[Child of the 7th Age]

Littlemanpoet -

You may be interested in this brief quotation from The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien by Currie and Lewis. In their discussion of Tom Bombadil, the question of the Trickster is raised:

[Tolkien] left Tom buried in LotR like a thorn on a rose - a pointed reminder that things may not be what we think they are. .... The answer is that there is no one answer, no single and unified figure to find.

Frustrating as such a conclusion may be, it is an important one. That fluidity of form and meaning is as much a part of real literary creativity as the fruitless effort to confine it in neat boxes is a part of literary criticism.

There is after all something in the notion that Tom Bombadil is not rational. From a standard literary-critical point of view, he is certainly no such thing. Yet for the critic the foolishness of Tom Bombadil could be the divine madness of inspiration.
In the tarot deck created by Terry Donaldson, the Fool is portrayed as Gollum and Bombadil represents the Hermit. In many ways, a reversal of these values would be appropriate. The manyfacetedness born of Tolkien's unwearying creativity almost makes Tom Bombadil into the Trickster, the Fool, pointing away from the known and into the uncertainty of the new, with all its risks and rewards.

So we're not the first to consider the twin possibilities of Bombadil and Gollum. The book The Individuated Hobbit does at least refer to a number of archetypes in passing (it's been years since I looked at it), but I can't remember if Trickster was among them.

For some time, I had tried to discover if Tolkien was personally familiar with the writings of either Jung or Joseph Campbell, or whether he simply understood so many of these things from his own studies of the actual myths. There's nothing in the Letters or other writings to answer this directly, as far as I know. My feeling is that any discussion of Trickster and/or other archetypes inevitably leads back to one of these two thinkers, if only to acknowledge their work with a brief nod of the head.

I recently ran into an interesting discussion on just this topic. The moderator of the Joseph Campbell Foundatin forum apparently wrote Verlyn Flieger, and received the following answer to the question of whether Tolkien was familiar with the writings of Jung and Campbell:

As far as I know, Tolkien never spoke of or wrote about any acquaintance with Joseph Campbell‚s work, though it' is certainly the kind of thing he would have been drawn to. I have yet to come across any serious writing on myth and folklore that Tolkien HADN'T read. At a guess, I think he would have known both The Masks of God and the Hero With a Thousand Faces. He would, however, have been equally familiar with Raglan's work on the hero figure, and with Rank's. Moreover, Tolkien was definitely familiar with Jung's work. [...]

It's always possible that on the "kinship of great minds" principle, their ideas resonate with one another because both thought along the same lines, and understood the world in much the same way. Much of the literature that Tolkien studied and taught-- Beowulf, Norse mythology, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--was made of the epic components and followed the mythic tradition that provides the paradigm for the hero path. It's always been there.

I have taught courses in Tolkien and comparative mythology for thirty years, and have known and admired the work Joseph Campbell for about the same length of time. I have always found Campbell's work both compatible with and illuminating of Tolkien's fiction, and I use it frequently in my classes.

I had the privilege of meeting and talking with Joseph Campbell and his wife at a conference in Northern Virginia, a scant few years before his
death. It was an unforgettable experience, one I'll always treasure. He was a remarkable man.

An interesting letter, I think. So it sounds as though JRRT definitely read Jung and probably read Campbell, but that his main understanding of such things came from his grappling with the original myths, which certainly isn't surprising.

For the link to the whole discussion, see the Campbell Foundation. A word of warning....these folk aren't Tolkien experts. There are a number of factual errors ranging from JRRT's birthplace to a discussion of David Day, but I have no reason to think the letter from Flieger wasn't real.

Sorry if this is too far off track, but the minute the word "archetype" comes up or a term like "Trickster" I can't help thinking of Jung.