What shall I say tonight, to follow yesterday’s hubris fest? Something self-deprecatory? That’s always a favorite, and I imagine I’ll get to it before I’m done, but instead, just to make a change, why don’t I deprecate somebody else? Somebody famous, somebody whose majestic literary legacy makes me look not only tiny, but invisible.
I’ll trash Robert Burns.
Mitch Berg at Shot in the Dark reminds us that today is Burns’ birthday. Scotsmen and their descendants around the world are toasting him today, no doubt, and good health to them.
But I don’t like Burns.
It’s not his poetry I object to, but his life. When I think of Burns I think of his womanizing, and that offends me. I unloaded on this subject through one of the characters in Blood and Judgment. That whole 19th Century Romantic movement was as famed for its flouting of traditional sexual mores as for its creative accomplishments.
You know what happened to a girl who got pregnant out of wedlock in those days? How many young women debauched by these scoundrels, do you think, ended up thrown out of their homes, walking the streets? I’m not defending that kind of draconian attitude toward “fallen women.” I’m affirming a more draconian attitude toward seducers.
Part of it’s plain jealousy, I have no doubt. I’ve always had a furious, repressed resentment against guys who have an easy way with women. I envy them deeply. I’ll not deny it.
And I know that C. S. Lewis would reprimand me for practicing “the personal heresy,” allowing judgments about a poet’s life to cloud my appreciation of his work, which is a thing whole unto itself.
Guilty on both counts.
But that doesn’t make me like Burns.
I close this section with the only Burns story I know, which isn’t helpful to my purpose in any way, but might soften the effects of my rant.
As the story goes, Burns was walking down the road one morning, when he met a pretty milkmaid.
“Good morning, lassy,” he said to her, tipping his hat.
“Good morning sir.” The girl smiled and continued on her way. Obviously she hadn’t recognized the poet.
“Do you know who I am, lassy?” he asked, turning.
“No sir.”
“I’m Robert Burns.”
“Oh,” said the girl. “I expect I’d better put doon my pails then.”
Commenter Michael suggested the other day, in response to my post about my medical test, that I might be “the Tom Bombadil of psychotropic drugs,” utterly unaffected by them.
That’s flattering, but laughable. If there’s a less Bombadillian character in the world than I, I don’t know who it is.
But it reminds me that in my recent re-reading of The Fellowship Of the Ring, I think I finally figured out a way to think about old Tom.
I’ve always had trouble figuring him out. I know that Tolkien didn’t write allegory, and so it’s always false to say of any of his characters, “This character symbolizes X.” His characters are rich and complex. They reflect qualities, and multiple qualities at that. They sometimes act in ways reminiscent of Christ or the Virgin Mary or others, but none of them is anybody but himself, consistently.
Still I find it helpful to see Tom Bombadil as a sort of Adam figure. Not the fallen Adam, but the unfallen, the First Patriarch who named the beasts and tended the Garden. Bombadil reminds me of the Green Lady in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra, though he’s been tested and lacks her vulnerability. Bombadil, it seems to me, represents humanity as it was created to be—at one with nature but not beastly; highly sexual but chaste.
(By the way, I’m glad they skipped him in the Peter Jackson movie. He’s absolutely unfilmable, and the scenes in his house could only have been done as a sort of musical comedy number. I just can’t see it working).
I could well be wrong in my conclusions. Feel free to tell me why.
I agree with you both about Tom being a sort of Adam-figure, and about the movie. I don’t mind when things are left out of movies – as you couldn’t possibly fit everything into a feature length film. But I mind very much indeed the numerous instances of putting things in which were not there, and of grossly changing things. (Faramir’s behavior being one of Jackson’s most heinous crimes)
But I could go on for hours on that subject…and no one wants that.
That’s a very interesting insight, and to me it rings true (pun not originally intended, but consciously allowed). I’d read a few different theories about what Bombadil is, and compared to them your theory has an elegant simplicity.
I’d enjoy seeing Tom Bombadil: The Musical, just as long as they don’t let Nathan Lane come anywhere near it.
I forgot to mention – you jogged a memory for me from my fondly-remembered trip to English L’Abri in 1989. A few of us stopped in at the local pub on what happened to be Burns Day, and heard a few half-baked attempts to hold a poetry reading. Apparently we came to late to hear the bagpipes.
I like your comments about Bombadil Lars; I think that’s about as close to him as we’ll get. (One of the things that makes LOR’s so fascinating is that one only gets so close to certain figues (ie. Treebeard) and no close; they remain mysterious.)
– As for ‘fallen women’ Anne Perry writes movingly about this subject in her novels of that general period. (I would recommend ‘Shifting Tides’ as an example.
I heard Peter Kreeft address this breifly by saying Tolkien has said Bombadil is himself and nothing more. The one thing that interests me most about him is the statement in Rivendell that he couldn’t take care of the Ring because he’d lose it. His mind was dedicated to other things and somehow wasn’t reliable enough to hold something safe for someone, even though this one thing would have brought him a lot of trouble.
Ah but then…there is nothing new under the Sun. Wasn’t it Lewis who said something about how if you write a good book or story, you can’t halp but have representations of truth in there somewhere.
So Tolkien didn’t set out to write characters which would in some way remind us of Christ or certain Bible verses…He didn’t do it on purpose – but it happened anyway. So there!
The Bombadil – Adam idea is good.
There is an essay by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore called “The Point of Rest in Art.” He says that in painting and literature the maker will often have something that, in itself, is “indifferent,” but that contributes mightily to the work as a whole. He mentions the heel of the Infant in a Madonna and Child painting, and a character in a Shakespeare play. I think Bombadil is such a point of rest. He does not obviously advance the plot, and yet, don’t you agree? – – the book (LOTR) really would lose something if he were taken out.
I agree: he is unfilmable. Unless by a genius. Which PJ is not.
I remember that one of my really old (well, old for me–let’s say 30ish years) had a little catalog excerpt that included something called the Adventures of Tom Bombadil in it. As in, maybe Tom is some sort of cameo. I like the Adam take too, though.
“The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” is a poem, and is included in The Tolkien Reader.
I was a little disappointed when I got it, years back. I was hoping for something a little more extensive and illuminating.
I just came across a cd of Lewis reading the Four Loves. I’d recommend this to people highly.
I have it on cassettes, very old and pretty much unlistenable anymore. Glad to know they’re on CD now. I’ll probably get around to buying them about the time that technology becomes obsolete.
The sound on the Lewis CDs is crystal clear. I had no idea Lewis had ever recorded his work, and was delighted to hear this book. I haven’t read much Lewis since my younger (atheist) days. (In the early 70’s in our crowd you read; Alan Watts, CS Lewis, Herman Hesse, and Dostoevesky. I read all of Watts and Hesse, and maybe half of Lewis and Dostoevesky.)
– Does anyone read Watts anymore 🙂