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. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control, but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron. (Letters179)
I am not usually one to "trust the author," so to speak, but Tolkien is different. Everything he says here fits with what is represented in the text, and with the interpretation that close reading would yield--and yet there is insight here, too. I find that I have nothing to add, but I am reminded quite sharply of Gandalf's intent, at the end of Return of the King, to visit and chat with Bombadil.
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
1 comment:
It's an interesting comment on pacificsm and neutrality and their dependence on those who are wiling to fight against evil, isn't it? As I read I thought Bombadil is rather like a self-sufficient Benedictine monastery, complete in itself and not needing anything from the world outside. And yet it too could be overrun and destroyed by a hostile army that didn't respect its neutrality. Maybe there is a great value to their being those who stand outside history and conflicts and power, but it's not a stand everyone can take. I've run into folks who say that Christianity demands we be pacifists and this is a rather satisfactory response. I've said in the past to them that Christians *may* be pacifists, but there's a place for just war and if we were all pacifists, there's a chance evil might win.
I agree that this reading is well supported by the text, it could have been proposed by any reader and isn't dependent on Tolkien's authorial authority. And yes about Gandalf's chat with Bombadil. That leaped out at me in this reading and I wanted to think about it more.
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