A short note on Tom Bombadil, whom I have mentioned once or twice before, since I have been rereading Fellowship of the Ring to help jump-start my stalled book progress:
Last summer, I wrote quite a lot about the Valar. In the course of writing about them, I engaged in rather a serious way with the idea of their spiritual nature--their wholly spiritual nature, which meant fluidity of form but not of gender, and a reversal of Tolkien's original plan that there should be children of the Valar.
Rereading Ch. 6: "The Old Forest," I did not have any epiphany concerning what type of being he is. Truthfully, I think the deciphering of all the mysteries to be a boring and fruitless endeavor. But it did occur to me how blissfully, exuberantly embodied he is, "dancing along the path," coming into sight "[w]ith another hop and a bound," if not quite tall enough to be a man, at least "too big and heavy to be a hobbit," "stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink." He is heavily made, heavily clothed, bearded, wrinkled, and utterly, completely, a physical being, reveling in moving about on the created earth almost as if he has chosen, quite deliberately, to exist in this form.
1 comment:
ooh. I like this reading. You're right. He's so very very embodied and physical and colorful.
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