Tom Bombadil is a father-figure in a story filled with them. He is indeed perhaps the most powerful father in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” He’s there at the beginning to tell the hobbits the stories that they need to hear in order to know their place in the order of things, and to see them on their way. But also at the end, to receive them home again.

One of my daughters-in law recently asked, “Why is Tom Bombadil so silly?”, or something like that. I’ve written a book on Bombadil, and I’d just spoken on him earlier that day to a group of students at Grove City College, so the question hadn’t come completely out of the blue. But the context for her comment was the subject of fatherhood (her husband, my son, is a new father), and we were discussing my methods for raising him—and one in particular: my tendency to go from being authoritative to light-hearted, in the blink of an eye.

Back to Bombadil for a moment: My answer didn’t satisfy her, I could tell. And upon reflection, it doesn’t satisfy me either. I had mumbled something about jesters, the ones who yuck it up in a king’s court. Tom’s a kind of jester, I’d said. But as I’ve already said, that doesn’t satisfy me. Indeed, I’ve come to see that it’s precisely backwards. It’s Tom who is kingly, even with all his nonsense singing (as I hope you can recall from reading the story). According to his wife Goldberry, he’s “the Master of wood, water, and hill.” And as if on cue, he appears wearing a crown of autumn leaves. So now I’m wondering too—if Tom is a King, why is he so silly?

Upon consideration, if I could answer her question again, I’d correct her slightly, and get to the heart of the matter at the same moment. I’d say Tom is jovial, like any good king—or father for that matter—should be.

Joviality is an attribute of kingship; we can discern that if we look into the origin of the word. Jove is another name for Jupiter. I’m not thinking of the planet here—not the planet as it is contemporarily understood, anyway. The Jupiter I’m thinking of lived in the old cosmos as it was understood by astronomers before the invention of the telescope. He was the King, and his name literally means, “Sky Father”. That old cosmos, with all if its relevance for creatures living on the earth, was beautifully brought back to life by C. S. Lewis in his Narnia Chronicles. In those books the planets exercise a subtle, but pervasive influence in each one of the stories. We can see the influence of Mars in Prince Caspian, and Mercury in The Horse and His Boy, and even the Sun (yes, it was considered a planet, too), in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But we see Jupiter, in all his kingly splendor, in the first book (at least in the order in which they were written): The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Michael Ward in his marvelous book, Planet Narnia, makes an irrefutable case for what I describe. His thesis might be written off as eisegesis if it wasn’t for the consistent interest Lewis shows in the planets in so much of his scholarship. For example, The Discarded Image, the last book Lewis published, documents the contents of his Oxford lectures entitled, “A Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry.” (In other words, it is his introduction to the subject of medieval poetry, containing important information a reader must know if he is to understand the poetry of the period.) And in that introduction Lewis zeroes in on Jupiter, the King, and the influence he has on the world that lies beneath him. Consider this:

“The character he produces in men would now be very imperfectly expressed by the word “jovial”…. We may say it is Kingly, but we must think of a king at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene. The Jovial character is cheerful, festive, yet temperate, tranquil, magnanimous.” (quoted in “Planet Narnia,” p. 43.)

Just a few moments before my daughter-in-law had asked her question, I had been making goofy faces at her 7-month-old daughter, but about two hours before that I had spoken authoritatively on serious themes from the history of Western thought that run through The Lord of the Rings. She noted that my son did the same sort of thing; he toggled back and forth between silly antics and authoritative pronouncements. What I think she was getting at (and this is a guess, since I didn’t cross-examine her) was the question of how is it possible to be both jovial and grave at the same time—or, actually, at different times—like Jupiter, or Tom Bombadil for that matter?

Because he’s usually associated with thunderbolts and storms of wrath, it might strike us as incongruous to think of the Father of gods and men as going from grave to jovial in a flash—or like Tom, capering with the hobbits one minute, then authoritatively saving them from a murderous Barrow Wight the next. But that’s just what fathers in the heavens or on the earth are supposed to do.

Believe it or not, most of the time Jupiter was a smiling and benevolent presence who enjoyed helping those under his care. We can see it in this episode from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which his daughter Venus—yes, the goddess—appeals to him on behalf of her son, Aeneas, the demigod, and hero of the story.

“Jove from high heaven, gazing down on the sea.… All at once, as he took to heart the struggles he beheld, Venus approached in rare sorrow, tears abrim in her sparkling eyes, and begged, ‘Oh you who rule the lives of men and gods with your everlasting laws and your lightning bolt of terror, what crime could my Aeneas commit against you?.… Is this our reward for reverence, this the way to give us back our throne?

The Father of men and gods, smiling down on her with the glance that clears the skies and calms the tempest, lightly kissed his daughter on the lips, replied, ‘Relieve yourself of fear, my lady of Cythera, the fate of your children stands unchanged. You will see your promised city, see Lavinium’s walls and bear your great-hearted Aeneas up to the stars on high. Nothing has changed my mind.’” (Fagle’s translation)

The remarkable thing about this—and something known to Virgil and his ancient readers—is that the tempests that the smiling glance calm and clear away are often Jupiter’s own making. But the Sky Father who sent the rain and the lightning wasn’t Janus-faced, or fickle. Generally he was believed to be just. (Yes, he did have bad days, like David or Jacob in the Bible, but let’s save that subject for another essay.)

With our guilty consciences we cannot imagine a smiling judge, unless we also imagine that he is either ignorant or weak. But Jupiter was neither of those things. Instead he was jovial, and that was a great blessing to those under his oversight, as we see in his assurances to his daughter.

And by Jove, this is why all true fathers should be jovial as well as avenging angels. Sometimes justice calls for a benediction. And fathers can do this supremely well. It would be tedious, and largely a waste of time, to outline the differences between fathers and mothers in this regard. Those who already know the differences don’t need to be told, and those who deny the differences won’t listen anyway. The joviality of a father is his kingly benediction on his home. His demeanor is the good-word—which is what a benediction is, literally a ‘good word.’ With every smile, with every joke (even dad jokes), he blesses the procession coming behind him—from wife, to smallest child, and even aged-grandmother—and he declares, “This is good.” And in a real way this joviality reflects the joviality of the great father above. And here I’m not thinking about Jupiter, but of the true God who sits enthroned above all planets.

But what does this have to do with Tom? Tom is a father-figure in a story filled with them. Farmer Maggot is one, Gandalf is too, so are Elrond and Theoden—even Denethor is one, though despairing. But Tom is the smiling father, and perhaps the most powerful father in the story. He’s there at the beginning, like a good father, to tell the hobbits the stories that they need to hear in order to know their place in the order of things, and to see them on their way. But also at the end, to receive them home again.

If you know how the story ends, you might wonder, how so? The hobbits don’t return to Tom’s house. But it is in Tom’s house, at the very beginning of the story, that they’re given a picture of the way things will end: In Frodo’s dream, a dream that comes true, at the very end, in the chapter entitled, The Grey Havens, Frodo sails into the Uttermost West, and he sees what he saw in his dream at Tom’s house—a rain-curtain parting, and a swift sunrise on an emerald shore. And it is here, after his many labors, that he receives the blessing of the last benediction, and here that he will live happily ever after, as Tom and Goldberry have lived happily all along.

This essay was first published here in April 2022.

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The featured image, uploaded by Harry Tworth, is an image of Tom Bombadil. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.