Tom the Oldest

Tom Bombadil is a being so powerful and strange that even his creator did not know what to make of him. 

 

While fans and scholars have speculated and disputed his nature, they neglect to consider that the man who discovered was himself wise enough to refrain from doing so. Tolkien respected the mysterious nature of Tom Bombadil. He did not fret with Tom but simply left him be in his corner of Middle Earth, a corner which by Tom's mere presence is perhaps the most unusual and miraculous of that map. 

 

Since I am rather well-read in Middle Earth lore, casual Tolkien fans sometimes ask me if I know who or what Tom Bombadil is. But in all my years of enjoying Tolkien's lore I have never found an explanation concerning Tom Bombadil that satisfied me, but one. 

 

 

It seemed a fact not worth mentioning that the character of Tom Bombadil was inspired by a Dutch doll that belonged to one of Tolkien's children. While this may go so far as to explain some of the very specific and colorful attire Tom is known for wearing, such as his yellow boots, as well as Tom's carefree and almost childish nature, it does not at first glance say much else about the ancient figure; till you learn that Tolkien used to tell his children stories about that doll.

 

While reading Tom's own songs about skipping through the trees and along river beds, one can almost picture Tolkien bent over his children's beds, the shadow of the doll cast across the bedroom wall as he animated it with his hands and his voice, bringing it to life with his stories. 

 

Tolkien told his children stories long before he ever actually completed writing one that satisfied him; and so, one can know with certainty that Tom came along long before Bilbo or Hùrin, or even Gandalf. 

These were only shadows cast big and small, vague impressions in Tolkien's mind left by the lore he loved and the legends he read. Names of characters he later wrote about can be found in obscure Norse fragments we know Tolkien used to study. Images resembling Tolkien's own line some of the Fairie realms he once dwelt in.

 

But Tom Bombadil was there, real, tangible, childish, put forth with the easy flow of a narrative told for one's own children, living up only to their whimsical standards, and not Tolkien's own. Tom offers us a glimpse into what those stories might have been like, there in the bedrooms of his children when he did not burden himself with self-doubt and a work beyond imagining in the course of an evening. 

It is strange that something that at first seems so easy should puzzle readers for so very long. Tolkien did not wish to understand Tom Bombadil. Indeed, while most everything else about Middle Earth is rich with history and thought, Tom Bombadil exists outside of that, he escapes that, in more ways than one.

We must decide that Tom Bombadil must simply be left be. 

 

 

 

In the end, the only thing that has ever made any amount of sense to me about Tom Bombadil was what Gandalf says about him. At the Council of Elrond, he tells that Tom "is oldest." 

Tom is older than Middle Earth both inside Tolkien's works and outside of it. Indeed, out of all the vivid faces and scenes that linger when I reflect on all I have loved in Middle Earth, I know Tom Bombadil has been around the longest. He was around long before any of Middle Earth's histories were written, for he lived outside of them once. He knew Tolkien before he was weighted by success and immense writings.

I know only that Tom Bombadil is so ancient that the only origin I have ever traced of him in all my Middle Earth wanderings is the curious and puzzling figure of a Dutch doll in yellow boots. And where that came from, none but Tolkien need ever know. Though I greatly doubt that he himself would have been able to remember. 

The Dark Lord of Depression in Sanderson's "Mistborn"

(While I try to refrain from discussing plot points specifically, spoilers lie beyond this point. Please, go no further if you do not wish to uncover the plot of the first Mistborn novel!)

 

I discovered fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson in the ninth grade by route of the Mistborn trilogy. Back then I spent many a lunch hour perusing the shelves of the library, pulling out book after book and imagining that perhaps someday I might read them all. 

So, on one dark and fateful day, I pulled a paperback off the bottom shelf and was immediately intrigued.

 

I remember it was the cover that first attracted me to the book. On it Vin (the protagonist) is truly a force to behold, the look in her eye can tell you that much. She is young, intelligent, fierce, and beautiful, and extremely powerful.

 

While I certainly wasn't new to fantasy at the time, having read The Lord of the Rings two years prior as well as The Inheritance Cycle, this was the first book of this variety that I had ever read. It was Sanderson that made me realize that The Inheritance Cycle wasn't nearly as good as I had once believed. It merely offered a good medium, a stepping stone from children's fairy tales and young adult adventures to the epic and more adult fantasy genre. 

One can credit Tolkien with effectively reinventing the legendary and truly terrible Dark Lord, pulling them straight out of old epics, the dark seas where they had so long lain comatose, and reawakening them into the fantasy genre. Christopher Paolini certainly gave it a good try. But it was Sanderson, I believe, who left us with a Dark Lord of truly devastating disposition. Little more than a shadow for most of the tale, Sanderson's Dark Lord lingers like an overpowering presence from the story's dark beginning. 

 

I must admit, reading Mistborn for the first time was an utterly overwhelming experience. While I had been familiar with The Lord of the Rings prior to reading it, it being like a family heirloom in our household, Mistborn was wildly unknown and totally alien. I had no idea what to expect of it. The complexity of Sanderson's magic systems was fully new to me, as was this style of world building. It was, at the time, astoundingly staggering.

These feelings of suffocation served the plot remarkably well. The sense that I was engulfed in this new dark world made it that much more effective and terrifying. I felt like Vin, a girl in front of a hugely hopeless task, the scale of which I had never seen surmounted and had no reason to believe could succeed.

I confess, some of the images the book gave me still haunt me, though I did not realize it until I recognized its shadows in my own mist-filled fictions. The sickening pollution of a world in which skies rain ash; the cruel light of a harsh red sun; the suffocating mists permeated by peasant's superstitions, inhabited by corpse harvesting monsters: I could practically smell the stench and spoliation. It felt sickening and overwhelmingly heavy in a way that made it hard to breathe. I remember feeling my skin crawl when the spike pierced head of an Inquisitor turned in Vin's direction. I remember feeling bereaved and disturbed when the once familiar face of the contemplative and dependable brother returned to us at the end of the book, his eyes pierced inside his skull. 

I remember all these things like one remembers the stench of a place even after one leaves it. Most of all, I remember the cloud of depression that came with it. 

 

It has been almost ten years since my first reading of the trilogy, and a reread has been a long time coming. The series holds up incredibly, and though I had long believed that The Stormlight Archive was my favourite of Sanderson's series, now I am no longer so sure. 

 

Mistborn has been with me longer, after all. The images have stayed with me from the ninth grade and on. I remember them so much more vividly than the plot itself, just like I remember the feeling of despair that oozes like a black fog from between its pages. 

The book describes this feeling subtly, incorporating it into the details of the world and the suffering in the backdrops; until, that is, the Lord Ruler shows up. It is by his presence that one begins to suspect exactly where this feeling of hopelessness and depression comes from. The Lord Ruler, an immortal emperor who has ruled, polluted, and impoverished this world for hundreds of years, uses his unquenchable powers in Allomancy to suppress anyone near him. His haunting and imposing keep sits over the city, the very shadow of depression, forcing all to be submissive under his despotism. He is the source of their devastation, and thus, it bleeds out from the book, stark and black!

This feeling was so consistent and horrifying throughout the book that it lingered and could be brought up by the mere thought of the novel even long after I had read it. Years later I heard Sanderson compare Mistborn to a version of The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo comes to Mordor, tired, broken, and devastated by his burden, only to find Dark Lord waiting for him at the gates, thanking him for bringing the ring all this way to him. I could not help but laugh, but not because it was funny; only because it was true. Deep down, the hopelessness and manipulation of it still disturbed me. 

Why did you think you could ever succeed, these words suggest. 

I can still hear the Lord Ruler's voice hissing pitifully: You don't know what I do for mankind. I (am) your god...

 

Having now finished rereading the first of the Mistborn books,  something came to me: an idea that served to add an even greater sense of tragedy to an already dark book. 

Before the end, the novel offers us an explanation for the Lord Ruler's extreme power, saying he had the source of both Allomancy and a Feruchemist at his disposal. This, the book explains, is how he had stayed young for so many years, for by storing his youth and his strength in his metals and later burning it, he could use those to the extreme, exaggerating them to the point of exhaustion. Indeed, the image of the Lord Ruler in his old and frail form is no less vivid to me than the young handsome man who arrives to attend mass executions in a black carriage, dressed in black, serving death to hundreds without a flinch. 

 

One is reminded of the effects of the One Ring, which stretches one out till one becomes a horror, a shadow of one's old self. In the same way, the Lord Ruler's powers eat away at him, harvesting from his human flaws of aging and weakness, taking from his fatal feelings and stretching them out into vast, horrid shapes. 

It was only on my second read through that I looked past this shadow of despair and depression and saw another sad form behind the Lord Ruler's black figure. 

 

 

The book doesn't explain the Lord Ruler's overwhelming ability to bring feelings of depravity upon hundreds of people, managing even to pierce those who are meant to be resistant to those forces. He manages to soothe entire crowds into feelings of misery and hopelessness. Yet the explanation is there, beneath the surface of the Lord Ruler's horrid disposition and Sazed's uncertain words: for if things like knowledge, and sight, and age can be stored and burnt and harvested, can depression not be also? 

Why not tether your own despondency to your stores; shackle it to your metals and burn them like a power; thrust them out across your subjects to subdue them; dish out your own despair so you can suffocate them in your misery; suppress them under the weight of your own sorrow.

I cannot say that I have forgotten about corpse-devouring mistwraiths and cold men with metal for eyes, but another image lingers now as I finish reading Mistborn for the second time: that of a dark castle over an ash covered city, its people retching on pollution and poverty, submissive in its shadow; and locked away inside this haunted keep, gone from sight and knowledge, an immortal lord deemed god sits in his tower, binding his own despair into vast stores, enough to depress and rule a world for generations. 

 

Inevitably, I leave this world now feeling no less overpowered than I did before. I only understand it better.

Tolkien, Trees, and other Thoughts

I got distracted by the light dancing across my book as I was reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien this afternoon.

I love the tree outside my bedroom window, almost as much as I love reading in the afternoon. I love sleeping with the window open so I can listen to the hush of the leaves in the night. I greatly enjoy all the little critters that visit me outside my window, from the birds that come to sing in the morning, to the family of squirrels that sometimes come to gawk at my cat. It is also my favorite place to take a nap, there in the tree filtered afternoon-sun.

Tolkien was himself a great lover of trees. Thus, it is no small wonder that The Lord of the Rings pays such special attention to them. Indeed, the trees are the personality of most every landscape in Middle Earth, be they of the hostile or illustrious variety. They are the constant dwellers, watching over passersby and temporary inhabitants that come and go throughout the years, such a short while in the long life of a tree.

Tolkien himself had a tree outside his window once which he claimed helped inspire his story Leaf by Niggle, an odd and wonderful tale that feels altogether dreamlike. He wrote about this tree in the books original introductory note, saying

"One of (the tale's) sources was a great-limbed popular tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner. I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large or alive. I do not think that it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

Altogether, leafing through these letters written by a mentor that I will never get to meet has been wonderful, even more so than I expected.

Reading through his rambles –regarding such themes as the struggles of procrastination in the face of productivity, his constant anguish at the regrettable busyness of his schedule, and the woe brought on by a book that doesn't want to get done, have all made me realize that maybe I know what I'm doing after all. Self-doubt is no stranger to even the greats.

I sometimes feel small in comparison, so un-heightened by time, so stuck in the scope of the present with a book that is only as old as the files containing it on my computer; a book that is still so unlived in. But knowing that someone I so admire has struggled with the same things as I am toiling with now brings me an unexpected sort of comfort. All this is mostly normal, after all; as normal as the life of anyone who takes up writing can ever be.

Tolkien barely dared dream that so many would share in his delight for his Middle Earth.

Books are wrought only with great pain and frustration, for the imagination rarely complies well with the limits of our vocabulary and the hampered frame of the page.

But once the wrestling is through, and the writer sits back and cries in wonder and fear at what they have created, the book becomes severed from them. As Tolkien wrote:

"(The) goal was reached at last. It is finished... (but) now I look at it, the magnitude of my disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped my control, and I have produced a monster."

Sometimes the book fades away after that, collecting dust on a back shelf, thought about from time to time only by they that sired it, sometimes with fondness, sometimes with regret. But every so often, if chance allows, a book will fly away to other horizons, where it finds other shelves, from that of a publisher, to possibly that of a reader.

Who can ever know for certain how many shelves a book can make a home in, nestled in comfortably, as if it's already forgotten they that toiled for it before it could stand up on its own. But, the writer won't know: not where it goes, nor how shelves it comes home to; much less how many readers might find a semblance of home in reading it.

Indeed, no one can ever truly guess what might happen when you release a wild book onto the vast world.

For now though, it is much nicer to simply read under the shadow of a tree, and dream of the day when my own book will forget about me and find a home on the shelf of another.