Tom Bombadil

The song arrives before the singer does. It comes hopping down the path through the reeds of the Withywindle, cheerful nonsense about willows and dingles, and then a battered hat rises above the rushes with a long blue feather stuck in the band. What follows the hat is a man, or something near enough to pass. He is too large and heavy for a hobbit and not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, and he crashes through the grass like a cow going down to drink, thumping along on thick legs in enormous yellow boots. His coat is blue, his beard brown and long, his eyes bright, his face red as a ripe apple and folded into a hundred wrinkles of laughter. Balanced on his open palm is a broad leaf held out flat like a tray, and on the leaf sits a small heap of white water-lilies, cold and dripping, gathered from a pool downstream for his wife.

He was, to begin with, a doll. A brightly painted Dutch peg doll with a feather in its hat belonged to Michael Tolkien, second son of the philologist who would go on to invent Middle-earth. Michael’s elder brother John disliked the thing enough to stuff it down the lavatory, from which it was fished out and rescued, and their father gave the survivor a name and a country. Tom Bombadil first reached print in 1934, in a poem in The Oxford Magazine, twenty years before anyone had heard of Frodo Baggins. That poem already had most of the furniture: the yellow boots, the swan-wing feather, the small valley under the hill where the Withywindle runs down into the dingle, a badger-folk, a barrow-wight, a malevolent willow, and a river-spirit called Goldberry whom Tom catches and marries. Everything tried to take him. Nothing could.

When Tolkien began the long sequel to The Hobbit, Bombadil walked into the drafts almost at once and never left. The author was blunt about why in a letter written in 1954: he had already invented the fellow, and he wanted an adventure on the way. Elsewhere he called Tom the spirit of the vanishing Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside, and then, characteristically, warned that the character was not improved by being philosophised over. Some enigmas are deliberate. This one certainly is.

In the Old Forest the trees are awake and resentful, and the worst of them is a grey willow leaning over the brown water. Merry and Pippin are swallowed into cracks in its trunk while Frodo and Sam shout uselessly at the bark. Tom comes on the noise the way he comes on everything, singing, and puts his mouth to the crack and orders the tree to let go. The willow lets go. There is no duel and no bargain. He simply tells it to sleep, and it sleeps, and afterwards he leads four badly shaken hobbits home to a lamplit house at the top of the valley, where the floor is scrubbed, the ceiling is low, and Goldberry sits in a chair surrounded by shallow vessels of water with white lilies floating in them, so that the whole room seems to be standing in a quiet pool.

They stay two nights. On one of them Frodo, half testing, half showing off, hands over the Ring, and Tom does the thing nobody else in the story can do. He puts it to his eye and laughs, one bright blue eye peering through the little circle of gold. He slips it onto the tip of his smallest finger and does not vanish. He spins it in the air, it disappears with a flash, and then it is back in his other hand and returned to its owner, who is quietly relieved to have it. When Frodo puts it on himself a moment later and slides out of the world, Tom sees him anyway and tells him to come back, since his hand is more fair without it.

Later, at Rivendell, the Council considers giving the Ring to Bombadil permanently and Gandalf shuts the idea down. The Ring has no power over Tom, he says, but Tom has no power over the Ring either. He would not grasp why it mattered. He would take it out of politeness, put it down somewhere in a wood, forget which wood, and go on gathering lilies.

What he is, no source in the story will say. To the Elves he is Iarwain Ben-adar, oldest and fatherless. Dwarves call him Forn, Men call him Orald, and he calls himself Eldest, claiming to remember the first raindrop and the first acorn, and to have known the dark under the stars when it was still fearless, before the Dark Lord came from Outside. Asked point blank who he is, Goldberry answers with two words and no explanation: He is. Readers have been trying to fill that silence ever since. One early guidebook proposed that he is a Maia, an angelic spirit; a Mythlore essay argued instead for the smith-god Aulë walking about in disguise; the folklorist David Elton Gay laid him beside Väinämöinen of the Kalevala and found the same oldest-of-beings, the same singing that overrules the world, the same fearlessness that comes of knowing every name. Tolkien denied that Goldberry’s answer was an echo of the voice from the burning bush.

His power is a voice, and it works on anything inside his borders. Trees obey it. So does the barrow-wight in the fog on the Barrow-downs, when the hobbits are found lying on cold stone in a ring with a sword across their throats and Frodo remembers the rhyme Tom taught them for exactly this emergency. Tom arrives, drives the wight out of its mound with a shouted verse, breaks the spell, and then hands each hobbit a long bronze-hilted dagger from the hoard, the blades cool and lightly worked, forged an age earlier by enemies of the Witch-king. One of them will one day matter enormously, though nobody says so.

And that is the whole extent of it. His mastery stops where his country stops, and he refuses to cross the line, pointing the hobbits east to Bree and turning back to his own hill. He has no armies, no plan, no ambition, and no fear, because he wants nothing and therefore nothing can be dangled in front of him. Tolkien wrote that this made Bombadil, rather than Aragorn or Gandalf, the true opposite of Sauron: a Master with no desire to own. It also made him useless in a war. If the West had fallen, Tolkien said flatly, nothing would have been left for him, and the singing would have stopped somewhere between the willows and the wight-haunted hills, unheard by anyone at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tom Bombadil?

Tom Bombadil is a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings who lives in a small valley beside the Withywindle river in the Old Forest with his wife Goldberry. He calls himself Eldest and Master, and the Elves know him as Iarwain Ben-adar, meaning oldest and fatherless. Tolkien deliberately never explained what kind of being he is.

Why does the One Ring not work on Tom Bombadil?

Tom Bombadil can wear the One Ring without becoming invisible, and he can still see Frodo when Frodo wears it. Gandalf explains at the Council of Elrond that the Ring simply has no power over Tom, because Tom has no desire to possess or dominate anything. The reverse is also true, which is why the Council rejects him as a guardian: he has no power over the Ring and would probably mislay it.

Where did Tolkien get the idea for Tom Bombadil?

Tom Bombadil began as a Dutch peg doll with a feather in its hat that belonged to Tolkien’s son Michael. Tolkien wrote a poem about him, published in The Oxford Magazine in 1934, roughly twenty years before The Lord of the Rings appeared. He later described the character as the spirit of the vanishing Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside.

What does Tom Bombadil do in The Lord of the Rings?

Tom Bombadil rescues Frodo and his companions twice. He sings Old Man Willow into releasing Merry and Pippin from its trunk, then shelters the hobbits for two nights, and later drives a barrow-wight out of its mound on the Barrow-downs and gives each hobbit a dagger from the barrow treasure. He then refuses to travel beyond his own borders and sends them on to Bree.

Is Tom Bombadil a god or a Maia?

Tolkien never said. Readers and scholars have proposed that he is a Maia, that he is the Vala Aulë in disguise, and that he is a genius loci or spirit of place rather than a member of any category at all. Tolkien wrote that even in a mythical age there must be some enigmas, and that Tom Bombadil was one of them on purpose.

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