Bombadil & the Shire [archive]

[Chrysophylax Dives]

At one point (page 52 of the pdf), halfir posts in 'Peeling the Onion' concerning the editorial preface to the 1962 Adventures of Tom Bombadil:

it is a fiction, and those who try and claim that Tolkien wanted us to see both the 1934 revision that it contains, and the other poems as part of an actual Hobbit ME tradition are talking nonsense, for Tom was never part of any Hobbit or ME tradition - he was an import to their world.

halfir here writes peculiar nonsense. The whole of Middle-earth is a fiction, but within this fictional world the Shire is coeval with the realm of Tom Bombadil. Of course, The Hobbit tells us a little about the neighborhood of Hobbiton, and the Tooks over the Water, and the adventure itself touches vaguely on the world of the Silmarillion stories. But "the Shire" came into being only in early 1938, as Tolkien took the heir of Bilbo Baggins and some hobbit companions to the other side of it so as to pass into an already considered adventure in the realm of Tom Bombadil. There never was a moment when the walk through field and wood and over water, from the hole that is Bag-end to the house in Crickhollow, was not designed to arrive on the other side of the hedge, an adventure with Old Willowman and a meeting with Goldberry in the house of Tom Bombadil.

I think halfir's confusion about the relationship between Tom's realm and the Shire was likely in part responsible for his failure to ever clearly articulate the meaning of his central claim about Tom, namely that Bombadil is 'in Middle-earth but not of it'. For this 'in but not of' surely captures Tolkien's perception of the matter of Britain in the magic of the English countryside - places inscribed by forgotten stories as old as the hills, imprints of aboriginal personalities. Put another way, I think the enigma of Tom Bombadil has much to do with the peculiar place of Britain in the English experience of England.

Edit: typos.

[Androthelm]

I'm not entirely sure I follow. While the Shire is certainly fleshed out by the early chapters of Fellowship, I think it's hard to say that the main thrust of the setting--a peaceful, quaintly English rural land full of peaceful, quaintly English rural people--is not already present in the first edition of The Hobbit. There is some degree, certainly, to which those tropes are broken off from the tone and subject of the rest of the Legendarium (a gap that Tolkien does some heavy lifting in the Lord of the Rings in an effort to fix), but only so much as they represent ordinary, simple life to Tolkien's readers in the late 30s (in much the same way that the Pevensies experience of leaving London for the countryside in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe does for Lewis's).

So, on the one hand you have a community which was shoehorned in, certainly, to a broader world--but not without some wriggling to fit. The Hobbits and the Shire get trimmed to fit the world, what with their linguistic connections to the Rohirrim and the details of their migration into the west laid out, but Tom Bombadil does not--unless you count the elves of Rivendell remarking that yes, he sure is old. This is not to say he serves no narrative purpose--I think he does. This is not to say he was a late addition--He was not. But, vitally, Tolkien scrapped connections which would have drawn Tom Bombadil deeper into the world--connections such as his possible relation to Farmer Maggot. The Shire and Tom may each have been inconsistent with the broader world, but it does seem that the Shire--at least, some vision of the Shire within the realm of Middle-Earth--both predates AND goes through more "edits to fit" the world than Tom, leaving him, as it were, "in but not of."

EDIT: Oh, and since I forgot to say at first -- the line about Britishness / Englishness / Tom is fascinating. I'd love to hear that argument expounded a little more, I hope this doesn't come off as too critical of the idea, I just struggle to understand the argument you're making specifically re: Tom and the Shire's coevality.

EDIT 2: Took out my nonsense bit agreeing with halfir. I don't, as it happens -- & wrote that in a moment of distraction while working on something else. Canon aside, the text is clearly the same Tom as Lord of the Rings

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Androthelm. I'm not sure I can add anything I have not already said. It seems to me that you are reading the first edition 'Hobbit' through the lens of 'The Lord of the Rings.' As I have already noted, the Shire is never mentioned in the Hobbit, and indeed from this story we only really learn about one hobbit! (OK, we learn something of his parents, maternal grandfather, and cousins - although note that none of these are farmers). There is no good reason to describe Bilbo as 'English' rather than 'British' - the English hobbits arose in 'The Lord of the Rings.' And the Shire was invented as Tolkien wrote of the journey of some hobbits across it to pass under the hedge and adventure with Bombadil. Both the Shire and Bombadil's realm are creations of the 1938 writings on a new hobbit story.

What I tried to say above is that the hobbits became English as Tolkien invented the Shire, and as he made them English he also gave them a mysterious back yard where they encountered the matter of Britain. But the argument cannot get off the ground if you insist on seeing the Shire as somehow already present in the first edition 'Hobbit.'

[Androthelm]

I'll acknowledge that the name "Shire" doesn't appear in the Hobbit, but it certainly seems that the character of the land--and, even, the Englishness of its inhabitants--is already present. Certainly there is an engagement with Englishness versus the realm of Britain which is further explored in the Lord of the Rings, but I'd love to know what you mean in suggesting (as I think you are) that the Hobbits of Rings are somehow English in a way that the Hobbits of the Shire are not.

The truth of the matter, I think, remains that both the Shire and Bombadil are somewhat shoehorned into the world of Middle-Earth, but where I do feel the urge to defend halfir's stance is the degree to which they have been edited to match, as it were. Perhaps it is that editing (through the Forward and the Appendices, the bits about the migration and the King at Norbury and all that) which you mean by the invention of the Shire for Fellowship, and I'm mistaken? You just seem to be hanging a lot on the name itself.
Bombadil, though, doesn't get that treatment. He, like the Shire (or rather, like Bilbo's home country) of The Hobbit, remains present in the world without fitting. In, but not of.

[Androthelm]

As a small note, even Tolkien seems to have acknowledged that Tom was a character invented separately but later "put in" to give the Hobbits an adventure. It's Letter 153, but I don't have my copy to hand for the exact quote.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Hi @Androthelm. Thanks for engaging with me on this. There is a lot going on here and so I'll only now respond to a part of what you write.

Clearly, Tom Bombadil was created externally - his 'adventures' with Willowman, Goldberry et al. were published in The Oxford Magazine in 1934. These were the verses Tolkien sent Stanley Unwin in December 1937, about 10 days before he began a new hobbit story. When you look at the early plot notes and also observe - as you have - the astonishing lack of editing of the Tom Bombadil part of the story (astonishing compared to everything else), and also two further letters to Unwin of 1939 announcing the new hobbit story to be 3/4 complete then it seems clear to me that the original idea of a new hobbit story was to bring some hobbits into the 1934 adventures of TB.

What happened, of course, is the 'unpremeditated' encounter with a black rider in the woods of the Shire, which led to Weathertop (after departure from TB) and a hobbit becoming a wraith, which caused Tolkien to rethink the whole matte of the magic ring - which only now, on the return back to Bag-end, becomes the One Ring, but which it took Tolkien a few more years to fully comprehend.

It is very difficult for any Tolkien fan to read the early drafts of Lord of the Rings as other than the embryonic story we know. But given the above I have come to the conclusion that the new hobbit story as imagined and written in 1938 was primarily imagined around Tom Bombadil, who established the limits to the power of the Necromancer. The Necromancer and Rivendell notwithstanding, I see no reason to consider this story any more a part of 'Middle-earth' than was the original 'Hobbit.' The integration into Middle-earth only came later - and in the process transformed Middle-earth (as a result of Tolkien's imagination of what happened in Holin the Second Age the Silmarillion stories were themselves changed, with a new account of the making of the world and of the Silmarils subsequently drafted to fit with the metaphysics of Ring-making).

A major problem in 'Peeling the Onion' is that it assumes an existing Middle-earth and asks how Tom Bombadil was (partially) 'integrated' into it.

My considered response to halfir's formulation is that it misunderstands the process of composition of the story: that the Shire and Tom Bombadil were first imagined together, and then the story gradually integrated into a new Middle-earth. Only when you see this biography of composition clearly can you address the 'in but not of' of TB.

When the imagination of Bombadil and the Shire is understood as coeval then the relationship between English and Britain can be seen. But I am also building here on separate research on 'The Hobbit' in relation to Edwardian scholarship on Britain's aborigines, which requires a whole other post to explain. In a nutshell, however, I believe that Bilbo Baggins was initially conceived as an aborigine but than in writing the new hobbit story Tolkien made Bombadil the real aborigine and consequently made the hobbits (English) settlers of the land.

[Dorwiniondil]

Very interesting. As regards the Shire, compare the first three chapters of John Garth's Worlds of J.R.R.Tolkien where he finally describes hobbits as "the full English" (p. 58), a most appropriate description in view of the menu item of that name. BTW, Tolkien was obviously fond of the word ""coeval"!

[Androthelm]

@simon thank you for that--that is fascinating. I'll admit that I am less well-read on a lot of Tolkien scholarship than I probably ought to be, at this point, but it's fascinating to see someone write with a proper understanding of the field. I'll look into the Bilbo / aborigine connection, although I'll also acknowledge (recognizing that I'm falling into my own trap again) that it makes a kind of "gut sense", especially thinking about the presence (or, absence and Hobbitish distance to) Big People as we see them in The Hobbit.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Androthelm, the basis of my theory that Bilbo Baggins was initially conceived as an aborigine is an account I found of British aborigines by John Rhys, who was the Oxford Professor of Celtic when Tolkien was an undergraduate. In a talk of 1900 (you can read it here) Rhys argues that the first race to dwell in the British Isles was “a small swarthy population of mound-dwellers, of an unwarlike disposition, much given to magic and wizardry, and living underground: its attributes have been exaggerated or otherwise distorted in the evolution of the Little People of our fairy tales.”

Rhys further observes how “certain underground, or partially underground, habitations in Scotland are ascribed to the Picts”:

Now one kind of these Picts’ dwellings appear from the outside like hillocks covered with grass, so as presumably not to attract attention…. But one of the most remarkable things about them is the fact that the cells or apartments into which they are divided are frequently so small that their inmates must have been of very short stature, like our Welsh fairies. Thus, though there appears to be no reason for regarding the northern Picts themselves as an undersized race, there must have been a people of that description in their country. (emphasis added)

I have no doubt Tolkien knew this talk. Whether his knowing the talk is sufficient basis for my inference I am not sure. But my instinct is that Tolkien was having fun with Rhys when he wrote The Hobbit.

[Androthelm]

Thank you so much @simon, those are fascinating connections. I'd seen, obviously, the connection between Hobbits and mythic Little People -- especially when The Hobbit is full of off-hand comments like

I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of Big People

and

[the magic of Hobbits is] the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along.

which are the sorts of things which so often accompany fairy-stories. Still, it is interesting to know that there was more going on in Tolkien's academic environment with these symbols and features.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Androthelm - on that first quote - yes!

Your second quote, by the by, reads curiously in light of the magic ring. When you think on it, the magic ring merely amplifies Bilbo's 'ordinary everyday' hobbit disappearing magic. (I was quite blown over when I realized this - it only took me around 45 years to spot it).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

This thread jumps the gun; I’m basically ‘replying’ to the plaza archive ‘Peeling the Onion’ thread, which has not yet been released and, according to present library policy, will be locked, i.e. not open to comments.

So I think one key to Bombadil is the word aborigine. We read this word in the first and the second drafts of 1938. When Tolkien first composed this part of the story, in late summer, Bingo Bolger-Baggins asks: “Who are you, Master?” and Tom Bombadil replies: “I am an Aborigine, that’s what I am” (Shadow 121). When Frodo arrived at the house in the redrafting in the winter, he indicates that the term is not meant in the loose ethnological sense of ‘native people’ (as in, a pre-Celtic settler in the British Isles) but as a literal translation of its Latin origin: “I am Ab-Origine” (Shadow 329), Latin: ‘from the beginning.’

Tom Bombadil is an inhabitant of the land, who lives in a married state in a house, who was not made in the land nor ever settled it.

halfir of course saw all this, as he saw also that the Bombadil who names himself an Aborigine is the same speaker whose adventures had been told in a verse printed in The Oxford Magazine (1934). If I understand the drift of ‘Peeling the Onion,’ however, halfir reads this self-designation as expressing an idea about Tom Bombadil that resulted from the 1938 story; an innovation that (somehow) reflects the very fact that Bombadil was ‘imported’ and ‘integrated’ into the story-world of Middle-earth.

In opposition to this reading I submit that aborigine – ‘from the beginning’ – is a comment or disclosure by our author concerning the subject of his 1934 poem; a vital characteristic of Tom Bombadil, implicit in the original but now brought out by some narrative need – reflecting (I guess) something about the magic ring of the old story now undergoing dramatic imaginative transfiguration. If this is correct, then understanding Tom Bombadil may prove a key to understanding the One Ring (one of many ideas that evidently flickered in the mind of halfir). But my concern here is with Tom Bombadil.

I submit that being in but not of the world is of the very essence of the original (1934) Tom Bombadil and only accidentally reflects an ‘importation’ into Middle-earth (which in any case, was not yet the world of this story, nor had even been imagined as we know it). I think the misapprehension that in but not of the world takes its meaning from the fact that Bombadil was queerly ‘integrated’ into Middle-earth runs deep in ‘Peeling the Onion’; a peculiar delusion that by the end seems to undermine (it does not) the great value of the textual exegesis of the long (and best) first part of the thread.

Aborigine was in 1939 replaced with the less revealing – and, of course, ambiguous – Eldest, together with the greatest riddle: Who are you, alone, yourself, and nameless?

The 1939 revisions disguise the clear comment, which was Tolkien’s way. He knew Tom Bombadil an enigma from the beginning; not an enigma because he was imported, simply an enigma who – in contrast to humans and elves – was there from the beginning. And what we learn here, in the first instance, is simply that aborigine is a key to the 1934 poem, which appears to have been designed as the story of a speaking-being who is eldest and yet precisely not Adam, the first man.

Adam was not from the beginning; he was created on the sixth day. If the 1934 poem tells of an aborigine of the land it tells of a speaking-being with a quite different relationship to the land (to Nature, to a particular location in the countryside) than that of Adam and Eve and all their many children. Tom Bombadil is in the world in a different way than either humans or elves. This is surely why in the sequel, when Tom and Goldberry have been living together an age, their house remains childless. While Tom as it were lifts Goldberry out of Nature, capturing the daughter of the River, marrying her, and living with her in his house, their life together is not that of man and woman as we know it. And here we arrive at the crux of the matter as far as Tolkien's 'grand theories': Bombadil and Goldberry are outside the drama of the Fall.

Of course, halfir saw much of this. For example, we can profitably turn now to his long, late discussion of pacificism, war, and power, which includes a most suggestive contrast of Tom Bombadil and Sauron that teases out a shared theme of capture. Just as sexuality without procreation is at the heart of the marriage of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, so such things as the Ring have ‘no hold on his mind’. As halfir saw, Bombadil does not join Galadriel and Boromir in desire for power. What this means, in Tolkien’s mind, is that Bombadil cannot be captured by the northern agent of the Fall, the Necromancer. Here, presumably, is why an aborigine was in 1938, the first year of the writing of a new hobbit story, called upon in the face of a magic ring of invisibility that had seemed rather to capture the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, but now turned out to be a snare of the Necromancer.

[Troelsfo]

This is very interesting, indeed! Thank you @Chrysophylax Dives and @Androthelm
!

Trying to sort out my own thinking is likely to require more than a single post, so I will start out commenting on the introduction of the Shire into Middle-earth.

In this question, I find myself in something of a intermediate position – a ‘superposition’, I am tempted to say

Clearly the Shire did not exist in the first edition of The Hobbit. Neither as a name or as a concept of a defined area in which the Hobbits lived – not even as a concept of a defined area at all.

This is, perhaps, nowhere as obvious as when the party of Dwarves, Wizard, and Hobbit are heading east, where subtle changes were introduced in later editions to indicate an area of Hobbit dwellings. In the first edition, however, we learn that at first,

There was a good deal of wide respectable country to pass through, inhabited by decent folk, men or hobbits or elves or what not, with good roads, an inn or two, and every now and then a dwarf, or a tinker, or a farmer ambling by on business.

Hobbiton would obviously have been a village of Hobbits, but that is all we get here. There is no “hobbit-lands” to pass through as in the later editions, and the inhabitants of the “wide respectable lands” are a motley group of races, men, hobbits, and even elves, and “what not”.

I do, however, think that the intention is also there to create, for Hobbiton, specifically, an area that is reminiscent of England. This is not particularly strong in the first couple of chapters, and is generally only implied by Bilbo's wish for his tea. However, in the final chapter, the notice in black and red on the gate to Bag End is, for me as a foreigner, particularly telling, and, in my opinion, reveals that the produce of Hobbiton, if nothing else, is certainly grown in English soil. For me, this notice, even when reading the Danish translation as a child, came across as something English. As a child, I doubt that I distinguished between English and British, but I will nonetheless insist that “Messrs. Grubb, Grubb, and Burrowes” selling off “the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire” could not belong in Wales or Scotland.

If we combine this with the images that Tolkien made for (or before) the first UK edition in September 1937 (see particularly figures 1 through 10 in Hammond & Scull's brilliant The Art of the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien), we do, in my view, get a bit more local. On page 23 of his recent The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (also mentioned by @Dorwiniondil above – I agree that this work is a very valuable contribution to this discussion) John Garth discusses the famous picture of “The Hill : Hobbiton-across-the Water” and how it was inspired by a picture of Faringdon Folly (in general, I think too little attention is often paid to Tolkien's own pictures as indications of how he envisioned scenery, and how his envisioning changed over time – but that is not related to this and will have to wait for another day ).

So, I believe that, in the first edition of The Hobbit, we had the village of Hobbiton whose surroundings were intentionally reminiscent of the English West Midlands, onto which Tolkien had tacked certain other things, including stuff from his private folly and preoccupation, the Silmarillion legendarium, much like Niggle would use some odd and unfinished painting of some distant mountains to tack on to his tree and mostly paint over with leaves without worrying much about the mountains at all, while the Tree itself remained firmly rooted in the well-known soil.

I am not sure how this relates to Simon's ideas here. If I am right, we had, in The Hobbit a vague and undefined area of land with deliberate reference or echo of the lands of which Tom Bombadil, in Simon's reading (which I am inclined to agree with), truly was an aborigine, and from that concept Tolkien started developing this area into what we know today as the Shire – and here I would certainly agree with Simon that this development of the Shire and the wider area until Bree, should be seen as one process that brought forth the Shire, the Old Forest, Tom Bombadil, the Barrow Downs and Bree-land.

[Troelsfo]

In an entirely different context, I came across The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies by Robert Kirk in the 1893 edition with a long introduction (and notes) by Andrew Lang, whose fairy books a young Tolkien would read, and in whose honour the University of St Andrews instituted the Andrew Lang lecture, which was in 1939 delivered by one J.R.R. Tolkien under the title On Fairy-stories.

I will quote first from Lang's Introduction (p. XVIII):

Mr. Kirk's first chapter, " Of the Subterranean Inhabitants," naturally suggests the recent speculations of Mr. MacRitchie. The gist of Mr. MacRitchie's Testimony of Tradition is that there once was a race of earth-dwellers in this island; that their artificial caves still exist; that this people survive in popular memory as " the legendary Feens," and as the Pechts of popular tales, in which they are regarded as dwarfs. "The Pechs were unco wee bodies, but terrible Strang." Here, then, it might be thought that we have the origin of Fairy beliefs. There really was, on this showing, a dwarf race, who actually did live in the "fairy-hills," or howes, now commonly looked on as sepulchral monuments.

There is much in Mr. MacRitchie's theory which does not commend itself to me.

And next from a note (p. 88) to Kirk's use of "Fairy hills" (p. 23)

Note (d), p. 23.-"Fairy hills."
The hypothesis that the Fairy belief may be a tradition of an ancient race dwelling in subterranean homes, is older than Mr. McRitchie or Sir Walter Scott In his Scottith Scenery (1803), Dr. Cririe suggests that the germ of the Fairy myth is the existence of dispossessed aboriginals dwelling in subterranean houses, in some places called Picts' houses, covered with artificial mounds. The lights seen near the mounds are lights actually carried by the mound-dwellers. Dr. Cririe works out in some detail "this marvellously absurd supposition," as the Quarterly Review calls it (vol. lix.t p. 280).

These quotations seem to me to discuss the same theories of one MacRitchie as John Rhys in the 1900 talk Simon (@Chrysophylax Dives) has already directed our attention to, but Lang is a little earlier and much less convinced.

We know, also, that Tolkien requested The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies at the Weston Library on 27 February 1939 as he was preparing for the Andrew Lang lecture (Oronzo Cilli, Tolkien's Library, entry 1198).

At that point, Tolkien had, of course, been working for a bit more than a year on his new Hobbit sequel, and I am aware of no evidence to suggest that Tolkien was aware of this book (much) prior to requesting it from the library, but it is another voice showing that this theory of MacRitchie's was being discussed and addressed among the great scholars of the generation before Tolkien himself; men that Tolkien knew and probably admired, and so it would seem highly likely that Tolkien would have known about this discussion even earlier, making Simon is, at the very least, right in identifying this theory as an aspect of the intellectual 'landscape', with which Tolkien was familiar, and thus at least a possible influence.

In many ways, the concept of these "dispossessed aboriginals" would seem to me to be more akin to the Hobbits themselves than to Tom Bombadil. I am uncertain when it became clear to Tolkien that the Hobbits and migrated into the lands in which the lived towards the end of the Third Age – possibly a check-up in The Return of the Shadow might give some hints (or even clear evidence), but that will have to be for some other day

Archive.org references:
Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies. London, 1893.
David MacRitchie, The Testimony of Tradition. London, 1890.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

In an entirely different context, I came across The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies by Robert Kirk in the 1893 edition with a long introduction (and notes) by Andrew Lang:

Mr. Kirk's first chapter, " Of the Subterranean Inhabitants," naturally suggests the recent speculations of Mr. MacRitchie.

Troelsfo, apologies on a late reply. We have a second daughter and I was long distracted...

Just to say two things on your comment here.
1. MacRitchie is *the* source of Rhys' 1900 archaeological speculations - he appears not to have seen these pict dwellings himself and his credence with MacRitchie's claims appears singular (everyone else recognized MacRitchie as a bit obviously bonkers).
2. Honestly, for what it is worth, i don't think there is even much point tracing the likelihood of Tolkien reading Z in book Y with regard to this material. The close-knit nature of Oxford colleges and faculties, environs that specialize in the cultivation of local oral traditions, would hardly forget the wilder speculations of a Professor, even the Professor of Celtic.

Edit postscript on 2: as evidence by John Buchan's short story of an Oxford scholar of northern antiquities who is kidnapped by the aborigines in the Highlands of Scotland. This kind of material is really not forgotten after a generation.

[Troelsfo]

Thank you, @Chrysophylax Dives

No need to apologise! One of the beauties of this is that we can discuss things at a pace that suits our other obligations (whether family, work, or other)

Just to make sure: with your no. 2, are you saying that the University community that Tolkien belonged to would be sufficient ‘source’ for these things, irrespective of his readings?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Just to make sure: with your no. 2, are you saying that the University community that Tolkien belonged to would be sufficient ‘source’ for these things, irrespective of his readings?

Yes.

[Troelsfo]

Yes.

Thank you