On ‘Tom Bombadil and the Anti-Matter of England’
Simon J. Cook
28 Sep. 2020
Ho! Tom Bombadil
Wither are you going
With John Pompador
Down the River rowing?
Excerpt from poem by Tolkien (1930s), published in Return of the Shadow (ed. Christopher Tolkien, 1988).
Professor J. G. A. Pocock first read The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) about a year after it was published. He was then in Dunedin, New Zealand, preparing his doctorate for publication as The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957). Pocock’s essay on Tom Bombadil (which draws on Humphrey Carpenter’s 1981 Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien but not the 1983 Monsters and the Critics) can be dated to about 1982, the year in which he published ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,’ which is referenced in the Bombadil essay. Curiously, while Tom Bombadil is obviously kin to the original British subject, Pocock read him as a symbol of an England that resisted assimilation into Britain.
Tolkien grew up in the village of Sarehole, now annexed by Birmingham, and spent most of his adult life in Oxford. Traffic formed in Birmingham in 1967 and soon relocated to the rural village of Aston Tirrold, south of Oxford, where they composed music, jammed, and smoked a lot of pot. Aston Tirrold was part of Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes transferred it to Oxfordshire and is as likely place as any to catch a glimpse of Tom Bombadil, who, as Tolkien explained to his publisher Stanley Unwin in December 1937, is “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” (Letter 19). Traffic’s ‘Roll Right Stones,’ of course, invokes not the house of Tom Bombadil but the Downs on its eastern border, with their standing stones and haunted barrows.
The road today from Sarehole to Aston Tirrold; with Lydney Park also marked. Source: Google maps.
While the musings on the lost sounds of long ago by the Oxford philologist were intellectually more sophisticated, not to say ingenious, Traffic’s Steve Winwood voices the wonder that stands at the beginning of Tolkien’s scholarly and literary imagination of Tom Bombadil. We might be in the heart of the English countryside but, in the song at least, there is no suggestion that the people buried in the mounds are English. These Brummie musicians sang not of national but of natural monuments. The standing stones, some in circles, some alone, were here before we came, and here before the people before us arrived; more ancient than the Celtic elements in the place names of the Midlands, they seem as old as the hills.
It is, as Pocock might say, all very English, but it is an Englishness that the New Zealander was cut off from by modern disciplinary boundaries. For Pocock was heir to an English historical scholarship that, under the leadership of F. W. Maitland, had cut loose the late-Victorian local antiquarians and place-name enthusiasts. Identifying the civil and legal archives of the thirteenth century as the beginning of history, properly considered, Maitland declared the more ancient past beyond the limits of historical inquiry, leaving the field to a motley crew of archaeologists, folklorists, and philologists. In his own idiosyncratic way, stepping from scholarship to art as his own methodology dictated, Tolkien continued the inquiry into what was now the dubious marches of the English historical imagination. The most remarkable aspect of Pocock’s essay is his failure to recognize this.
Pocock’s Tolkien is an author who was only accidentally a professor. The crux of Pocock’s argument is that the young Tolkien reacted to the Battle of the Somme by resolving to invent a body of English mythology (Letter 131), “was led by a series of slowly grasped decisions to create a secondary world instead,” but then placed Tom Bombadil in the secondary world of Middle-earth because he stood for England, “the point of departure that could not be left behind.” Never mind that Tolkien’s notion of the ‘sub-creation of a secondary world’ was just another way of framing the invention of legend and mythology (even an invented language requires a context), what is striking here is that Pocock seeks his answers to the problem of Tom Bombadil in The Silmarillion (1977) and Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) but not in any of Tolkien’s scholarly publications.
Pocock’s original march. Source: Map of Britain in the Dark Ages: South Sheet, Ordinance Survey, Chessington, Surrey, 1939.
This selective reading is illuminated by a consideration of Pocock’s divisions and limit of British history, as set out in the 1974 and 1982 papers referenced in the Bombadil essay. British history is to be understood through a model of interactions between ‘domains’ and ‘marches,’ where the former are states and the latter contested border zones. Modern British history, or British history proper, begins in the twelfth century, when Anglo-Norman lords penetrate Ireland, thereby establishing a new march. Prior to this, Pocock envisages a late medieval period, following the Norman takeover of Wessex. Before this was the early medieval period, when Wessex came to dominance while the original march arose on the border between Wales and the kingdom of Merica, where Æthelflæd was queen of the English.
But the ‘ancient’ origin of British history Pocock locates in a quasi-mythical past:
“The ‘Arthurian’ and ‘paleo-English’ periods… A map takes shape… There is no period of ‘British history’ about which the literary organization of historical memory has less to tell us in comparison with the techniques of archaeology and linguistics; and a history of the archipelago constructed in terms of its durées will lay its foundations here, unencumbered by the subjectivities of memory.”
(‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’)
Tolkien might have countered that written marks are not the only mode of organizing historical memory. Pocock cannot have known of Tolkien’s unfinished poem on ‘The Fall of Arthur’ (2013), composed in the early 1930s in alliterative verse – an imagination of how the early English settlers might have told the story of their legendary enemy. But it is notable that the various Oxford history volumes discussed in Pocock’s 1974 and 1982 papers do not include R. Collingwood’s History of Roman Britain (1936), which concludes with the suggestion that Arthur was the last British Roman, mounting a cavalry campaign against the pirates-turned-settlers, and that in the stories told of him the British embalmed their memories of the age that had passed and their hopes of renewal. Collingwood and Tolkien were colleagues at Pembroke, and the comparison that can be drawn from their various readings of Dark Age stories points to a shared vision of distinctive national frameworks for organizing oral memory: the British hail Arthur as the once and future king, indicating a hope for renewal and return, but the English narrate the recent, cataclysmic, histories of both peoples in terms of irreversible disenchantment and exile.
Here, at Pocock’s origin of British history, we arrive at Tolkien’s starting point. Tolkien read ‘prehistoric’ organizations of memory in the ancient oral stories that have come down to us. He belonged to that generation of philologists who fostered the rise of linguistics by charging their nineteenth-century predecessors with too exclusive a focus on old and ancient texts, insisting that language is, first and foremost, sounds voiced in communication (see, e.g. Otto Jespersen’s 1924 Philosophy of Grammar). This development was of course not without significance for Pocock, but while the historian read texts as speech-acts, the philologist sought also to reconstruct the languages of prehistory. Tolkien studied the old English, Celtic and Scandinavian texts with extraordinary care, and read Beowulf, at least, as the work of an author with definite intentions relating to a specific context; yet his mind was drawn ever back in time, inferring from the old written marks the lost contexts of the more ancient oral traditions he discerned behind them. Tolkien sought a more ancient origin than did Pocock and, composing stories as an artist, he drew various mythical origins with his pen.
Tom Bombadil is discovered at the origin of Tolkien’s inquiry into prehistoric Britain; but before following Tolkien beyond the limit of philology we may explore the source of Pocock’s misreading of Tolkien. The vital point is that Pocock’s projection of an early modern three-part scheme of history onto post-Roman Britain collapses prehistory into the march. The heir of Maitland, Pocock’s domain blossoms with what Tolkien called ‘the Anglo-Saxon Christian Spring,’ when clerical learning fostered not only literary composition in the vernacular but also the lettered administration of the royal courts, producing an archive and so becoming historical. The march, from this perspective, is prehistorical, shrouded in myth and opaque to the historian; it has no hold on his mind. Pocock recognized that Tolkien’s mind inhabited the march, but he was quite blind to the Oxford professor’s further divisions and limits of the unknown British subject.
We can discern both the recognition and the blinkered vision in the references to the ‘Little Kingdom’ in the Bombadil essay. The origin story of the Little Kingdom is told in Farmer Giles of Ham, a tale born of etymological reflection on the place names around Oxford and lending narrative substance to the model of domain and march. Giles is a farmer in the village of Ham in the Thames valley, some twenty leagues distant from the royal court of the Middle Kingdom to the north. After two incursions from the march – first a giant and then a dragon – a journey to the dragon’s mountain-home in the west and a return to Ham with a tamed dragon and much of his treasure, Giles sets himself up as king of the Little Kingdom. The story does not merely reveal the imaginative role of the march in the histories of the domain, it also circles the place of literacy in the establishment of the domain. For Giles becomes king with the aid of the lettered parson of Ham. “He was a grammarian and could doubtless see further into the future than others.”
One can see why the author of ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’ (1974) was captivated by Farmer Giles, and may guess that it was a reading of this story that caused Pocock to return to The Lord of the Rings – whereupon he resolved to pin down Tolkien’s idea of England by resolving the enigma that is Tom Bombadil. But already in his reading of Farmer Giles we see those presuppositions of Pocock’s ‘ancient’ British history that will cause him to misread Tom Bombadil.
In his essay, Pocock insists that Bombadil stood in Tolkien’s mind for an England “otherwise symbolised by the Shire and the Little Kingdom.” Putting the Shire aside for the moment, we may observe that the Little Kingdom is not English. The tale itself is simply a deliciously anachronistic medieval tale (Giles fires a blunderbuss at the giant), and Pocock is surely correct to discern Mercia in the Middle Kingdom. But Giles has red hair (a detail of note to Tolkien, if not to Pocock) and a mock forward situates the story according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of Britain – “Somewhere in those long years, after the days of King Coel, maybe, but before Arthur and the Seven Kingdoms of the English” – and pretends that it has been translated “out of its very insular Latin into the modern tongue of the United Kingdom.” Pocock’s reading of the Little Kingdom as a symbol of England is surely a correlate of his model of ancient British history, in which Wales disappears into the march.
To catch Tom Bombadil we need to step beyond the ancient limit of Pocock’s British subject and follow Tolkien to – and beyond – the limits of philological technique. We begin with an archeological excavation of the late 1920s, and a map of the march when all of England was Wales.
Source: Map of Roman Britain, Third Edition, Ordinance Survey, Chessington, Surrey, 1956.
R. E. M and T. V. Wheeler’s Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (1932) contained an etymological appendix by Tolkien on ‘The Name Nodens.’ Nodens was the proper name of the godling who once dwelled in Lydney Park (marked by a red circle on the map). Tolkien argued that “the name is not pre-Keltic, whatever may be true of the god”; it “was probably in origin adjectival, a title of a god whose remoter proper name is lost,” and by comparison with Germanic inferred that it had once meant “the ‘snarer’ or the ‘catcher’ or the ‘hunter.’” He discerned in later Welsh legend “an echo of the ancient fame of the magic hand of Nodens the Catcher.”
Just as Pocock is a modern historian, so Tolkien was a modern philologist. John Rhys, Oxford’s first professor of Celtic, whose lectures the undergraduate Tolkien must have attended, claimed to discern relics of the aboriginal language of the British Isles in certain odd Celtic titles. Tolkien, however, deemed the pre-Celtic languages utterly lost and the pre-Celtic past beyond the limits of philological inquiry. Yet Tolkien remained as obsessed with origins as his late-Victorian predecessors. This is the key to the relationship between the professor and the artist: when Tolkien reached the limits of scholarly inquiry he turned to art, using his literary imagination to investigate the lost beginnings.
In 1934 The Oxford Magazine published a poem by Professor Tolkien entitled ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.’ Across the water to the east of Lydney Park – or so we may infer his location from Tolkien’s later letter to Unwin – lived a most ancient spirit. His remote, not to say ridiculous, proper name was Tom Bombadil, and his title was the one who cannot be caught. The 1934 adventures of this curious subject reveal an etymologist’s artistic meditations on the name Nodens, which took the form of an exploration of some meanings of catching and being caught.
Sitting by the river, Goldberry, the River-woman’s daughter, pulls Tom by his hair into the water; Willow-man sings Tom to sleep under his branches and then catches him in a crack; Badger-brock and his family pull Tom by his coat into the earth; at home at night a Barrow-wight waits behind Tom’s door. On each occasion, Tom escapes by the power of his voice. Then Tom “went and caught the River-daughter”: “Never mind your mother. In her deep weedy pool: there you’ll find no lover!” Here is a playful treatment of the theme of marriage-by-capture, which late-Victorian anthropologists fondly imagined the primitive origin of the institution of marriage. But if Tom captures his wife, it is Goldberry who initiates the courtship and the 1934 poem may be read as the story of how she caught her husband.
The sequel to the 1934 ‘Adventures’ leaves the original just as it was and is told in The Fellowship of the Ring. A long age later, a party of hobbits from the Shire stumble into the malicious enchantment that has been brewing in the Withywindle valley since Goldberry moved into the house of Tom Bombadil. The hobbits are caught by Old Man Willow, who has been stewing in his discontent for time out of mind, egged on, we are led to suspect, by Goldberry’s unforgiving mother. If we accept with Pocock (and indeed everyone) that the Shire is England and the hobbits English, then we may read this part of The Lord of the Rings as an exploration of the enchantment inscribed within a corner of the English countryside by a story so ancient that we can hear nothing of its original words and can only imagine the voice that cast this spell. A vision of a very ancient past characteristic of Tolkien’s art: beyond the reach of song, but not of imagination.
Like those buried in the ancient mounds that Traffic sang of, Tom Bombadil might be in England but he is not of it. This is signaled in the sequel by the geography of Middle-earth. In their journey from the hobbit-hole of Bag-end to the house of Tom Bombadil the hobbits cross to the other side of the Shire, pass over the Brandywine river, its original border, continue through Buckland, a colony of the Shire where folk are queer, and enter the Old Forest, the point of contact with Faërie. This is a journey into – and beyond – the march, and the lesson, surely, is that once upon a time all of England was the march and the aboriginal spirit of Tolkien’s England is not English.
We now know, from Christopher Tolkien’s editions of the early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, that the story of Bombadil and the hobbits was composed in 1938, while the new hobbit story only became the great tale of the legendary War of the Ring between 1939 and 1940, in the first year of WWII. Only then was the world of the story comprehensively integrated into the Middle-earth that we know, the mythical creation and first age of which is told in The Silmarillion. It was only now that Tolkien imposed boundaries around the realm of Tom Bombadil, beyond which Bombadil would not pass, thereby establishing him as absolutely insular in Middle-earth. These new boundaries in part reflect the theological problem with which Pocock begins his essay. Before addressing the theological enigma of Bombadil, however, it is important to note how the war propelled Tolkien into a reckoning with just that English insularity with which Pocock charges him.
We can all agree that the Shire is England and the hobbits not only English but insular by inclination. But as an elf reminds Frodo Baggins in a conversation in the woods of the Shire, two nights before the hobbit sleeps in the house of Tom Bombadil, “it is not your Shire”:
Others dwelt here before hobbits were;
and others will dwell here again
when hobbits are no more.
The wide world is all about you:
you can fence yourselves in,
but you cannot for ever fence it out.
(Fellowship, ‘Three is Company’)
The preface to the story, ‘Concerning Hobbits,’ establishes that the hobbits can allow their swords to rust only because the borders of the Shire are protected by unseen guardians (the Rangers). The story tells how hobbits determine the fate of Middle-earth, and it concludes with their returning home to discover that the spirit of Necromancy, against which they have been contending abroad, has entered the Shire, with a new order cutting down trees, building machinery, and befouling the water. The Lord of the Rings is a story about little Englanders who, however unwillingly, must come to terms with the wide world where dark things move against them. The very idea that Tolkien was unable or unwilling to integrate England into wider history is extraordinary. Whatever truths it might capture about the young Tolkien who returned from the Somme were exploded by the rise of National Socialism and the descent of Middle-earth into a second twentieth-century war.
So, Tom Bombadil entered the new hobbit story before the war and before that tale became the great story of Middle-earth as we know it. He entered the story as a theological enigma, but the theological problem was only established later and inadvertently, when Bombadil found himself placed within Middle-earth and the question arose, as Pocock puts it: “How can there be a secondary power, himself uncreated, indifferent to the drama of the creation?” As Pocock perceives, Tolkien had the artistic sense not to trouble himself with this question, beyond circumscribing Bombadil’s realm within self-imposed borders. Still, the question remains how this practicing Catholic ever came to imagine an uncreated spirit of the Oxford and Berkshire countryside.
A comprehensive answer would take note of Tolkien’s long pondering of the Anglo-Saxon question ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ note too that modern enthusiasm is not so exclusively Protestant as Hume may have suggested, and take into account also Tolkien’s subtle correction of Collingwood’s theory of magic in his essay On Fairy-stories. For the present, however, it is perhaps sufficient to observe that Tolkien’s religion evidently did not constrain the artistic myths he imagined beyond the limits of scholarship. Bombadil’s uncreated status, which already informs the conception of the 1934 poem, is in the first instance simply a (pagan) mythical expression of a scholarly limit.
In the early drafts of the sequel to the 1934 poem, Tom Bombadil names himself an aborigine of the land. There is a pun at work here. Rather than a Neolithic farmer whose language is lost to us, Bombadil is literally an aborigine – ab origine, Latin: ‘from the beginning.’ Tolkien has stepped from philological meditation on the name Nodens, whose bearer may have dwelled in the land before the first Celtic-speakers arrived, to an artistic imagination of another person with a different if related title, who was certainly an aborigine and, as such, cannot be captured by scholarship and is, therefore, mythical. The precise form of this myth is that Tom Bombadil is an aborigine: a house dweller who interacts with the spirits of the natural world, into which he was neither born nor ever settled.
This theological enigma entered the sequel to The Hobbit in its first year of composition. It did so because it offered a way forward given the initial problem posed by the author. The very first plot notes, penned around Christmas 1937 and the New Year, propose that the magic ring that Bilbo Baggins had won from Gollum is really a snare of the Necromancer. In 1936 Tolkien had penned ‘The Fall of Númenor,’ in which Sauron the Necromancer was cast as the agent of the original (mythical) northern Fall. Tolkien’s use of his old art in new stories provides a commentary on the original, and I suggest that the initial imagination of the sequel to The Hobbit as a sequel also to the 1934 ‘Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ indicates that Tolkien was always aware, but only now decided to utilize, the fact that the aboriginal magic of 1934 makes sense only if it stands outside the drama of the Fall. If Bombadil was one who could not be caught by Nodens the Catcher, what Tolkien now saw was that the spirit of necromancy, the agent of northern historical cataclysm, who once again walked abroad, had no hold over the aboriginal spirit of England.
Here is an imagination of a tale more pagan and more British than the sequel that it became after Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September, 1939. There is continuity as well as development in the conception of a magical voice, but Tom Bombadil belongs to a story quite different to that in which we now find him. In the long years of writing under the shadow of the real war, Tolkien carefully redrew the British magic of Tom Bombadil into the more theologically orthodox enchantment of the elvish Lady Galadriel, who possesses a genealogy and on whose mind the Ring has a hold, and told an English legend of the war that ended an age of history, not with a fall into darkness but with golden peace under the king, which followed his seemingly miraculous (and British) return and the defeat of the old Enemy, Sauron the Ensnarer.
I’ll conclude this attempt to capture Tom Bombadil with Traffic’s 1970 version of ‘John Barleycorn,’ which may invoke the magical world of the 1938 story that was lost because it turned into another before it was finished.
Further reading:
The verse that heads this essay is from a poem of the 1930s, now published in Return of the Shadow (ed. Christopher Tolkien), where Bombadil’s self-designation as an ‘Ab-Origine’ may also be found. For Tolkien on the aboriginal languages of the British Isles see ‘English and Welsh’ (1955), republished in The Monsters and the Critics. ‘The Name Nodens’ is reprinted in volume 4 of Tolkien Studies and see my ‘The Expression of Faërie’ in volume 17 of that journal for more on Tolkien and Collingwood. For the disciplinary boundary changes that confined Tolkien to the marches of History (and for his reading of pre-migration English history) see my Tolkien’s Lost English Mythology.
Simon J. Cook was educated at Cambridge and taught for five years at Duke University in North Carolina. His study of the 19th century political economist Alfred Marshall, published with Cambridge University Press in 2009, received the best monograph of the year award from the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. Since then, his research has moved into the early 20th century, focussing on the emergence of anthropology and archeology and various understandings of the history of religion, mythology and literature. He is co-founder of Rounded Globe.
