpse of a teaser for what's going to come later and possibly a hint at why Gandalf isn't there. We also learned it doesn't happen on the same night as the events happen so it's a dream that comes to him later after the events have happened but it's a way of connecting the different parts of the story which as this story does braid and spread out dreams are one of the ways that the characters are connected and i'm just a little side note i want to highlight here is the wonderful description of the wolves yammering that's a great word i don't know if that is the wolves yammer but i know exactly what he means by that it's probably got some great etymological origin but the perfect word to describe the walls of eisenhardt mary and pippin what's the purpose of their dreams well they're both kind of um ptsd dreams um pippin dreams of tweak hands and mary dreams of drowning Although, of course, it was Frodo who had the near drowning experience.
[22:32] But what this is about is to say that the power of Goldberry's words come to them like the soothing of a frightened child. And this does make us feel there is a responsible adult in the room element here. Still slightly the nursery tale, the tale for the nursery here. You don't need to worry too much because the older maternal figure saying, don't worry, no one's going to get near you, it still has the power and dispels the daytime fears. And then, of course, we get a little chuckle that Sam slept like a log. If, as content as a log, if logs are contented. Yeah, we get you, Sam.
[23:22] Now we move into the second day and here we get one of those delicious weather transitions that we get in Tolkien. And this is a transition to a rainy day. It's a fabulous description. Love it. But I want to just pick out one part of a sentence which sums it up. It's brilliant. Frodo's looking out the window just to see if there's any hoof marks or anything like that. It's all plain and clear. There was no riders near the house. But anyway, he gets he gets a good view of the beans the red flowers on the beans began to glow against the wet green leaves now i don't know how much sense this makes to people around the world but tolkien was a keen gardener and one of the most commonly grown kind of beans here is the wonderful runner bean and there probably are other beans with red flowers but that's the one i remember from growing They climb up structures like tentpole-type structures, and they have a very, very solid green colour with this red, red colour.
[24:33] They're very small flowers, but Tolkien is absolutely right. On a dull day, these red flowers do glow. There's probably some light signature in them that attracts insects, pollinators. But he has captured brilliantly what it's like to be out in a country garden on a dull day in england of which there are many anyway tong comes in from leaping on the hilltops we sense that he is bigger than his person there is a feeling that we don't we don't see him doing that but we We totally believe he could. I think in this, he feels almost godlike in a demigod way. And we sense he has his powers barely kept in, barely bridled. That thing about not getting wet, you know, being able to move amongst the raindrops not falling on him. He's also aware. He's aware they had a bad night. And he's ready to dispel it with a jolly good breakfast.
[25:39] There's one other, as well as the red beans, I just want to point out the chalky path detail. So I live on the Downs, just south of Oxford, and the Downs, which Tolkien knew and loved, and we are in Down land, because that's where we're going, to the Barrow Downs, are made of chalk. And when it rains, indeed, the chalky paths do become like milky in the rain. They're also really slippery, pretty dangerous paths in the rain. But it's a wonderful piece of observation and the rainy day gives the hobbits the excuse to stay for an extra day in this haven with tom and goldberry and of course they sit down and tell stories of course they do but this i think is one of my favorite tale-telling exchanges here because, they tell you so much about the character just note we don't hear all the stories that tom tells But it's notable that the way it's described is he tells them stories of evil things and good things, things friendly and things unfriendly, cruel things and kind things, and secrets hidden under brambles.
[26:55] Tom lives in a world of things. He's not in some half other world. The elves have access to this sort of special plane almost which is their being and their magic Tom is rooted in things.
[27:12] And it's not without purpose what's clear is that he's telling them the things they need to know And he goes on to tell them about how the wood feels about what's happening in the wide world and how we meet its orcs and others who are doing this and probably humans too. But he has the wonderful line how the trees are filled with hatred for those that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning, destroyers and usurpers. So how we look to the trees and the things planted in the soil. And that line, in case you think it sounds familiar, is given to Treebeard in the Peter Jackson version. And in fact, a lot of the best stuff in the Treebeard in the film comes from these Tom Bombadil sections.
[28:13] So let's give them back in our imagination to Tom, because it's a Tom thought rather than a treebeard thought. And he gets down to describing the great willow and its dominion over all of the forest. And we get to understand that, of course, they always were going to end there. What the little hobbits could not stop was that confrontation. And we get a sense of how powerful the willow is. It's interesting to note that tom's theory of the trees or talking to each other and communicating with each other is of course where biology has reached with trees and the amazing ways that trees, release certain chemicals and pollen and all sorts of things to communicate so tolkien's way ahead here or tom his character tom is but if the willow is so powerful it makes you you think how much more powerful tom is because he is able to bring that great willow under his control by just telling it off basically he told it off slapped it on the side with a stick and it released the hobbits so we've left behind that particular threat and then we get this absolutely fabulous passage which in my version is on page 141 i don't know if your edition is the same but it's the what i'm calling here the fast forward of history on the barrow downs.
[29:40] Tolkien doesn't let us forget, which is what's just over the horizon.
[29:44] And oh, it's just, just wonderful. 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 onto the downs. So he leads us there. 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 so here we've got the idea that the sun is young because tom existed before the sun was made in the cosmology of Middle Earth and that the kings are little and their wars, which was obviously vast and of huge importance to their history and their timeline, feel small to Tom and to the Barrowdowns. There was victory and defeat and towers fell, fortresses were burned and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the buyers of dead kings and queens and mounds covered them and the stone doors were shut and the grass grew over all.
[31:10] Sheep walked for a while biting the grass but soon the hills were empty again. We start with sheep, we go back to sheep. I just love this passage. In fact, we have a tradition in our family of reading Lord of the Rings to our children when they get to an age when they can appreciate it and I always look forward to reading this passage it's poetry it is absolutely wonderful and then we get the danger a shadow came out of dark places far away and the bones were stirred in the mound, barrow whites walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers and gold chains in the wind stone rings green grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight.
[31:56] I'm not going to gloss that. It's perfect. Just go back and enjoy it and linger on that because it's a wonderful sense of the history of Middle-earth but also
[32:10] set within the frame where it's just a tiny episode against a much bigger world. And that is the strength of Tolkien's world-building. It's all about revealing new vistas further and further away. And he goes on. It's like listening to a symphony of stories which passes from mood to mood. You know how a symphony moves through different fast sections and slow sections and it encapsulates so much emotion. That's what Tom's storytelling is like.
[32:42] And it ends, keeps going and ends on this absolutely wonderful final note, which is, so they're going back in time. Still on and back tom went singing out into ancient starlight when only the elf sires were awake and we fall into one of the most beautiful silences in tolkien and i love that use of silence that words fail and everybody is just sitting there breathless and that's when frodo comes in with a repeat of that question he's been told that tom is the master so he uses that title but he still doesn't understand it's it feels like a a kind of question that the disciples asked jesus in the gospels who are you master i can't think of another moment in lord of the rings quite like this there is reverence for gladriel definitely and frodo again is the one, marveling at her and her power but that who are you yeah maybe when gandalf comes back there is that sense of who are you really but this is i think the most powerful of all those moments, and just like with goldberry's answer he can he says this is tom says only, answer to that question is your name and he adds to master eldest.
[34:05] Is a interesting the lord of the rings is full of very old things treebeard elves but tom bombadil is the oldest i guess the valar are even older because they existed before the world but without them being around tom is the eldest and then we have a transition away from this It's quiet, a bit like the Council of Elrond, a long section of information, more beautifully, more poetically given in this case, and shorter.
[34:41] But then we get a movement to something else. We get a movement to a meal. Of course we do.
[34:47] And here we get a wonderful image of a very equal marriage, just set out here and laying the table. They're both weaving around each other with the ease of people who know each other very well note here the coloring again goldberry is in silver and white with shoes like fish's mail, mail as in chain mail um you've got that heraldic feel but it's also really earthy because it's fish something you know in a in a in a stream you're going to get fish so it connects to her origins but also that male idea it's not fish's scales it's fish's male elevates her to the the lady of legend and tom here is in clean blue with rain wash that rain wash blue of forget-me-nots and green stockings blue and green and we can see why tom and goldberry seem to like the hobbits because they're very good guests they have honest appetites and they're happy cheerful and they seemingly have no guile and we hear that uh goldberry's songs here that she sings them she it's her turn for do some speaking her songs are described like rivers.
[36:04] We get a little bit more information from Tom as they have a sort of post-prandial pause. And he tells us, or tells the hobbits, that he rates Farmer Maggot as being one of the wisest people in the Shire. And I love this touch because we are just outside the borders of the Shire and it brings home how the Shire looks different from the outside. And we also get from the plot another important little note, which is Gildor, who is the elf they met in the Shire. He has passed word that they are traveling on their own. And this is an important plot point to link why people turn up when they do. It's not coincidence Gildor has set the news running. And in Gandalf's absence, other people are stepping up to meet the hobbits and try and help them. And then we get one of those fascinating ring encounters. There are several during the story. We've had Gandalf and we have the ring at the Council of Elrond. And then, of course, we get Galadriel and the temptation of the ring and so on. These moments are pivot points. And this is a very different one to all the others because it's suggesting there is a way of understanding this story where the ring is a nothing.
[37:25] It's not important. It's not important to Tom. He says show me the precious ring it's not precious to him he's using that i think almost ironically jokily and he's he he's one of the very few people to hold the ring and it's comical and alarming he holds it up to his eye the eye of sauron is the big image of how embodied sauron is at this stage in his existence and here we get the blue eye of tom looking through the circle it's sort of scary but funny and then we learn that he doesn't disappear when he puts it on which of course means everyone realizes that the ring has no power over him and potentially he has no power over the ring either. It's just a nothing to him. It's not his business.
[38:26] That comes up again at the council of elrond that you know could he look after it and the answer there is well you just forget about it because it's not in his doesn't fit in his world and his way of behaving and it's noticeable here the bad effect of the ring because it's the first guile the first craftiness creeps into the house because when frodo gets the ring back lovely description here that he feels like a person who has lent something a trinket to a juggler is it really mine have they changed it they swapped it out and he's suspicious so he to test it out he puts it on which he's been told not to do um and he tries to creep away so you get the sense that the ring drives you.
[39:12] Apart it makes you act in a way that isn't being a good guest it sort of against the spirit of the Tom Bombadil house and Tom's response is priceless take off your golden ring your hands more fair without it totally sums up the healthy reaction to the ring is it's better of not wearing it and then we come to the end of this day and as they go to bed we get the last of these words of advice of what to avoid which means of course they're going to walk straight into that danger it's the trailing end that draws us out of this haven to end up on the on the stone barrows but we also know that tom has taught them the get out of jail free song the.
[40:09] Ho Tom Bombadil Tom Bombadillo song. So we're also comforted by the fact that he's not kicking them out with no hope. He's saying, don't go there, but if you do go there, remember this song. So again, it ends on a note of comfort, but I think we can probably all guess what's going to happen tomorrow.
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