The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, part two

"Old Tom Bombadil was a merry fellow,
bright blue his jacket was and his boot were yellow,
green were his girdle and his breeches all of leather;
he wore in his tall hat a swan-wing feather."

This character, Tom Bombadil, remains one of my favourites from Tolkien's writings. I'm happy that he wasn't a character in the recent films of The Lord of the Rings (hereafter LotR). The films are great, but I like having my own memories and associations. Bombadil has received a lot of fan attention, and a good bit of critical interest.

How the character developed, why he was retained when in many ways he is just a side-track of the main plot, and what is his significance in the larger world of Middle Earth, are problems thoroughly explored in Christopher Tolkien's The History of Middle Earth, Tom Shippey's The Road To Middle Earth and JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century, and in the biographies of Tolkien. All of these are worth reading, if one has an interest in these matters.

What I want to explore here is in two parts: the invention of a secondary world ("Tom's Country") within the bounds of a poem, and the special uses of language to perform that invention.

As mentioned in the previous post, the poem has a ballad-like form. The rhyme scheme and metre suggest a traditional structure and a traditional subject-matter, and Tolkien (who in fact was well-aware of his position as a communicator of tradition) emphasizes this with his diction (line numbers):

girdle (not belt) (3)
breeches (not pants or trousers) (3)
well (not spring) (6)
dingle (not valley) (6)
a-wallowing (13), a-swallowing (14), a-thinking (31), a-drinking(32), a-listening (43), etc.
dabchicks (18)
water-lady (22)
draggled (26)
like a rainy weather (34)
forest-eaves (43)...

many more examples could be given: the poem is 136 lines and hardly any of them are free of some quirk of diction.

A careful and detailed -- but not comprehensive -- examination of Tolkien's word-use is found in Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner's The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford UP, 2006). While most of the terms in ATB are not archaisms, some are, and some are "recoveries" or reconstructions ("barrow-wight" is probably the chief example here). Some of these terms also maybe usual in a certain context, but for a general readership (I am inclined to add "particularly in America" although that is a presumption on my part) they are peculiar.

The presence of these unusual words, in fact, their very peculiarity, helps to create a sense of remoteness. Shippey argues cogently for "mediation" in his works on Tolkien (especially in Author), and this tendency of Tolkien's to find common ground with his reader from which to bring her or him to his secondary world is balanced, particularly in his poetry, with an opposing tendency to "make it strange" as Chekhov recommended.

But the words here are not simply peculiar -- they are particular. They are, in many cases, old, and they are rural in context. In Tolkien's mind (and I agree in part), the very sound and "feel" of these words place them, and suggest their meanings. I have wondered, as I read about Tolkien's process, whether he was not synaesthetic, that is, experiencing words and the sound of words as shapes or colours. But that is a matter for another venue. Certainly, for an English reader, Tolkien seems to have believed that the word "dingle" would immediately suggest the basic lexical connotation: a small valley. Why this should be so is more difficult to say, but that Tolkien felt it was so seems clear.

Now, if we can for the moment accept Tolkien's basic assumption that words by their very nature suggest particular meanings, and that this is the more true the broader and deeper one's acquaintance with a language, we can say with some confidence that even the phrasing and diction of "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" (hereafter ATB) point us, if not to the West Midlands, at least to rural England. Shippey, again, has indicated in some detail how Tolkien's novella Farmer Giles of Ham includes obvious hints at existing geography. Here, the situation is different. Placing ATB in the wider context of Tolkien's writing, the reader can gather than Tom's Country is on the edges of, and at least partially within The Old Forest, to the east of Buckland, itself an eastern "colony" of The Shire of the hobbits. All this is "pure fiction", whatever remote connection Tolkien forges to existing geography and history (see, for example, the introductory materials to the LotR).

It is possible, and profitable in its way, to place ATB in this larger context of Middle Earth. But if we were to encounter this poem on its own, without benefit of that context, we could still learn much about the construction of secondary worlds. And here Tolkien has the special problem of constructing a secondary world in (only!) 136 lines.

There is little here of the artificial. Tom has clothing (as noted above) and a house (which, however, is named a "house" only in line 126, quite late in the poem) with a door which can be locked (73), and the door further has not only a lock but a turning handle (78) and a door-step (135). The house, furthermore, has windows (75) with shutters (73) and sills (116), and is lit by a lamp (74) and a candle (77), has stairs (78), a yard surrounded by a wall (92), a table (114) on which is set cream, bread, and butter (115), all of which are foods requiring processing (a fourth food, honeycomb, is mentioned, but obviously that does not require processing), and white bedding (125). A fiddle is mentioned (123). The "old mound" which is a barrow (81) and the "ring of stones" (82) are also artificial, however ancient and well-incorporated into the landscape.

But overall it is this very sense of integration into the landscape which characterized Tom and his fellow characters -- mostly antagonists -- in the poem. Tom is a "nature spirit" and so are the other characters (except perhaps the Barrow-wight). The natural landscape is centrally important here. But it is a tamed landscape, one that has been shaped for many years, perhaps many millenia, but some pruning hand.

... to be continued...