Chapter 6. "The Old Forest" & Chapter 7. "In the House of Tom Bombadil" (I)

After the scare in the Old Forest, I am going to leave my dear hobbits sleeping peacefully in the house of Tom Bombadil. See you later.












Well, here goes the account of the day.
Merry, Pippin, Sam and Frodo have definitely left the Shire, entering the Old Forest and - to his relief - letting Fatty at Crickhollow in order to wait for Gandalf and keep up the illusion that Frodo is living there. Re-reading about the Hedge in the context of the too many borders that we continue building in order to keep away those we feel like a menace, I cannot help but remember the words that Gildor told the hobbits a couple of days ago: "The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out." It would be good for us to pay attention to Gildor. In the world in which we live, some of us have been fortunate enough not to have to leave our homeland in order to survive somewhere else. Others have not been so lucky and, desperate to have a chance to live, will jump any wall, no matter how dangerous. But the real thing is that those walls are illusory protection; no one is immune to the suffering, the pain existing in the world.

But I'm getting sidetracked. In this part of the journey, the hobbits are now beginning to taste the world outside their border. I particularly like the way nature behaves in the Old Forest, because Tolkien destroys any possible hint at pathetic fallacy and presents us a natural world that is agentive, trees that protect themselves from intruders, even if the hobbits have no intention of hurting them. The adjective that Merry uses to refer to the forest, to the trees, is queer, perfectly grasping nature's ultimate inscrutability. The trees may have grown distrustful after the great fire, but they already had their own personality before, irrespective of what humans or hobbits intended to do to them. Not only is other-than-human nature presented here as agentive, but also intentional; the trees appear to have both an individual and a collective consciousness, judging by Merry's words, who does not believe in the old stories of goblins and wolves, but, he admits, 

"the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don't do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so I am told. I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge. I thought all trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind."

And so, they take the hobbits precisely to the place they were avoiding to go to, the Withywindle, and they almost succeed in getting rid of them - or at least give them a good scare. It is interesting how the hobbits' loss of agency is linguistically marked, by the progressive looseness in the construction of their sentences. Pippin does not even speak but falls forward on to his knees, while Frodo hears Merry saying "It's no good. ... Can't go another step without rest. Must have nap. It's cool under the willows. Less flies!" Later, Frodo stammers: 'Wait for me, Sam. ... Must bathe feet a minute." Sam is the only one who keeps alert and able to express himself in full sentences: 'There's more behind this than sun and warm air ... I don't like this great big tree. I don't trust it. Hark as it singing about sleep now! This won't do at all!' Maybe because of his closeness to the earth, Sam is the only one who can "read" the tree's intentions. He saves Frodo from drowning, but it will require the appearance of Tom Bombadil to save Merry and Pippin.

In Tom Bombadil we find the most enigmatic character in The Lord of the Rings. Who is he? According to Golberry, "He is," but what? Who?  I am not going to enter here into the debate concerning who is he or what Tom Bombadil stands for. I simply take Goldberry and Tom as two forces of nature, who have human form but are not human. Tom's songs are different from those of the hobbits and the Elves and, when entering his house and seeing Goldberry, we seem to be in a different world. Their food includes milk, cheese, butter, cream and honey, but no dead animals, which, at least to me, connects them strongly with vegetation and life, Life, LIFE. Nourishment without cruelty to other sentient beings. I do not want to leave this house; I think I could stay here forever, and I bet the hobbits would too. However, even in the peacefulness of Tom's house, of the three hobbits, only Sam can have a dreamless sleep; Frodo, Merry and Pippin wake up from their dreams. Yet, they are soon comforted back into sleep: 'Fear nothing! Have peace until the morning! Heed no nightly noises!' 'Nothing passes doors or windows save moonlight and starlight and the wind off the hilltop.'

Good night, good night. See you tomorrow, still in Tom Bombadil's house.