Tom Bombadil in Narnia

Just as we feverish moderns have stopped singing, so we have stopped looking, really looking. If we did, we would see not only the magic of Tom Bombadil, but the magic that Tom Bombadil sees in every tree and blade of grass. And if we did that, we would be truly prepared for the heavenly kingdom that awaits us after the Saurons and Sarumans of our world have been defeated, and error, ugliness, and darkness have given way to truth, beauty, and light.

In the House of Tom Bombadil, by C. R. Wiley (128 pages, Canon Press, 2021)

Who is Tom Bombadil and what is he is doing in The Lord of the Rings? Peter Jackson, unsurprisingly, left this strangest of characters out of his film trilogy; but even the faithful, highly literate BBC radio play version, a version that retains the seemingly anti-climactic scouring of the Shire, left out the entire Bombadil episode. As for the novel itself, though Tom is discussed briefly at the Council of Elrond as a possible ally for destroying the Ring, and though Tolkien mentions a dream Frodo had in Tom’s house as his Hobbit hero sails off into the West, the Bombadil episode is a tangential one that does not seem to play a necessary or organic function in the War of the Ring.

Enter C. R. Wiley, a Presbyterian pastor, college professor, man of letters, and author of The Household and the War for the Cosmos: Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family. He has thought deeply and carefully about Bombadil, and, though he refuses to unpack Old Tom of all his mysteries, he meditates on those mysteries in a bracingly original way in his brief but expansive book, In the House of Tom Bombadil.

In this review essay, I would like to meditate myself on four striking insights that Prof. Wiley offers in chapters 2, 3, 5, and 7, respectively, and then link those insights to Narnia—not as a literary end-in-itself, but in order to highlight four messages that our world desperately needs to hear.

The True Nature of Stars

Tom, Prof. Wiley explains, is the master of the forest, but he does not own it. He holds dominion over the trees and rivers and woodland creatures, but he does not dominate them. While Saruman uses nature, manipulating and exploiting it to secure his power, Bombadil knows and loves and communes with it. Tom, like Gandalf, is a steward; Saruman, like Sauron, is a possessor.

In that sense, Saruman is like “the modern world [whose] 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.” Bombadil, in sharp contrast, will not so reduce the natural world that it becomes merely the sum of its parts.

Lewis shared Bombadil’s, and Tolkien’s, holistic vision of creation and of the rational creatures who live upon and within it. In chapter 14 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a product of modern empiricism, materialism, and logical positivism, learns that the magician Ramandu is a star, he falls back into the same kind of reductive thinking that corrupts Saruman. “In our world,” he exclaims, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

Ramandu’s reply is one that our age, blind as it is to transcendent truths and metaphysical realities, needs to hear: “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” Once a civilization objectifies nature, robbing her of her mystery, wonder, and integrity, it is only a matter of time before it does the same to man. True conservatism must ever resist the commodification of God’s creation and the dehumanization of God’s image-bearing creatures. When virtue-based wisdom that seeks to unite and edify morphs into power-based knowledge that seeks to dissect and deconstruct, the industrial appropriation of nature and the social engineering of man is at hand.

Come, Master Bombadil, and teach us again how to be rulers and not conditioners.

The Song of Creation

The ancient, fatherless Tom Bombadil, Prof. Wiley suggests, still remembers the music of creation by which God, assisted by his archangels, sang Middle-earth into being. He knows that such music has power, and he uses it to protect the domain over which he rules. Tom’s songs may seem nonsensical to those who lack ears to hear, but they combine the primal white magic of words (the language of Adam by which he named the animals) with the equally primal white magic of numbers (which Pythagoras and Galileo alike considered the language of God).

“Pythagoras,” explains Prof. Wiley, “believed that numbers were the key to unlocking the secrets of Reality. But rather than making a materialist of him, mathematics made him a mystic. He thought that people should attune themselves to the grand music of the cosmos.” Tom knows that cosmic music, and with it, he rescues the hobbits from the dark magic of Old Man Willow who tries to devour them and the Barrow Wight who chills their blood and sucks out their breath. In the face of such harmonious beauty, evil shrivels and is defeated.

It is by means of just such fertile, life-giving music that Aslan sings Narnia into being in chapter 8 of The Magician’s Nephew. But that music, as beautiful as it is, has the same effect as the music of Tom Bombadil. Like light or fire, it has the power to illumine and to expose, to heal and to harm. It is like the Word of God, which the author of Hebrews compares to a two-edged sword that cuts both ways and discerns what is in the heart, whether good or evil (4:12).

Just as Tom’s song brings joy to the hobbits and terror to the Willow and the Wight, so Aslan’s song, which the good characters drink in with “open mouths and shining eyes,” has a very different effect on the evil, Machiavellian Queen Jadis: “Her mouth was shut, her lips were pressed together, and her fists were clenched. Ever since the song began she had felt that this whole world was filled with a Magic different from hers and stronger. She hated it. She would have smashed that whole world, or all worlds, to pieces, if it would only stop the singing.”

True followers of Christ have been entrusted with a song, the gospel, that is as fertile and life giving as that of Aslan or Tom Bombadil. On a lesser level, true conservatives have been entrusted with a tradition that embodies much that is good, true, and beautiful. Let us not delude ourselves into believing that all people will respond with joy to our message of forgiveness and redemption or to our canon of what Matthew Arnold dubbed “the best that has been thought and known in the world.” The same message that strengthens the believer enrages those who would resist the lordship of the creator or envy the hierarchical supremacy of the Great Books.

Sing, minstrel of Middle-earth, and attune our ears once more to goodness, truth, and beauty.

Rehabilitating Paganism

Although evangelicals are nearly unanimous today in their love for Narnia and Middle-earth, there was a time when a goodly number were suspicious of the magical elements in Lewis and Tolkien’s fantasy worlds. Many remain highly suspicious of the witches and wizards that populate the Harry Potter world. In one sense, they have biblical and church precedent for their cautious mistrust of spells and potions and the telling of fortunes. The Old Testament harshly condemns witchcraft, sorcery, and divination (Deuteronomy 18:9-12), while Dante reflects the spiritual dangers of seeking to know the future apart from God in the terrible punishment he allots to the fortune tellers (Inferno XX).

As we have seen, neither Lewis nor Tolkien advocated the kind of dark, instrumental magic that seeks to control and dominate. They did, however, find much that was good in the myths of the higher pagans and in the yearnings that lay behind them. In such myths, they discerned pointers toward the fuller revelation of Christ. Rather than obliterate all traces of Europe’s pagan past, some elements of that past could be preserved and perfected, taken up into the true, redemptive magic of the incarnation and resurrection.

In the figure of Tom Bombadil’s wife Goldberry, Prof. Wiley catches a glimpse of a certain approach toward paganism that the church sometimes took. Rather than follow what Prof. Wiley dubs “the scorched-earth method” toward the pagan legacy of Europe, there were some Christian missionaries who adopted instead “the fulfillment method.” In terms of the Bombadil episode, Prof. Wiley argues that Goldberry represents, in part, a redeemed version of pagan water spirits that were more often than not dangerous and malicious.

To further develop this concept he invokes the character of Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Though satyrs in mythology were dangerous and lustful, Lewis redeems Tumnus by giving him “civilizing accessories” and “something of a Christian conscience.” Though I agree here with Prof. Wiley, I think Lewis gives us an even better example of “the fulfillment method” in the character of Bacchus in Prince Caspian. Quite remarkably, Lewis transforms the pagan god of wine, women, and song into a force of divine revelry that Aslan channels to help bring about the redemption of the Narnian countryside. Still, Susan and Lucy realize they would be terribly frightened by Bacchus and his wild female revelers (the Maenads) were Aslan not with them.

Secular Western culture is as cut off from its Judeo-Christian past as it is from the best of its Greco-Roman pagan past. Teach us again, good Bombadil and Goldberry, to dance and sing and indulge in proper revelry.

Preparing for Heaven

Sadly, in our modern, pragmatic world of non-stop, hamster-in-a-wheel activity, fewer and fewer Christians or non-Christians, conservatives or liberals take the time to dance or sing or indulge in proper revelry. We are too busy with both frenetic work and frantic entertainment to find and practice the joys of a Sabbath rest marked by fruitful and soul-enhancing leisure. To those of us so distracted, Tom Bombadil offers a true rest cure.

In a wonderful insight that most readers of The Lord of the Rings will miss, Prof. Wiley reminds us that when Gandalf leaves the hobbits to go on to the Shire alone, he tells them that he plans a detour to the Old Forest where he will have a long and long-awaited talk with Bombadil. The next and last time that Gandalf meets with the hobbits is just before he sails off with Frodo from the Gray Havens to the enchanted lands of the west. Perhaps, Prof. Wiley theorizes, Gandalf wants to visit with Bombadil before going to his just and final rest so that he might learn the proper use of such rest.

“How,” Prof. Wiley asks, “can we imagine an eternal rest when we can’t even rest for a few moments now? We may look forward to a vacation so that we can ‘rest and recuperate,’ but that way of putting it shows that the point of rest is getting back to work. Perhaps you’ve felt listlessness on the third week of vacation. That’s when ‘sleeping in’ has lost its charm, and you’re looking for things to do. If Heaven is like that, it probably sounds like Hell. Perhaps eternal rest is unimaginable because it calls for an entirely different mode of life.”

Bombadil, like Martha’s sister Mary (see Luke 10:38-42), has found that different mode, a life of contemplative joy that enriches one’s present life but that will not leave one bored in heaven. In The Last Battle, Lewis marshals all his skills as a fantasy writer to imagine a heaven (Aslan’s country) in which every tree and blade of grass means more than it does on earth, in which no one can feel fear even if they try, in which redeemed humanity can swim up waterfalls without obstacle or fatigue.

Jewel the unicorn explains best what Aslan’s country is like in chapter 15: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all of my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.”

Just as we feverish moderns have stopped singing, so we have stopped looking, really looking. If we did, we would see not only the magic of Tom Bombadil, but the magic that Tom Bombadil sees in every tree and blade of grass. And if we did that, we would be truly prepared for the heavenly kingdom that awaits us after the Saurons and Sarumans of our world have been defeated, and error, ugliness, and darkness have given way to truth, beauty, and light.

Open our eyes, Tom, and teach us to see.

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