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Old 08-03-2004, 12:31 PM   #13
Fordim Hedgethistle
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Join Date: Feb 2004
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Fordim Hedgethistle has been trapped in the Barrow!
Allow me to add my voice to that of Esty in praise of davem for getting us off on a Goldberry foot for this chapter. She is badly overlooked far too often, and I am as guilty as anyone in this.

So far it seems that the major bone of contention in this chapter’s discussion is the depiction of Goldberry as tamed/domesticated or wild/fey in respect to her relationship with Tom. I would like to suggest that there’s another way to approach their relationship: rather than locking ourselves into a relatively simple either/or version of their ‘marriage’ we can regard it from within an older version of relations between men and women, one that I think held a lot of appeal to Tolkien.

It’s an ideal that I’m most familiar with in, of all things, the plays of Shakespeare. It’s the idea that men and women are ‘best’ or ideally suited to be joined in a relationship of mutuality, with the man still clearly ‘in charge’ of a hierarchy, but still dependent upon and completed by the woman. This is more than just each needs the other, and stems from a way of seeing the world in terms of feminine and masculine ‘energies’ or tendencies. In this view of things, and I’m more and more convinced that this is Tolkien’s own view, everyone is possessed of both masculine and feminine natures; not just people are like this, but all other beings, all actions, all of the created world. In this respect, there is no clear and finite division between the genders, as everyone participates to some measure in the intermingling of both. I think that this sort of a view is palpable in the description of Tom and Goldberry working together:

Quote:
Then Tom and Goldberry set the table; and the hobbits sat half in wonder and half in laughter: so fair was the grace of Goldberry and so merry and odd the caperings of Tom. Yet in some fashion they seemed to weave a single dance, neither hindering the other, in and out of the room and round about the table
The image of the dance is an old and a good one for this – in a traditional dance one partner may lead and the other follow (although we don’t see that here!) but it’s still a mutual effort, with both parties contributing evenly. I think this dancing pair of Tom and Goldberry is the best representation of their mutually conjoined natures – I said it in the last thread, and I reiterate here: I think we are forced by the book to see Tom and Goldberry as single ‘character’ in terms of their function in the narrative.

So they are ‘the same’ in that they are locked in a mutual relationship, but they remain distinct in their effect on the hobbits. When Frodo first encounters Goldberry his reaction is telling:

Quote:
‘Fair lady Goldberry!’ said Frodo at last, feeling his heart moved with a joy that he did not understand. He stood as he had at time stood enchanted by fair elven-voices; but the spell that was now laid upon him was different: less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvellous and yet not strange.
The difference between Goldberry and Elves is here summed up by the difference between “enchantment” and “spell”; I think this is really important, for the effect of the Elves is one that is reminiscent of Sauron insofar as it tends toward dominion and over-awing the weaker hobbits, whereas Goldberry (like the Old Forest) works a “spell” – she’s more magical, pure and simple. I love the phrase “marvellous and yet not strange”: I can’t think of a better way to describe hobbits!

Quote:
‘But I see that you are an elf-friend; the light in your eyes and the ring in your voice tells it.’
Here Goldberry reveals that she is more than ordinarily perceptive. She sees the full Frodo in her first glance: the good (elf-friend) and the evil (the ring in his voice). She sees him fully without apparently judging him; this is not some kind of nurturing earth-mother goddess, but a feminised manifestation of the created world itself: she sees all, knows all, accepts all; lies close to the mortal heart of the hobbits – what could be more magical, in the purest sense, than a rainy day?

Then there’s Tom. For my money, his most important moment comes at:

Quote:
‘Who are you, Master?’ [Frodo] asked.
‘Eh, what?’ said Tom sitting up, and his eyes glinting in the gloom. ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?’
Right here is where I think we can see Tolkien himself speaking to us right through the mask of his creation. For Tolkien everything begins with language – his works were all undertaken for the sake of the languages he invented, and to go even further, his own Catholicism was one that highly venerated John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Tom is not God or Eru or any such figure – he’s the masculine manifestation of the created world that is the counterpart to Goldberry – but he is here expressing the full creativity of the divine word/language: for Tom the word is the thing, name is identity. This is another way of looking at the magic that fills this realm: Goldberry’s song doesn’t just cause the rain, it is the rain – the true magician says “rain” and water falls from the sky: the reality of the world is begun by language.

So Tom and Goldberry mutually express and embody the truly magical nature of reality in their own ways. They also respond to the Ring in a mutual manner. Goldberry simply accepts the Ring as part of Frodo’s makeup without condemning him or, apparently, seeing any split, while Tom (quite famously for most readers) demonstrates the irrelevance of the Ring to him by putting it on:

Quote:
‘Show me the precious Ring!’ he said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom.
…For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold.
His action here is more than just to show how the Ring does not have power over him, but to demonstrate that he, like Goldberry, is fully aware of the nature of the Ring (it is “precious”) and of its maker (he mocks the Eye with his own). This is where I think their mutual relationship becomes clearer, insofar as Goldberry responds to the Ring at the individual level (that is, insofar as it has effected Frodo) whereas Tom responds to it at a more ‘historical’ level. Each aspect of the Ring is a necessary part of its truth – how many threads are there in the Downs arguing over whether the Ring operates internally (swaying Frodo’s “voice”) or as an external source of compulsion (brining Frodo under the ‘Eye’)? The split nature of the Ring is here summed up by Tom and Goldberry working together just as in the dance they undertake.

This post is already too long and too pedantic to continue so I shall leave off with just two more quotes. The first is the description of Tom’s songs:

Quote:
A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight.
And the second is the description of Goldberry’s songs:

Quote:
Goldberry sang songs for them, songs that began merrily in the hills and fell softly down into silence; and in the silences they saw in their minds pools and waters wider than any they had known, and looking into them, they saw the sky below them and the stars like jewels in the depths.
I would suggest that these two songs taken together – perhaps sung in harmony? – are as good a summation of the world created by Tolkien as have ever been written.
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