LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 07 - In the House of Tom Bombadil

[Aiwendil]

Fordim wrote:

The fact that Tom can still Frodo when he is invisible to others is proof positive that the Ring is part of a perverted or subverted nature that Sauron has managed to twist to his own purposes, not the gateway to a whole other realm.

And yet we have a lot of quotes suggesting that the Ring does function like a gateway to another realm - a spirit world, one in which the Elves partially exist and in which the Nazgul primarily exist. Not one that Sauron created, and yet one that is supernatural. Tom is supremely "natural". And he has power over nature. But the Ring is a work of artifice, and a gateway into a supernatural world. So Tom does not have power over it - but it also does not have power over him. It's as though Tom exists entirely on the plane of Nature; he can command, and interact with, other parts of Nature, but all that is unnatural, artificial, or supernatural means nothing to him - it cannot affect him and cannot be affected by him.

This is part of why I find the Tom = Aule idea completely ludicrous. The two are diametrically opposed. Tom is pure Nature and Aule pure Craft.

Rimbaud wrote:

Facetiousness aside, isn't TB in this instance another example of Tolkien's get-out clauses? These include Eagles, Armies of Dead etc...

Impishly or not, I think you've hit on an interesting point. There seem, at first glance, to be a lot of dei ex machinis in Tolkien. Just when things seem completely hopeless, something unexpected will come to the rescue. There's Tom twice, the flood at Bruinen, the Rohirrim attacking the Orc band, Gandalf sent back by Iluvatar, the Huorns at Helm's Deep, the Rohirrim arriving at the Pelennor at dawn. And those are just from LotR. Other prominent examples are the Eagles at the Battle of Five Armies and the Valar at the end of the First Age. Indeed, Tolkien's very notion of "eucatastrophe" would seem to involve this kind of thing.

But if these are really such cop-outs, why doesn't anybody ever seem much bothered by them? Because they're not. There's a difference between unexpected and unprepared. In nearly every case, the thing that comes to the rescue is something that has already been set up. Tom saves the Hobbits at the Barrow-downs only after painstakingly teaching them the proper song for summoning him. We hear about the Rohirrim long before they inadvertently rescue Merry and Pippin. And we know that they are on their way to Minas Tirith even if we don't know when to expect them. Moreover, it is almost always through the actions of established protagonists that the deus is allowed to come out of the machina. Tom doesn't just show up on the Barrow-downs; he must be summoned, and that only after Frodo's heroics (though I admit he does show up completely without warning to save them from OMW). The Valar don't simply change their minds about the Noldor; Earendil has to convince them. The Ents don't act on their own; it takes the prompting of Merry and Pippin.