Tom Bombadil – An Intriguing Answer !

[Marwhini]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Balfrog, I think you and your alter-ego, Dan Brown code-deciphering authoress should just take Tolkien at his word when he says:

"I don't think Tom needs philosophizing about."

And in that regard, use the advice Tolkien gave to an over-eager correspondent:

"As for Tom Bombadil, I really do think you are being far too serious."

I tend to think in this case it is over thinking Bombadil as well.

And... As for the ring disappearing???

Really?

Would no one in Middle-earth be capable of simple slight-of-hand?

And that isn't the only explanation for the person who literally commands the Ontological Identification (What things Are) of Middle-earth.

I still think Shippey's explanation fits the best.

It even applies when dealing with why he is confined to such a small area (Goldberry is the primarily answer).

Shippey skirts around the issue of Archetypes here as well, as what he is describing of Tom Bombadil is an Archetype (First Man, The Namer, . . . ).

As for Tolkien using Allegory. Tolkien addressed that in several places, indicating that there is a difference between Allegory and Significance.

Letter 203:

That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability.

Or.

From Letter 215:

I do not like allegory (properly so called: most readers appear to confuse it with significance or applicability

And he deals specifically with Allegory with respect to Tom Bombadil in Letter 153, he says of Tom Bombadil.:

He is then ... a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are 'other' and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with 'doing' anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture .

It was from this, and from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil that Tom Shippey got the idea of Bombadil as "First Man" (Do not confuse "Man" here with Human - First Man is an Archetype, or a form of Mythic Personification, and not a human being, or any other form of Child of Ilúvatar, in the terms of Middle-earth).

Tom Shippey was not well educated in Campbell's work (not wholly ignorant of it, I understand, but not deeply studied).

I am.

And when I read Shippey's account (Echoed elsewhere by other Tolkien Scholars), I immediately recalled from Campbell's The Masks of God, vol. 1: Primitive Mythology the various accounts of the First Man and other such spirits whose job it is is to simply know "What is." (The Ontology of the World).

So it is not that people are "allergic" to Allegory WRT Tolkien's works.

It is that Tolkien himself utterly rejected it as a conscious application.

And what this girl is describing in her attempts to force an allegorical explanation onto Tom Bombadil (one that Tolkien has already held-forth upon) is to claim that Tolkien consciously and intentionally wrote an Allegory, where Tolkien has utterly rejected that.

This makes Tolkien a liar, at worst, and deluded, at best.

Why would there be an INTENTIONAL allegory in Tolkien's works where he has explicitly rejected it?

MB