Thursday, March 13, 2014

"In the House of Tom Bombadil" - Jacob's Thoughts

I had totally spaced on the existence of Goldberry, which just goes to show how memorable this chapter was to me as a child.  I don't know what to do with her--but then, I don't know what to do with most everything in this chapter.

It's as though we've temporarily stepped into a different story, into a different genre, as we enter the house of Tom Bombadil, visiting midstream a totally different narrative before being returned to our own.  Part of me wonders aloud if that radical dislocation was perhaps intentional on the part of Tolkien: the Hobbits all feel apparently spell-bound by Tom's story-telling, such that they lose track of all time, as Tom tells tales of how he predates time himself; then there are the strange dreams they experience there too, as Frodo for example hears Dark Riders closing in on him, despite this being a safe place--they have lost all track of space in this house, too.  This is all to say, that the house of Tom Bombadil is this strange liminal area that exists outside of time, space, and even the main narrative. 

Tom Bombadil is "Master" according to Goldberry, though not apparently of her--or of anything else for that matter, for Tom is wholly Master of himself.  Time and Space do not affect him, evil does not seem to threaten him, and he can put on the ring without turning invisible or being seduced by its power.  When I was a child reading for the first time, I assumed this meant that Tom would maybe appear later to help carry the ring when Frodo couldn't anymore or something; but nope, this apparently ground-breaking superpower never comes up again, because apparently for Tom to be total master of himself means for him to not be subject to anything or anyone, not even to Tolkien's narrative.  He is not even subject to his own creator.  He stays free of the worst of the novel by staying out of the novel altogether.

Tom in a sense is the exact opposite of Sauron--the latter seeks to make himself master by subjecting all other possible rivals (even as he himself is still subject to the fate of the ring), while Tom by contrast knows that the only way to be truly free, to never be enslaved is, to never enslave others.  As G.B. Shaw once wrote, "When we learn to sing that Britons never will be masters we shall make an end to slavery."  Sauron sang that he would never be a slave, and thus made slaves of all others; but Tom I think knows better.

Of course, Tom, at the very least, could have given us a far more complete account of Sauron's origins (as he hints at this chapter), and this chapter could then have justified existence by serving as a helpful data dump instead of requiring readership of the Silmarillion--but no, Tom does not even give us that.   But then why would he?  He is as radically disinterested in our primary narrative as I was in his as a child.

Part of me still wants to just role my eyes at this once-off character that doesn't really do much besides exist, but perhaps part of the point of Tom Bombadil is to provide an alternative possibility for existence--Middle-Earth, after all, with its mutual xenophobia, strained race relations, paranoia, general distrust, greed, and corrupting desire for power that destroys all it touches, really isn't all that different from our own world, is it.  But Tom Bombadil is genuinely different.  If the world (both Tolkien's and ours) were filled with people like Tom, then this would be very different world indeed, where there would truly be nothing to fear in the dark under the stars.

In a sense, Tom doesn't participate more in the primary Lord of the Rings narrative because he can't, he is on a fundamentally different plane from the rest of us.  We and the Hobbits get only a brief glimpse of this alternative possibility, but no more, before being dropped back into this world, to carry on the best we can.  Tom may be free of all other influences, but we are still not.

I still don't know what to do with this chapter.

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