The Art of Being - Not Doing
The character shown above is Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings. Yes, this ramble will eventually relate back to the title, honest!
Why Am I Writing About Him?
Whenever I interact with a work of art I see it as a conversation with its creator. Everything else is secondary to me. I can’t escape the notion that someone actually made the thing I’m reading, watching or listening to. Someone, or a group of people, had to make particular creative choices that fashion the story’s direction and craft the characters. From these stories and characters, I try to reverse engineer the mind of the people who created them. This becomes a cyclical process. If I find that elements of a work reflect a fascinating mind, I’ll return to the work and take things far more seriously. It’s almost like the author is some kind Higgs Boson-esque particle who, by virtue of their own stature, give weight to the things they make. (I know it’s mass and not weight, so suspend accuracy if you’re a physicist reading this).
Tolkien is someone for whom I’ll gladly apply weight, mass, and all the rest of it to his characters and stories. One character that stands out is Tom Bombadil - the jolly looking guy in the image above. Tolkien remarked in a letter that this character was not important to the plot or the narrative, instead he’d included him because he represents something he thought important. As a writer that is a dangerous move. Lesser writers than him - which is pretty much every writer - would not be able to get away with that sort of digression from the story.
This got me deeply curious.
Power Without Desire
Tom Bombadil is a uniquely powerful character. Upon encountering the One Ring - an item famed and feared for its insidiously corrupting capacity - he simply plays with it and makes it temporarily disappear with a magic trick. He’s given the most devastating weapon in the entire realm and doesn’t seem to care. He’s unaffected by the power of the one thing that everyone is fighting over. He’s lighthearted and whimsical when talking about matters of huge consequence, speaks in rhymes and is somehow detached or sheltered psychologically from the ever encroaching darkness that plagues so many other characters.
He can, with nothing more than his words, bend aspects of nature to his will, is perhaps the oldest character in the entire world (as is implied) and has abilities that defy understanding and are probably without equal, yet, he spends his time just… doing his own thing, chilling out with his family and having a laugh. He seems content, at peace, and totally out of place even in a world so fantastical. His appearance in the story amounts to a cameo, but it makes an impression.
Bombadil is a person in possession of power without the desire to exercise it over others - a frighteningly rare combination of traits.
Being vs Doing
The world of Middle-earth is full of planners, schemers, Machiavellian dark lords on power hungry paths and heroes bravely trying to outwit them. There’s a lot of people… doing. Gandalf, for example, is perpetually micromanaging the day-to-day events of whatever plan he’s putting into practice as well as making high-level chess moves that have far reaching implications. It’s relentless.
Tom Bombadil is about being. Gandalf is about doing. Tom takes pleasure in things as they are, for their own sake, not because of the utility they might offer. This distinction between the two characters is highlighted by who Gandalf decides to visit before heading to the undying lands, when his mission is finally done - Tom Bombadil.
“I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time. He is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another."
- Gandalf (The Return of the King)
When Gandalf is done with doing, he indulges, at last, in a bit of being.
Ambiguous Neutrality
Curiously, Bombadil pre-dates both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He is, in some sense, outside of the world or transcends it in a meta way. He was inspired by and named after a Dutch doll Tolkien’s children once had (that ended up getting flushed down the toilet). Tolkien wrote comical rhymes and poems about him where Bombadil seems to represent the spirit of the English countryside. So Bombadil might be, at least in part, an embodiment of nature itself, an incarnation of the natural world.
Bombadil feels out of place in Middle-earth. He doesn’t fit easily onto the sides of good and evil that Tolkien draws sharp lines between.
“… but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless.”
- J. R. R. Tolkien (talking in a letter about Tom Bombadil)
Ultimately, Tolkien’s stories are indeed about right and wrong, and this is precisely why Bombadil holds a unique position. He is “a comment” on a particular approach to life, one that Tolkien evidently thought important to include, a viewpoint on morality, power and control that deserved recognition and a representative. Quite straightforwardly, Bombadil represents pacifism: a desire to do the right thing, but not to go to war for it. After all, if the heroes of the story lose, as Tolkien himself remarked, there would be no place for Bombadil in Sauron’s world.
But there is more to the character. He also represents the philosophy of “being”, of acceptance, of looking upon the light and dark as opposing yet fundamentally natural things, necessary things even. Both sides are seeking control over the other to a degree. Bombadil resists that desire to control either side. Despite his clear willingness to do good (as we see from him, when saving the hobbits on multiple occasions), his lack of desire to join the heroes of the story and make use of his immense power is remarkably amoral and neutral. He will help should he be passing by, but he’s not going out of his way to do so.
In a story where the battle lines are well drawn he stands alone in his ambiguity and neutrality. He’s a zen-like figure possessed of an otherworldly detachment who, for a short while at least, takes us outside of and above the conventional bounds of a story into territory that, at least to me, still feels entirely fresh and seldom explored.
This is a beautiful piece,