Today is Tolkien Reading Day, or New Year’s Day (Fourth Age), or Lady Day (in the Middle Ages), or Why-haven’t-you-started-the-pepper-seedlings-yet Day (in the vegetable garden).

Over at “Middle-earth Reflections”, Olga has published an essay about the mystery of Tom Bombadil, with the usual quiet charm that wouldn’t be out of place in the drawing room of a hobbit hole. Over in the more boisterous hall at the Prancing Pony, Ed Powell asks what Alan and Shawn think Bombadil is doing in the story, and they give a typically-entertaining answer. Well, Idiosophers know a harmonic convergence when they see one, so in I shall jump.

I must confess right off, I don’t know where the mystery is. This is one of those (frequent) cases where people who study literature for-real say things that I just note without understanding. Tolkien told us in Letter #153 [1] what Bombadil is doing there:

… he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture.

So many of the characters in Middle-earth who seek knowledge are doing so for the sake of power, seeking dark secrets they can use against others, that one might be tempted to think Tolkien disapproved of the search for knowledge. Bombadil is a counter-weight to that. He knows all there is to know about his little realm, but it hasn’t turned him into a power-hungry maniac like Saruman or a resentful wretch like Gollum. He’s happy, playful, always goofing around.

You can find people like that in any physics department. When I was in college, it was Rolf Winter. He didn’t look much like Tom Bombadil, though (now that I think of it) he bore a resemblance to Ken Stott’s portrayal of Balin in the Peter Jackson movies.  Here’s a figure from Prof. Winter’s book Quantum Physics:

platypus, Fig 1.2-6

A world with only dark secrets would be unbalanced and considerably out of line with Tolkien’s own views. Tom Bombadil reassures us that a life of learning can be a joyful experience.

Works Cited

Carpenter, Humphrey. The Letters of JRR Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Winter, Rolf G. Quantum Physics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1979

[1] N.B.: 153 has 3 digits. Raise each digit to the third power.
1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3 = 153. Numerology!