LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 06 – The Old Forest

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Admission time: I have advised several people who were trying to read LotR and finding it difficult to “get into it” to skip over Tom Bombadil entirely. It has worked in almost every case, and I am delighted to say that these readers came back later to read these chapters. But still, as several people have already indicated, there is a sense in which these chapters are dispensable – they just don’t “fit” was I believe the word.

Clinging to the idea that anything that’s in a text must, be definition, have a place in it, and placing my faith in the artistry of Tolkien, I will now elaborate why I think this chapter is indispensable to the fabric of the whole.

I think that this interlude is an important and necessary reminder to the reader that while the story to come is going to be all about the War of the Ring, that this is not the whole story of Middle-Earth. The war between Elves and Melkor/Sauron has taken place within much of the historical time of Middle-Earth, but that conflict does not in and of itself define the nature of the world that is going to be created for us in the tale to come. History is the story of the people on the land, not the land itself, and with Old Man Willow and Tom Bombadil we are given mythic, almost allegorical, representations of that natural realm over and upon which history takes place, but over which, ultimately, history has no power. Sauron can enslave the land, the Elves can work within it and attempt to preserve it, but neither side can change its nature, nor can they make or unmake it.

The fact that these three chapters around Tom take place so much and so obviously ‘outside’ the rest of the story is very much the point. It’s a demonstration that for all the dangers and import of their quest, the hobbits are just taking part in a passing tale being acted out on the stage-of-reality offered by the natural realm.

The characterisation of this natural realm in Old Man Willow and Tom/Goldberry is tremendous, and – like I said – near allegorical. Take the description of the hobbits’ succumbing to OMW:

They shut their eyes, and then it seemed that they could almost hear words, cool words, saying something about water and sleep. They gave themselves up to the spell and fell fast asleep at the foot of the great grey willow.

When we put this beside the description of Goldberry and Tom’s house there’s an awful lot that we can see in common with OMW (and I realise I’m looking ahead, but I think these three chapters of Tom are a united suite in ways that other chapter-chunks in the book are not). The “singing” of OMW is “about water and sleep” – this is precisely the kind of song that will lull them in Bombadil’s house. Just as they give “themselves up to the spell” here they will do so again with Tom. The relation between Tom/Goldberry (who must always be considered as a conjoined pair, I think) and OMW is not one of good versus evil – that kind of dichotomous relation is staged (in history) by the Elves and Sauron, and in this chapter is revealed to be a limited and limiting kind of understanding. The relation of T/GB and OMW is more complementary and perhaps even dependent (the wholly trite image of yin-yang comes to mind). Both powers work in the same way (through song) to the same end (sleep and rest) using the same medium (nature, particularly water) in the same place (the Old Forest just beyond the borders of the real and dissociated from historical time and its struggles).

This natural realm is a truly magic place. There is surprisingly little magic in the book: the Elves speak of their “art” and “crafting” and Sauron is all about “deceptions,” “lies” and “domination.” But here, just over the edge of the known, is a realm that casts a “spell” upon the hobbits. The historical conflict between “deceptions” and “art” that we characterise in terms of “evil” versus “good” is just not apparent or even relevant here. In this place is true magic – the power that springs from nature but moves beyond the natural. An unhistorical and wild force that escapes all attempts to categorise, anatomise or understand. Tom Bombadil is nonsensical, yes, because that is the nature of, well, nature – it is non-rational, utterly mysterious, and wholly alien and other.

Finally, I think that these chapters give us a glimpse into a realm that is like the Shire in its disconnect from the ‘great’ matters of the world at large, but in a different way. Whereas the hobbits are (wilfully) ignorant of the darkness and light of the wide world, Old Man Willow and Tom are fully aware of both, they just do not care for such matters – they are unimportant and irrelevant, in the long run. In this way, they ‘surpass’ the gazes of every other being in the book: even Gandalf and Treebeard are trapped in their historical view of the struggle between good and evil. I think that in the end, this interlude in the Old Forest allows us to see how Gildor is as limited in his view as he condemned the hobbits as being. Just as the Elf is this figure from the wide world who opens the hobbits’ eyes, Tom and OMW are figures from an unhistorical plane of existence (nature) that surpasses the historical combat between Gildor’s people and the Enemy.