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Old 10-11-2002, 01:02 PM   #68
Nar
Wight
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Posts: 228
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Sting

All excellent points! Not to digress too much, Davem, but many of the female characters on Bethberry's list are complicated and rich (and to me heart-rending, Dorothea or Maggie in Elliot's work -- I wrote a LOT on Clarissa in my undergrad days-- masochistic, spiritually ambitious, lousy taste in men, yes, twee, no -- man, that was a disturbing book I had to do a thesis to exorcise it) --however, what these women are not is able to choose the field on which they do battle-- they cannot choose their opponent or determine the prize they try for or the goal they pursue-- they fight as they can for what they find to be good, but they have (it appears to me) little or no control over the terms of that fight and very circumscribed control over what sorts of things they can choose to fight for. Some real women of the period had more control -- I've always thought any woman going by 'George' had much more scope for altering the rules and upending the assumptions than your 'Clarissa' or your 'Dorothea'. In that sense, an Eowyn or Galadriel is much more satisfying, having SOME influence over the terms, goals and game to be played.

'He is time and she is space' -- yikes! That line slid straight from the back of my mind through my fingers and appeared on screen in front of me -- what? I thought Bombadil was 'the spirit of the land' so where did 'time' pop up from? What, you're asking ME? I think it was the songs he sings -- song is a linear form, it made me think of time, and Goldberry's changing with the weather made me think of the land.

Let's review. In deliberate descriptions by Tolkien, Goldberry's discussed in terms of the river and riverbanks and the life it gives to the land, with a connection to the life giving rain. She appears among a pool of water lilies, she's in green with flowers when it's sunny and silver when it's cloudy, Frodo thinks of the river whenever they meet. Goldberry's appearance clearly matches what the river would look like under the weather, and the notion of a river from its spring in the mountains all the way down to the sea pops into Frodo's head while he's with her. And I have the strong feeling she's the land surrounding the river, made life-giving and fertile by it, as well as the river and the rain that falls on it.

However, in Goldberry I think Tolkien also tapped his idea of water as the element with the most lingering influence of the song of Arda -- at the beginning of the Sil he linked the echoes of the song to the sound of the ocean and by this it is linked to the special status of England as a green (because misty and rainy) and pleasant land and as an island surrounded by ocean and channels. In that sense Goldberry's the heart of England, the element that makes England English.

In the thread 'Did Galadriel have a Palantir' I suggested that the vibrations from the song, containing the entire story of history, remained in and were sustained by all water, and that Galadriel's mirror (water from her fountain in a broad basin) might work to produce past, present and future images of the history of Middle Earth by responding to these vibrations with surface ripples that a receptive mind might form into pictures from the song: images of past, present and future. Like the concentric bands in the trunk of a tree, which reflect the life of the tree from the heart to the edge.

Is it an accident that in the house of Goldberry, whose nature springs from the river and who is intimately connected to the rain, the hobbits have prophetic and awesome dreams? It is always Goldberry explaining and reassuring --warning, almost --'heed no nightly terrors' -- she is of water and water tunes and vibrates to the song of Arda, beginning to end of time, tuned and reverberating through all space. So she is of the element most receptive to the song of Arda -- that made the world and sung of all history. She's the medium for the song.

Who's the song? Well, we do have a singing yellow-booted sprite around, that would be Tom. I am saying that Tom is the incarnation of the song of Arda, the song that defines the history of this land and therefore is the original form of time in Arda, from before the moment of creation. A song is harmonics, vibrations, they need a medium and the medium that retains them, remembers them, is the waters of the earth. Thus, Tom can only live as a stable embodied presence because he has bound (but not bound) himself in happy marriage (but free in love) to his medium, Goldberry, the river and riverbank, which runs from mountain meadow through pleasant shire down to the gentle shore where time ends, and song and river are absorbed in the boundless ocean.

So is Tom still the spirit of the land? yes. The embodied song of Arda is the spirit of Arda. My intuition is that Tom is the song sprung from the mind of Illuvatar, not the song as sung by the Valar -- the song as it was meant to be, so while all that happens is included, the ending theme of Arda remade and healed is also in him.

[ October 11, 2002: Message edited by: Nar ]
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