Tom Bombadil

The name by which he is generally known in the story is the one used in Buckland and the Shire, and it is also the one he uses of himself, invariably in the third person, as though it were a fixed title rather than a personal address. When Frodo asked him outright what he was, he treated the name as a sufficient reply and offered nothing behind it, which is the nearest thing to a self-definition the narrative records from his own mouth. No people, race or order is assigned to him anywhere in the published books: he is not numbered among Elves, Men, Dwarves or any of the other kindreds the story is otherwise careful to place, and the appendices, which supply lineage for almost every figure of consequence, give him none. What the text does supply is appearance. He is man-shaped and man-sized in a rough way, too big for hobbit-kind and too small for the Big Folk, heavy-booted in yellow, blue-coated, with a brown beard and a battered hat carrying a feather, and he is loud and constantly in motion.

The other recorded names are all names given from outside, by peoples who encountered him without absorbing him. Elrond supplies three of them: among the Elves he was Iarwain Ben-adar, which Elrond glosses as oldest and fatherless; the Dwarves called him Forn; and the Men of the North, Orald. He adds that further names exist beyond these. The Elvish form is the only one with an explanation attached in the text, and it makes two claims at once, priority in time and the absence of any begetter, which is consistent with the fact that no parentage is ever proposed for him. The other two names are rendered, by the translation conventions the appendices set out for Dwarvish and for the speech of Northern Men, in forms that carry the same sense of great antiquity, so that the three independent traditions agree on the single point of his age and are silent on everything else. To these he adds his own claim of being eldest, made in conversation rather than conferred by the narrator, and the story never confirms or disputes it.

No event in Bombadil's life can be dated before the autumn of the year 3018 of the Third Age, when the narrative of the Ring reaches him; everything earlier survives only as testimony, his own and that of others. At his table he told the hobbits that he had been in the land before the river ran and the trees grew, that he could recall the first raindrop and the first acorn, and that he had known the dark beneath the stars while it was still without fear, in the age before the Enemy entered the world from outside. Elrond, speaking later at Rivendell, reached back to a time when the Old Forest was merely the eastern fringe of woodlands that once ran west to the sea, and remembered a walker in those woods and hills who had already been counted old; he added the caution that he could not be certain this was the same being. Elrond also described him as having drawn back into a small country whose borders he had set himself, borders no one else could see. Nothing in the published books fills the intervening ages.

He enters the story on 26 September 3018, when Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin left Crickhollow through the hedge and went down into the Old Forest, drifting despite their intentions into the valley of the Withywindle. Drowsy under the heat and the murmur of the water, they fell asleep against a great willow; Frodo was tipped into the river by a root, and Merry and Pippin were closed into cracks in the trunk. Sam's shouting brought a stranger along the path, singing, carrying water-lilies gathered for his wife. He rebuked the tree in song and ordered it to open, and it obeyed, releasing both hobbits unhurt. He then sent the four on to his house at the foot of the hill above the river, and they arrived at dusk to find Goldberry waiting.

The hobbits stayed two nights, the second of them given over to rain. Their host talked at length, and the talk was mostly of things older than the Shire: the memories and grudges of the trees, the burial mounds on the downs east of his land, the kingdoms of Men who had raised them, and the shadow that came afterwards out of the north and troubled the bones. On the second evening Frodo was asked to produce the Ring. Bombadil handled it without ceremony, slipped it onto his own finger and did not disappear, made it vanish briefly as a piece of sleight of hand, and handed it back; when Frodo put it on to test him, he was seen plainly and told so at once. Before the hobbits left, he taught them a short rhyme by which they might call him if they met trouble while still inside his country.

They set out on the morning of 28 September, warned to keep clear of the old stones and the mounds and to be past the downs before dark. Instead they halted at noon beside a standing stone, slept, and woke into cold fog; they were separated, and Frodo was carried into a barrow. Waking there beside his companions, laid out in white with gold ornaments and a naked sword across their necks, he cut off a crawling hand with a blade from the floor and then remembered the rhyme and used it. Bombadil arrived, sang the mound open, and drove the wight out; the hobbits recovered on the grass in the sunlight. It is the second and last occasion on which he intervenes directly in the story.

He then carried the hoard out of the mound and left it lying open in the grass for any finder, so that the spell on it would be broken, keeping back only a brooch set with blue stones, in memory of a woman who had worn it long before. From the same heap he chose four long knives of Westernesse work and gave one to each hobbit, called their scattered ponies back by the names he had given them, and rode east with the company as far as the Road. There he stopped, saying his country ended at that boundary, told them of the inn at Bree and its keeper, and turned home. The gift outlasted him in the narrative: the blade Merry carried away from the barrow had been forged by the Dúnedain of the North in their long war against Angmar, and when it struck the Lord of the Nazgûl on the Pelennor Fields it undid the spell that bound his unseen body together, which the narrator states no other weapon would have done.

His name came up once more at the Council of Elrond on 25 October 3018, when a counsellor asked whether the Ring might simply be entrusted to him, since it had visibly failed to touch him. Gandalf answered that he would not take it of his own will, and that even if the free peoples begged him he would not grasp why it mattered; such a thing would be a trifle to him, soon mislaid or thrown away. His mastery, it was argued, held only within his own borders and could not be carried outside them, and against a besieging power he had no defence; were everything else conquered, he would be the last to fall, and night would follow. The Council let the proposal drop. A year later, on the journey home in the autumn of 3019, Gandalf parted from the hobbits before the Shire and turned aside toward the Old Forest, saying he meant to have a long talk with him; that conversation is not reported, and the published narrative leaves Bombadil where it found him, inside his own bounds, as the Age changed around him.

What Bombadil is within the story is defined less by what he does than by a distinction Goldberry draws for Frodo on the first evening in the house. Asked whether the woods and waters belong to her husband, she rejects the idea outright: ownership of that kind would be a weight, and the trees, the grasses, the water and the living creatures each belong to themselves. He is instead their master, which she offers as a different thing entirely, and when Frodo presses her on who he actually is she answers only that he is what the hobbits have seen. The narrator supports the distinction indirectly. Nothing in the house is guarded, no watch is kept, and the fear that had followed the hobbits out of the Shire simply fails to reach them there; the rain and the noises of the night are heard without alarm, and the uneasy dreams of Merry and Pippin are stilled by their host's voice heard through sleep.

Where his power becomes visible, it works through speech and song rather than through any display of force, and it works on things that already stand within his own country. The willow is not struck but told what to do, and does it; the wight is driven out of the mound by singing, not by combat; the ponies come back when he calls them by names he had bestowed on them himself. The same faculty extends backwards into knowledge: he can give an account of the downs, the mounds and the peoples who raised them, and can identify a brooch out of a grave-hoard by the woman who once wore it. Nothing in the text describes him making, forging or altering anything; his mastery is exercised over what is already there.

The limits are stated in the book with unusual directness, and they are not only the geographical ones raised at Elrond's council. Gandalf's objection there cuts both ways: the Ring had no hold on Bombadil, but Bombadil had no hold on the Ring either, since he could neither change the thing itself nor lift its power off anyone else. His immunity is therefore useless as a weapon, and his indifference is presented as a genuine incapacity rather than as modesty — the danger simply does not register as a danger. He takes no part in the war, is not summoned to it, and is not described as having any means of resisting an assault on his own borders should one come. The narrative accordingly gives him no second act: after the Road he is out of the story, and the wider events pass him by rather than around him.

The one enduring bond the books record is his marriage to Goldberry, whom the narrative identifies as the daughter of the River-woman and so places, by kinship, within the same water that runs through his country. He was on the path above the Withywindle when Sam's shouting reached him only because he had gone down to a pool he knows to gather the last lilies of the year, an errand he described as an annual one undertaken for her sake. Inside the house the division of speech between the two is consistent: he talks readily about the land, its trees and its buried dead, while it is she who fields the hobbits' questions about him, and she who claims the day of rain as her own washing and autumn cleaning. At the parting she did not ride out with the company but stood on the hillside above the house, and the hobbits turned back to look at her before the land closed behind them.

His dealings with the other powers inside his bounds are better described as authority than as enmity, and they leave no aftermath. The willow that had closed on two of the hobbits was neither felled nor expelled; it was made to let go, and it remained where it had always stood, so that the relation resembles that of a householder with a troublesome tenant rather than that of a champion with a monster. The wight of the mound was likewise driven out rather than destroyed, and nothing suggests he pursued it further. The same easy footing marks his ordinary company: he keeps a stout pony of his own, named by him as he named the hobbits' mounts, which comes at his whistle and carries him over the downs without any apparent need of gear.

Beyond his borders his acquaintance is thin and oddly chosen. The single person outside his country whom he speaks of with warmth is Farmer Maggot, a hobbit of the Marish who holds no standing anywhere else in the tale, and whose doings he evidently followed closely enough to surprise Frodo; the respect he shows for Maggot's practical sense is not extended to anyone greater. The reverse also holds, in that the powerful discuss him in his absence. His nature and his possible usefulness were weighed at Rivendell by people he never met in the narrative, and the separate names given him by Elves, Dwarves and the Men of the North describe a being many peoples have noticed and none has enrolled. Even the hobbits depart as guests rather than as followers: he asks nothing of them, shows no interest in their errand beyond the next stretch of road, and once they pass out of his land he neither follows them nor sends after them.

Bombadil was not devised for The Lord of the Rings. The drafts printed by Christopher Tolkien show him entering the sequel to The Hobbit as a figure already made, taken over from earlier verse, and the editorial commentary records that his father had at one point suggested him to his publisher as the possible centre of a story of his own before the new book found a use for him. In the first phase of composition the Old Forest, the house under the hill and the mound on the downs came out quickly and were afterwards altered less than almost any comparable stretch of the opening book; what shifted was chiefly nomenclature and the size of the party. The hobbit who carried the Ring to the table was Bingo Bolger-Baggins, and the name Frodo belonged at that stage to one of his companions; the hobbit who became Merry was written as Marmaduke Brandybuck; and a fourth guest, Odo, was eventually removed altogether, which obliged the rewriting of passages that counted heads. The substitution of Frodo for Bingo as the name of the Ring-bearer came considerably later in the work.

His place in the design as a whole was settled much later than the episode itself. The successive texts of the Rivendell council show the case against handing the Ring to him being assembled by stages rather than conceived entire, so that the reasoning eventually given in the finished chapter reads as a conclusion reached in the writing and not as a premise the story began with. What the drafts do not offer, at any stage, is an account of what he is: as the material stands in print there is no discarded explanation of his origin, no rejected genealogy and no abandoned identification with any order of being described elsewhere in the mythology. The reticence of the published book is therefore not the trace of something suppressed, and the character emerges from the drafting process much as he entered it.

Bombadil's fate in adaptation has largely been omission. The 1981 BBC Radio 4 dramatisation is the only one of the older versions to keep him: its twenty-six half-hour parts include the Old Forest, the house under the hill and the barrow, and Norman Bird took the speaking part. Because the series retained the episode, it also retained the consequences that follow from it, so that the hobbits leave the downs equipped as they do in the book. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 cut him entirely, along with the whole detour between Buckland and Bree, and moved the company directly toward the inn under pursuit. Peter Jackson's three live-action films did the same, and the omission was discussed at the time as a deliberate structural choice rather than an oversight. It obliged compensating changes elsewhere: with no barrow-hoard, the hobbits receive their swords from Aragorn on the road instead, and the ancient provenance of the blade that later matters at Minas Tirith goes unmentioned. The extended version of the second film relocates a version of the willow episode into Fangorn, where Merry and Pippin are seized by a hostile tree and freed by Treebeard, so that the rescuing function passes to another character while Bombadil himself is absent.