# In the House of Tom Bombadil  ## Metadata - Author: [[C.R. Wiley and Bradley J. Birzer]] - Full Title: In the House of Tom Bombadil - Category: #tolkien ## Highlights - Roger Lancelyn Green said something about stories that Tolkien later thanked him for: “To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce.”6 Rubber balls are meant to be gratefully received and enjoyed. ([Location 100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=100)) - I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, ([Location 107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=107)) - I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author. ([Location 109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=109)) - Another well-known story of this kind is told in book two of Plato’s Republic. It is the story of “The Ring of Gyges.” The moral of that story is that a ring that would make a wearer invisible would inevitably reveal the wickedness of the wearer. ([Location 125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=125)) - The Ring of Power isn’t neutral, like sweet cream, to which someone’s personality can be added to make a new flavor of ice cream. It is malum in se—intrinsically evil. ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=141)) - Tolkien did. Here’s what he said on the subject as it pertains to The Lord of the Rings: “There is no embodiment of the One, of God, who indeed remains remote, outside the World.” ([Location 258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=258)) - But if Tom was just filler, why didn’t Tolkien just go back and edit Tom out when he knew where things were headed? He was a notoriously fussy and precise writer. We know that he cut out huge swaths of material many times when he wasn’t satisfied with them. But he left Tom in for a reason. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=283)) - Tom Bombadil is not an important person—to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. ([Location 285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=285)) - Two more theories I’ve run across that posit a version of the “Outside” argument are either that Tolkien has written himself into the story and he’s Bombadil, or that Tom is the personification of the English countryside before industrialization. Concerning the second, Tolkien said as much in a letter to his publisher, Stanley Unwin. ([Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=305)) - As for expressing the spirit of the English countryside, you might as well say that the Shire itself (the home of the hobbits) does this just as well, if not better. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=314)) - But that doesn’t mean that the Good Professor didn’t intend for readers to ponder the meaning of Tom. Au contraire, enigmas invite inquiry. ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=325)) - One way it can be done is by analogy. When something is an analog, it is both itself and like something else at the same time. In allegories characters don’t really have lives of their own; they just represent other things; they’re like cardboard standees. Analogs, on the other hand, are real in themselves. ([Location 425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=425)) - in an allegory the reader is at the mercy of the author; when it comes to analogy, the association is made in the mind of the reader—or not. ([Location 430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=430)) - The Hebrew word that’s translated “dominion” means something like “skilled mastery.” ([Location 444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=444)) - We can guess what that means. Did you notice the telling line “the white light can be broken”? Saruman is willing to break more than light to learn what he wants to know. Gandalf’s statement about “break[ing] a thing to find out what it is” is a subtle yet profound allusion to a long debate on the nature of knowledge in the Western tradition.12 ([Location 477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=477)) - One of the devilish things about knowledge today is that it has sued for divorce from wisdom. ([Location 483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=483)) - Throughout The Lord of the Rings the Good Professor is careful to distinguish Dominion from Domination. We need to learn how to distinguish them for ourselves, because very often they get blended in unprincipled and tendentious ways. So, here’s my point in a nutshell: Tom is an image of what true dominion looks like. ([Location 497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=497)) - In the modern world the quest for knowledge is premised on the belief that the natural world is nothing more than a vast machine. Since it is merely a machine, learning how it works entails disassembly, breaking things down into their constituent parts. Unfortunately for the things themselves, this is something of a downgrade from the ways they were once understood, everything from trees, to rivers, to people. ([Location 506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=506)) - In the old way of knowing, things are “more than the sum of their parts.” ([Location 512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=512)) - If you see the world the way Saruman does, you’ll come to resemble a machine yourself. That’s the way things work. Whatever we think is the final truth of things, that’s the image we conform to. ([Location 515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=515)) - What this demonstrates isn’t just that Tom is good and Saruman isn’t, but how two different understandings of knowledge work themselves out in different ways of life—one catches things to control them, and another frees them in order to commune with them. ([Location 520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=520)) - As a side note that may be of interest: etymologically the word ignorant actually means “on your own”—as ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=648)) - Before you infer from this that Tolkien considered power evil in itself, remember that Tom is powerful—very powerful—in his own way. (The same could be said for Treebeard, or Gandalf, or Aragon, for that matter.) But Tom’s power is based on a different kind of knowledge, and his knowledge is based on a different way of knowing. ([Location 650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=650)) - The magic found in a fairy story is a magic that is intended to satisfy “certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is . . .to hold communion with other living things.” ([Location 656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=656)) - You don’t commune with things that you intend to use. ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=661)) - On the surface their meanings are derived from the world itself, but beneath the surface there is the Word—as in the logos—and this is the true source of all meaning, since the Word is what gives the world its form. ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=673)) - “Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men.” ([Location 678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=678)) - Treebeard implies here that names should reflect the histories of the things they name. Doing so not only tells you about those things; it also in some sense gives you power over them. ([Location 714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=714)) - Today nature is believed to be a single, self-contained thing. In antiquity, and the medieval world as well, people spoke of natures plural. ([Location 767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=767)) - The Lost Tools of Learning.) It consisted of seven fields of study broken down into two groups—the trivium (for three), which followed this progression: grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and a second group, the quadrivium (for four) which followed another progression: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and (get this) music. ([Location 842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=842)) - mathematics—the language of the physical world. ([Location 845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=845)) - Essentially, someone who is attuned to the music of creation lives in harmony with all things. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=854)) - Galdor, pondering Tom’s nature aloud at the Council of Elrond, says, “Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself.” ([Location 863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=863)) - And this brings me back to the nature of good magic—or perhaps it would be better to say, the magic of nature. Throughout The Lord of the Rings good characters are puzzled by the term magic when referring to their crafts. ([Location 869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=869)) - The dominion of the speaker is not a simple “Amen” to things as they are; and nature isn’t merely a tyrant. Instead, creation leaves room for subcreation, and even elaboration—and a consummation of given things. ([Location 887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=887)) - With all of this in mind, perhaps, just perhaps, the reason Tom’s songs seemed like nonsense to readers of The Lord of the Rings (and to the hobbits) is because Tom knows the music of the world, and we do not. And if that’s so, then maybe what we think and say is the real nonsense. ([Location 889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=889)) - But great writers can do more than one thing at a time. ([Location 993](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=993)) - After drinking what appears to be nothing more than water, the hobbits are “singing merrily”—as though singing was “more natural than talking.”8 “More natural than talking”—that’s a telling way of putting it. Here’s a little inside information: in Tolkien’s legendarium we learn that the music of the Ainur can most readily be heard in the waters of Middle Earth. ([Location 1004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1004)) - We live in a tone-deaf time and we behave as though there’s no natural order to harmonize with; instead, we think that the world should just do what we tell it to do. ([Location 1014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1014)) - The suspicion that this is all there is to it now runs so deep in our time that even marriage as the happy harmony of a man and wife has been lost. It has been “deconstructed” in the interest of “liberation” and what we see in Tom and Goldberry is more the exception than the rule today. ([Location 1016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1016)) - But even in Middle-Earth it is possible to get so lost in your own tune that you no longer hear anything else. That’s not true for Tom and Goldberry—each sings the praise of the other because it is not only singing but listening that makes for harmony. ([Location 1020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1020)) - I think that this is the space within a dominion in which freedom is given room—it is the open space in which wolves hunt, boys play with pocket-knives, and businesses get started. (As you may know, all these things are endangered in our world because of an over-emphasis on safety and equality.) ([Location 1045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1045)) - Many influential people believe that the biblical doctrine of dominion is behind climate change and the extinction of species, and a myriad of other regrettable things.11 But the problem with this view is that dominion is a fact—human beings simply have it. It’s God’s doing. We can’t abdicate. Human beings possess power over all the creatures of the world. I suppose you could say we have a Ring of Power—whether we want it or not. ([Location 1052](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1052)) - But dominion isn’t arbitrary power, at least not originally. In the Christian faith human dominion is subject to God’s dominion. And it is informed by God’s Law—his moral standard, his holiness. We can’t just do as we please. ([Location 1056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1056)) - The mystery of romantic love is profound, and it does not accord with the democratic temper of our time. In it there is passion and pursuit, fear and flight. Reducing it to a contract between equals drains it of its power. Our ancestors played in pools too deep for us. Deracinated and inter-changeable genders may keep the corporate flow-charts flipping, but the un-sexed don’t know how to play hide-and-seek with the opposite sex. ([Location 1195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1195)) - In our time we’ve lost our sense of the nature of things—particularly the fruitfulness of a home where women and the feminine arts are honored. ([Location 1216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1216)) - In a flat world things grow in significance at the expense of other things, but in a vertically ordered world, things can freely be themselves, even when they are subject to others. Mastery does not equal ownership—even when people are subject to you. ([Location 1229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1229)) - So, has Tom redeemed a water spirit? I can’t say. All I can say is he’s brought one home, and they seem happy enough. But I suspect that this is what Goldberry had always hoped for anyway. Perhaps that’s the best description of redemption—the fulfillment of a longing, long suppressed. If that’s so, then Tom truly is a master. ([Location 1308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1308)) - Jesus said that even Satan keeps an ordered house (Matt. 12:22–28). But it must ape another rule of order, because evil by definition can’t make anything good; it can only corrupt good things that have been made by someone else. ([Location 1430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1430)) - The primary emotion in any bureaucracy, and the real thumbscrew of managerial control, is fear. ([Location 1455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1455)) - And this is why Heaven is not a bureaucracy. Instead, it is a harmonious communion of natures, ruled by love. ([Location 1456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1456)) - It is because the world to come is more Real and Enduring than our world that our labors in this world matter. The next world infuses this one with meaning because, as the story suggests, in some sense our works in this world will follow us into the world to come. ([Location 1552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1552)) - I think Tom is the ending, as in a happy ending. What does this have to do with dominion? Well, bless my beard, it’s the same thing! In the Bible God doesn’t lay down His dominion when He rests on the seventh day; He enjoys what He has made. And Tom’s dominion and his rest amount to the same thing. ([Location 1674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09LSCR7LT&location=1674))