Big Books I Have Read: LOTR, Part III: Tom Bombadillo

Tom Bombadil, if you don't remember the name, is the character in The Fellowship of the Ring that many LOTR readers would just as soon forget.  Some suggest that Bombadil doesn't fit in with the rest of Tolkien's Middle-earth.  Some complain that his dialogue and characterization feel somehow strained.  Some aver that Tom Bombadil is just distressingly goofy.

If you have no idea what TB is about then perhaps you've only seen the movies; TB, like the rather more lamented Glorfindel, has no place in the film.  In the book, he occupies a significant portion of two chapters:  a self-contained episode in the hobbits' journey just after they've left the borders of the Shire and before they reach Bree.  Bombadil rescues the hobbits from a carnivorous Willow in the Old Forest, hosts them in his cozy bungalow, then (again) rescues them from carnivorous Wights in the ghostly graveyard of the Barrow-Downs.  Almost the whole time, he is described as prancing and singing like some kind of manic overgrown garden gnome.

What *is* Tom Bombadil?  He is not man, clearly, as he exhibits a magical mastery over even the most sinister ghosts and foliage.  Neither is he a wizard like Gandalf or a wise and solemn elf from back in the day.  He seems like nothing so much as a personification of Nature, a Green Man from European folk mythology or some sort of hippy Gaia spirit.  He really feels like something imported from a Tolkien side-project about the English countryside and the bountiful joy to be found in a frolicsome relationship to green fields and springtime.  He is a jarringly utopian intrusion of Pastoral into a narrative that is darker and more apocalyptic than that.

What most disconnects Bombadil from the main story of the LOTR, however, is that the One Ring has no effect on him.  He can see Frodo when the latter slips it on.  At one point, TB borrows the ring from Frodo and puts it on his own finger.  Not only does he not disappear, but he experiences none of the angsty helpless lust for power that drives the entire trilogy's plot.  To TB, the ring is just a band of gold with no powers of any sort.  Tom Bombadil comes disturbingly close to undermining everything the novel has been building up about the ring and its history.

After the Barrow-Downs, the story moves on to Bree and the comfortably Quest-centric meeting with Strider and subsequent escape from the Ringwraiths.  At this point, poor Tom Bombadil is effectively forgotten, at least for a time.  Later, whenever he is mentioned again, it is only in the context of explaining that his great power and indifference to the ring are nevertheless of little help to the Free Peoples in their struggle against Sauron.  He is described as being immune to Sauron's power and to the ravages of history so lovingly detailed by JRRT.  You get the feeling that, if pressed, an exasperated Elrond might explain that nobody really knows what to make of Bombadil but that he is strongly suspected of belonging to some other story.

Big Books I Have Read: (update!)

Short post:  in our reading aloud, we have reached the Barrow-Downs.

We didn't skip Tom Bombadil after all.  How's that for thorough?

(Thoughts on Bombadil at a later date.)

Big Books I Have Read: The Lord of the Rings, Part II

My history with Tolkien:

I think I’ve read The Lord of the Rings to completion about five times.  By the standards of die-hard Tolkien fans, that’s not a lot, but I’ve always found reasons to go back.

Where it started:  in 1978 my sister read LOTR on the recommendation of friends or possibly my father.  She may have been trying to get ahead of the release of the Ralph Bakshi animated film, the one that ended with Helm’s Deep and was completed later by other people as a TV movie in a totally different style.  I don’t believe I’d started reading the books before we went to see the movie, but I was thoroughly hooked just a few minutes in.  I dived into The Fellowship of the Ring as soon as we got home.  I was in fourth grade.

This, BTW, actually puts me in the same position as people who saw Peter Jackson before they read JRRT.  I may be snobbish about a lot of things, but I can’t be snobbish about that.  Really there’s nothing to be snobbish about here anyway, since Aragorn was voiced by John Hurt and the Bakshi-matic battle scenes were fully as creepy and ominous as anything that can be imagined with CGI today.

So how did Tolkien matter to me at that age?

Let's get the criticism out of the way.  JRRT is a wonderful prose writer, but his storytelling sometimes sags.  There are pacing issues.  Now and then there's a certain amount of (dare I say it?) preciousness in his narrative voice.   

What saves it from any tedium, however, is the world-making.  That’s the strength of it.  It's all there:  cosmology and linguistics and political history and material culture.  It has been said (by JRRT himself, in fact, IIRC) that Tolkien wrote LOTR so that there would be people to speak the languages and live in the lands that he had already invented for himself.  It's all so totally realized that it's just breathtaking. It's hard to call Middle-earth just a "setting."

Tolkien also came along for me when I was already deep into Star Wars.  We all know that George Lucas suffers from severe storytelling disabilities, but these won’t concern us here.  It can’t be denied that the first movie, back before it was the fourth movie, was perfection in itself.  It, too, had a world of its own, and I’d been happily living there for more than a year and a half when I encountered LOTR.  The Star Wars galaxy was nowhere near as well-developed as Middle-earth, and most of it is all surface polish, but it worked well for me at that age (just as H. Potter probably works well enough for kids today).  It felt like a universe.

What Tolkien offered right away was something much, much deeper and more total.  I’m sure I didn’t compare it much to Star Wars at the time, since I loved both and didn’t need to exclude one for the sake of the other, but it’s easy to see the relative strengths in hindsight.  SW had events and characters, and these were terrific, but LOTR had something more:  it had history and geography and always the sense that you were arriving where much of great importance had already happened, much of it long ago.  It wasn't generic, and I still believe it's more than just Europe with orcs.  There was mystery and a strong sense of firm order on the other side of text.  It was enticingly Biblical that way.

In short, what LOTR had was a vivid and inviting sense of place.  Even then, I think, I was dissatisfied with stories that had shallow roots.  LOTR, meanwhile, felt grounded in a reality that I knew I didn’t know enough about.  I think I always had the sense that I could really get there if I just kept reading.

Big Books I Have Read: The Lord of the Hobbitarillion, Part I

This has been a Tolkien Summer at my house.

My boys (six and eight years old) are finally old enough to appreciate good fantasy, or so I believe, so we started the long vacation with a family reading of The Hobbit out loud.  They loved it, I loved it, and now we're well into The Fellowship of the Ring.  This series of blog posts is to offer a few thoughts on Tolkien and on fantasy and perhaps on reading out loud.

But first, the very important issue:  do you believe it's permissible to criticize good old Professor T.?  This isn't a rhetorical question.  There are people who would be genuinely offended at any complaints about the books of Middle-earth, as (or even more so than) if one had criticized the Bible or Joss Whedon.  I know; I have at times been one of them.

But not so now.  I plan to offer some thoughts and make some digs at dear old JRRT where I believe they are deserved.  I hope you understand that I'm doing so only out of love, the kind of love that could lead someone to commit to reading almost 1,500 pages aloud without skipping a word.

Or skipping no more than Tom Bombadil, anyway.