My father, a native New Yorker was particularly affected when the Twin Towers fell. In December of 2001, on the way home from one of our many trips visiting extended family, we detoured past Ground Zero. Three months had elapsed, yet small fires continued to smolder. Upon returning home, my father’s psyche collapsed. He developed migraines that have been with him since. To escape the ceaseless ache, he immersed himself in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nineteen years later, I myself cracked open Tolkien’s masterpiece. The tragic backdrop this time around is the global pandemic. Inspired by Tolkien, I have chosen to adopt a temporary philosophy to weather all unexpected bouts of madness. I call this philosophy ‘Bombadilism’ after the story’s most enigmatic figure. Like fighting fire with fire, I have chosen to fight madness with madness.
Tolkien’s world is as magical and boundless as the seven decades of renewed literary criticism affirm, though not in the way one might think. The staying power of the Lord of the Rings is, ironically, its realism. The story is only marginally fantastic. Characters behave as they otherwise would in our world, and their existences are similarly brief. Much of the described world parallels our own. In fact, Tolkien explicitly stated that Middle-Earth, the setting of the Lord of the Rings, was not an imagined planet but our very world millennia in the past. What makes the Lord of the Rings fantastic is not its Elves or its Wizards but rather the archetypal qualities of a few pivotal characters. The eponymous figure of my proposed ‘Bombadilism’ is also the paragon of the Tolkienian spirit: Tom Bombadil. I am not alone in my fascination with him. For decades, critics have puzzled themselves over who or what Tom Bombadil represents. They proffer Nordic deities as antecedents, yet I prefer the simpler explanation: he represents unbridled optimism.
To understand Tom Bombadil requires a basic understanding of the plot of the Lord of the Rings. Simply put, the story is about the corrupting power of both temptation and evil. The Ring is the embodiment of temptation. As temptation is felt differently in all of us, so too does the Ring physically grow or shrink to fit the finger of whomever happens to possess it. The Ring is insurmountably evil and the corruption it engenders is inevitable. Those with stouter spirits can resist its evil for longer than others but not forever. ‘Ring’ is capitalized because it also houses what is left of the dark lord Sauron’s tattered spirit; much like a horcrux in Harry Potter. Tom Bombadil is the sole figure in the entire world of the Lord of the Rings who is entirely impervious to the Ring’s evil.
When Tom encounters Frodo after the latter wanders into his domain, he is completely unaffected by the Ring. Where others beforehand and afterwards sense a fey quality in Frodo because of the Ring’s influence, Tom could not care less. Tom Bombadil is also the only character capable of seeing those who the Ring renders invisible. To mock its powers, Tom is somehow capable of making the Ring itself invisible. He throws it in the air, laughs madly, and dances around with his wife, the nymphlike Goldberry. Tom is no fool. He is an ancient spirit and the genius loci of his forest home. He knows what the Ring represents to others yet remains magically unbothered. It is his attitude that I wish to emulate.
‘Bombadilism’ would consist then of juggling with evil, encountering it willingly, understanding its destructive force, all while overcoming it, beaming. The denizens of Middle-Earth all speak of an impending doom, due to the Ring’s growing power and its insuperable domination over free will and goodness. Tom knows this and laughs regardless, making a mockery of the thing which terrifies the world. He exerts a mastery over it that none other achieves, and is so disinterested in the thing that he is ruled out as a candidate in the mission to destroy it because in his Dionysian fancies he would likely lose it.
To be so unbothered by overwhelming odds is something we all aspire to. It is the familiar refrain in ancient epics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Tom Bombadil is the telos of the human yearning to be not merely unbothered but triumphant over the thing that beguiled us. He is the end of one’s development of courage and conscience. He is an enigmatic figure not because of his impossibility but his rarity. His risible disposition is something we might do well to emulate, particularly when the pillars of our minds collapse and the evil of the world seems inevitable. As obstacles are unexpected and contrary to our aims, we ought to employ a little Bombadilism: expectation and laughter. Throw it all up in the air and laugh a little – you might just sap the obstacles of all their potency.