[Aiwendil]

This is the final chapter in the Tom Bombadil trilogy. The first was an adventure chapter, ending with the rescue of the Hobbits by Bombadil. The second was a safe-place chapter. The third is again an adventure chapter and again it ends with a rescue by Bombadil. This little Bombadil cycle, then, is both symmetrical and cyclic - rather like the seasons. But within the cycle, there is also a linear development. In the first adventure chapter, the threat came from trees; in this one, it comes from supernatural beings. This alteration in the quality of the danger is exactly what is needed to keep the reader enthralled and move the story along - imagine how much weaker it would be if the Barrow-downs were in chapter 6 and the Old Forest in chapter 8.

There is also a linear development in Frodo's heroism. Though both times, they are saved by Bombadil, Frodo plays a much more important part in the Barrow-wight episode. Moments of heroism for Frodo like this are all the more important because they more or less disappear by books IV and VI (and this is largely why Jackson's Frodo comes across so weakly, I think).

Heren Istarion wrote:

I believe the whole cycle of poems in the chapter repeats on the minor scale the creative Music of the Valar. For, as the world was ‘sung’ into being with words, so words remain the medium of power, and require music to empower them some more.

And of course Bombadil is always singing - even when his lines are not written out as verse, they are metrical, as though he is chanting poetry. Does this represent the Ainulindale living on in him, as though he embodies it? That would make sense with the earth spirit interpretation. I wrestled with this point a bit in the last chapter, for the Ainulindale is Art if anything is, whereas I had theorized that Tom was supremely Artless. I'm still bothered by this, but I don't see any point in going on about it.

Interesting too is that three out of four are mentioned: earth, water, fire, but not air.

Interestingly, it's hard to think of any place in the Legendarium where the four elements are mutually opposed, whereas the opposition of three elements comes up quite frequently. One would be tempted to say that in Arda there are only three fundamental elements rather than the Greek four (or five) - except that there would be disagreement as to what those three were. The fate of the Silmarils is that one is in water, one in the earth, and one in the air. The three Elven-rings represent water, fire, and air. Then we have Bombadil's earth, water, and fire. The only case I can think of where there are four opposed elements is with the greatest of the Valar - Melkor is fire, Manwe air, Ulmo water, Aule earth.

1. There are some gates that are shut (reference to Morgoth thrown out, I believe)
2. One day the world will change (reference to Arda Remade)

Good observation - but I think that the more relevant gates for the Barrow-wight are the gates of Mandos.

Davem wrote:

Or perhaps the magic went away for Tolkien himself after completing LotR - he never seemed to be able to properly return to Middle earth again - his stories after LotR are half hearted, unfinished (unfinishable?) attempts to get back there, culminating in a failed attempt to ‘rationalise’ the legends, to make them scientifically ‘valid’.

I've simply got to disagree here. Well, I agree with the last point - I think that all the Myths Transformed business of the round-earth cosmology was misguided. But I think that many of his greatest writings date from the 1950s or 1960s - the Narn, "The Wanderings of Hurin", the "Athrabeth", and "Aldarion and Erendis", not to mention the revisions of the "Lay of Leithien", the Annals, and much of the Quenta Silmarillion.

Of course, that's all well beside the point of the discussion. But I don't think that we ought to think of the loss of magic or the long defeat in LotR as anything personal or in any way autobiographical. Tolkien's writing and sub-creation did not end or lose its vigor with the end of The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, it's not so much LotR that disagrees with Smith as it is Smith that disagrees with LotR. For the idea of the long defeat was well established in the Legendarium well before LotR - in fact it sees its ultimate expression in the very earliest writings, "The Book of Lost Tales"; next to the projected ending of that work, the endings of the Quenta Silmarillion and of LotR look positively jolly. And of course Smith was written after LotR.

Nonetheless, I think you're quite right here:

So we have Frodo, passing through ‘death’ in the heart of the earth, awakening & leaving the fairytale world behind for the ‘Christian’ world of high deeds & true sacrifice, & finding that ‘there is no real going back’ once the magic has been given up

That's a simplification, but it's a good simplification. Of course, the fairytale world is not completely left behind, nor was the Christian world completely absent prior to this point. Indeed, it is vital to LotR that those two worlds are in fact unified; the fairy-tale stuff of the Old Forest and the Theological element of Eru's grace and the destruction of the Ring are in fact both part of a single self-consistent world. But in terms of the narrative, you are certainly right - there is a change, albeit a subtle one, from fairy-tale ethic to Christian ethic, from "good and bad" to "Good and Evil" (nothing like using Nietzche's own terminology against him!)