Summary — The House of Tom Bombadil
Tom Bombadil’s house is warm and comforting. The presence
of Goldberry, Tom’s wife, moves Frodo in a way similar to that of
the Elves, but in a homier, less rarefied fashion. Frodo asks Goldberry who
Tom is, and she replies somewhat mysteriously that Tom is “Master
of wood, water and hill.” Tom leads the hobbits to their rooms,
where they wash up before a hearty dinner. That night, Frodo dreams
of a great tower of stone and a man standing atop it. The man raises
his staff, and a giant eagle swoops down and carries him away. Then
the dream is filled with the sounds of hooves. Pippin and Merry
also have troubling dreams, but they hear the voice of Tom Bombadil
in their sleep and are comforted.
The next day is rainy. With relief, the hobbits accept
Tom’s invitation to stay another day before starting out again.
All day they sit at Tom’s feet as he tells them stories about the
Old Forest, how it resented the animals and people that roamed through
it and hacked down and burned trees. Then Tom tells them of the
cities that rose and fell on the hills near his house, which have
left only crumbled ramparts on the hilltops and grave mounds haunted
by spirits called Barrow-wights. Then Tom’s story meanders back
in time to the very beginnings of Middle-earth. When the story ends,
Frodo asks Tom who he is. Tom answers simply that he is “Eldest”—he
is older than everything else in Middle-earth, and he even remembers
the time before Sauron.
The group eats a dinner even better than the last. Afterward, Goldberry
sings for them, and Tom asks Frodo about his journey. Tom has already
heard much from Gildor and from Farmer Maggot, whom he greatly respects.
Tom asks to see the Ring. To everyone’s surprise, when he puts it
on his little finger, he does not disappear. Tom spins the Ring
in the air and makes it disappear, but then smilingly hands it back
to Frodo.
Frodo feels suspicious and a bit annoyed at Tom. To make
sure Tom has given him back the real Ring, Frodo puts it on his
finger—the first time he has done so. Frodo does indeed disappear,
but when he creeps toward the door, Tom seems able to see him nonetheless. Tom
calls out to Frodo to take off the Ring and come back. Tom tells the
hobbits that it will be sunny the next day. He warns them to steer clear
of the barrows (burial mounds) and teaches them a rhyme to sing
if they run into trouble.
Analysis
If Tom Bombadil does not quite seem to fit with the rest
of the novel thus far, it may be because Tolkien created the character
as early as 1933, years before he began The
Lord of the Rings. Tolkien clearly liked the idea of Tom,
and he even tossed around the prospect of making Tom the hero of
the sequel to The Hobbit. (Eventually Tolkien would
write The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a collection
of poems, in 1961.) Ultimately, Tolkien ended
up transplanting Tom into The Lord of the Rings. However,
as the novel progresses and grows darker, Tom, in retrospect, may
seem to belong more in the children’s story of The Hobbit than
in the more threatening world of The Lord of the Rings. Nonetheless,
Tolkien did not regret his decision to keep Tom in the final edit
of The Lord of the Rings; the author later said,
“I kept [Tom] in, and as he was, because he represents certain things
otherwise left out.”
These “certain things” Tom represents are a matter of
great debate among Tolkien scholars, as Tom is indeed a mysterious
figure. Perhaps the only thing we know definitively about him is
that he is joyously immune to the power of the Ring, and therefore
a unique, neutral third party in the wider landscape of the War
of the Ring that is to come. Tom is something like a male personification
of Mother Nature, the master of the land and its creatures, albeit
only within his own territory. He clearly has great powers, and
the Ring does not affect him, perhaps because he was around before
Sauron ever came to Middle-earth. However, Tom refuses to go with
the hobbits to fight Sauron, and we get the feeling that Tom’s power
has perhaps diminished somewhat in the later ages of Middle-earth. Tom’s
presence, like that of the Elves, contributes to the overall tone of
elegy in The Lord of the Rings, a sadness for the
lost past. Like the Elves, Tom has a power that is closely linked
to nature, but with Tom the link is even more explicit. Frodo’s
feeling when he first steps into Tom’s house—that the place has
a demeanor that is “less keen and lofty,” but “deeper”—suggests
this distinction between Tom and the Elves.
