Scribe of Minas Morgul

For those who’ve never read the book, it’s part of a six-chapter sequence largely missing from the Jackson movies and every other adaptation I’ve seen covering the journey from Bag End to Bree. The hobbits have escaped out of the Shire and, in an attempt to keep the Black Riders from tracking them, into the Old Forest, a feared and half-haunted wilderness on the borders of the Shire. They’ve gotten lost, escaped (or been saved, by Tom B.) from an ancient, hate-filled tree that tried to devour them, and Tom set them back on the right path: not out of the woods, but toward his house. This chapter, as you’d expect from the title, is about their time in Old Tom’s house.

It all reminds me of the Beorn chapter from “The Hobbit” - a strange sui generis kind of character, lots of honey and vegetables, a chance to rest up. What’s odd is they don’t actually need the shelter and the reprovisioning. They’ve survived a minor adventure and are surely shaken up, but they’ve been in the woods less than a day, they still have all their luggage, and Tom Bombadil doesn’t really tell them – or promise to tell them – anything that will help them on their journey. Tolkien clearly wants to tell us about this eldritch being, and remembering Bombadil is based on a doll JRRT’s children had as children and he’s sending these chapters to Christopher while he’s serving in the RAF during World War II, story-external-wise, it’s a really sweet detail. 

Story-internal, it makes no damned sense. Compels me, to borrow the line, but even so. 

Plot-wise, it just serves no obvious purpose, not that would have justified Frodo going with him or even looking back. And precisely because of that it feels like a mistake to go there. It’s almost like they’ve fallen under his spell, or thrall. He’s unaccountable, unknown, unexplained, and preternaturally powerful. And they follow him. It’s enough to make you question Frodo’s and Merry’s sense of judgment. As we should; they’re completely unprepared for what they’re up against, and they just have no way to judge dangerous-strange from safe-strange.  

What I realized (or remembered) reading this was how thoroughly this wasn’t a there-and-back-again adventure. Bilbo’s quest was basically a struggle against externalities. Setting aside Thorin’s dragon-sickness and the Ring itself (which Tolkien hadn’t really worked out what it was when he wrote that book), it’s more or less a struggle against physical beings who might have more power or knowledge but were at least of the same kind as Bilbo and the dwarves. Merry’s and Pippin’s adventures and the rest of the Fellowship’s will be along that same line. But Frodo and Sam, Frodo particularly, are up against something more on the line of the psychological and the spiritual. It’s certainly not a struggle against externalities; it’s to hold on to himself and endure through trauma that can strike beyond the physical world. 

Here I’m reminded it’s the wound he takes on Weathertop that finally drives him from the Shire, and that the danger was never he’d lose use of his shoulder or the wound would get infected: It was that he’d been pierced by a morgul blade and would lose his freedom and self to the Nazgul. That’s not a physical wound, and it starts him on a very different kind of adventure than fighting off orcs, wargs, and dragons around Esgaroth.

Beyond the sing-song nature of it all, which will probably hit you as either magical or nonsensical depending on what you bring to the story (I’ve felt both on different readings) and some charming details about Tom Bombadil’s and Goldberry’s love and complementarity, the chapter really centers around two incidents. First, the hobbits make their way to the house, they clean up and have dinner and are finally sent off to bed. 

At last Tom and Goldberry rose and cleared the table swiftly. The guests were commanded to sit quiet, and were set in chairs, each with a footstool to his tired feet. There was a fire in the wide hearth before them, and it was burning with a sweet smell, as if it were built of apple-wood. When everything was set in order, all the lights in the room were put out, except one lamp and a pair of candles at each end of the chimney-shelf. Then Goldberry came and stood before them, holding a candle; and she wished them each a good night and deep sleep.

‘Have peace now,’ she said, ‘until the morning! Heed no nightly noises! For nothing passes door and window here save moonlight and starlight and the wind off the hill-top. Good night!’ She passed out of the room with a glimmer and a rustle. The sound of her footsteps was like a stream falling gently away downhill over cool stones in the quiet of night.

Frodo, Merry and Pippin all struggle with truly frightening dreams (of Sam, he “slept through the night in deep content, if logs are contented”), but are reminded by strange voices in the midst of their dreams that they are safe here. They can relax. “Heed no nightly noises.” With Merry and Pippin especially, their nightmares seem almost directly driven by what they went through with Old Man Willow. And having this time to be safe, to be safe beyond the home they know, seems important. They’re up against a marathon, not a sprint, and they’re going to need to find those moments along the road.

The next day the whole house is surrounded by rain. “‘This is Goldberry’s washing day,’ [Tom Bombadil] said, ‘and her autumn-cleaning. Too wet for hobbit-folk – let them rest while they are able! It’s a good day for long tales, for questions and for answers, so Tom will start the talking.” But it’s not a linear storytelling, not the great reveal of Necessary Information (TM) like we got from Gandalf back in “Shadows of the Past,” or what’s to come at the Council of Elrond. Instead:

He then told them many remarkable stories, sometimes half as if speaking to himself, sometimes looking at them suddenly with a bright blue eye under his deep brows. Often his voice would turn to song, and he would get out of his chair and dance about. He told them tales of bees and flowers, the ways of trees, and the strange creatures of the Forest, about the evil things and good things, things friendly and things unfriendly, cruel things and kind things, and secrets hidden under brambles.

As they listened, they began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart from themselves, indeed to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things were at home. Moving constantly in and out of his talk was Old Man Willow, and Frodo learned now enough to content him, indeed more than enough, for it was not comfortable lore. Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers. It was not called the Old Forest without reason, for it was indeed ancient, a survivor of vast forgotten woods; and in it there lived yet, ageing no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords. The countless years had filled them with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice. But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river. His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig-fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs.

Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up on to the Downs. They heard of the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight.

The hobbits shuddered. Even in the Shire the rumour of the Barrow-wights of the Barrow-downs beyond the Forest had been heard. But it was not a tale that any hobbit liked to listen to, even by a comfortable fireside far away. These four now suddenly remembered what the joy of this house had driven from their minds: the house of Tom Bombadil nestled under the very shoulder of those dreaded hills. They lost the thread of his tale and shifted uneasily, looking aside at one another.

When they caught his words again they found that he had now wandered into strange regions beyond their memory and beyond their waking thought, into times when the world was wider, and the seas flowed straight to the western Shore; and still on and back Tom went singing out into ancient starlight, when only the Elf-sires were awake. Then suddenly he stopped, and they saw that he nodded as if he was falling asleep. The hobbits sat still before him, enchanted; and it seemed as if, under the spell of his words, the wind had gone, and the clouds had dried up, and the day had been withdrawn, and darkness had come from East and West, and all the sky was filled with the light of white stars.

So they learn about Old Man Willow, and about the barrow-wights they still have to get past to make it to Bree; but the real effect isn’t that they’re suddenly equipped with useful facts. Rather, the story seems to weave an ephemeral, ethereal space. As a Silm fan I’m reminded of Cuivienen, or perhaps of Iluin and Ormal, or even to the First Song and that Eä! that set the whole thing off. He’s pulling them out of time, or as close as they can possibly get.

The whole point of Old Man Willow is not just to give the hobbits an early adversary to struggle against and be saved from. It’s to show that not everything ancient is good or safe. They’re not all like Gildor or the Elves Sam so desperately wanted to meet from Bilbo’s story. Sometimes being old gives things time to fester inside you (“his heart was rotten, but his strength was green”). Bombadil seems to escape that only because he is the Oldest. In a very real sense, he just is. He’s the closest Middle-earth - certainly in the time of Lord of the Rings - comes to something like the Christian God, with the simplicity and control and undefinable-ness of that concept. But his real power, and the real thing that keeps him both from claiming the Ring and from being the obvious cheat-code to not need to do the Quest is, while he’s utterly in control of his domain with no ambitions to claim anything beyond it, that domain is small and getting smaller. 

I’m most struck, though, by the way Tolkien tells us Tom’s stories by not telling them. We don’t know what he actually says, just how it affects the hobbits. And that creates an awareness of a sort of telling that can’t be boiled down into words, I guess? It’s transcendent. Which means the world – the world Frodo’s stepping into – is transcendent, too, or at least not something you can break down into facts and statements the same way you can with those other history-tellings with Gandalf and the Council of Elrond. It’s deeper and more basic than that; basic in the sense of primitive, fundamental, not break-down-able into constituent parts.

I’m not blind to how much of this is bound up in water, from Frodo’s dream to Goldberry coccooning them in this moment of peace. Again, knowing the Silm, I’m reminded how water is the element that bears the echo of that first Song most clearly. 

It’s still a somewhat weird chapter in its way, and I still find myself anxious to get on with the story. But letting it wash over me this week, as it must have washed over the hobbits, it’s much less silly and self-indulgent than I remembered. There’s definitely something Going On, and if it doesn’t quite fit into the kind of story I always expect, maybe that’s more a sign of the mental blinders we all carry with us.