Matthew Bailey
Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2015
- Messages
- 186
This was an interesting thread to stumble upon.
I feel a bit guilty about the thread necromancy, especially given Tolkien’s negative feelings about necromancy as a whole (Sorcery, “Magic,” the occult, etc.).
But to add a comment regarding “Iarwain.”
It means more than “Oldest,” it is a portmanteau of “Old” and “Young” (seeing as I stumbled across this thread, the sources are not readily at hand, but given Tom Bombadil is something of an annoying obsession of mine — where people keep saying “He is a Mystery“ and such things, when his identity is made clear as a bell IFF you happen to catch the references Tolkien gives us, which are the obscurest-of-obscure, and the arcanest-of-arcane, making it such that few will happen to have the luxury of exploring the respective sources involved, which are quite distant to Tolkien‘s work, itself).
So ”Tom Bombadil” is the “Oldest/Youngest Son of None/No–one.”
The respective sources do have quite the connection to Judaism, as some of those sources are connected to Kabbalistic traditions, and Judaic Genesis Myths, which it’s very likely that Tolkien would have been familiar with himself.
The specific Academic Domain of Myth Studies would call Tom Bombadil a Protoplast (distinct from the term as it is used in Biology in reference to the cells of plants that have had the cell-walls stripped from them. Plant Cells differ from Animal Cells by having both a cell membrane and a cell wall, the latter of which the animal cells lack), which is, in Mythology, either the “First Man” or the “First Life/Spirit” to exist in a Universe that arises spontaneously of the explicit event of Creation.
Typically the Protoplast is the “inventor of Speech,” or he/she/it is the “namer of the world” (The Protoplast gives the “True Name” of everything in existence, if we are dealing with a Platonic Metaphysics in the Mythology. Alternately the Protoplast is just the revealer of “That which is,” which can include the names of things, but can also include other forms of revelation).
Tolkien likely would not have known that term for Tom. But the Mythological Concept predates the modern term for the form, which was only applied to such mythological beings in the Mid-to-Late-20th Century. But this does not negate Tom Bombadil’s Identity as an emergent “Spirit/Life” as the “First Living Thing” in Middle-earth, despite not being an “intentional creation” of either Eru or any Ainur from the Ainulindalë.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil provide other such clues, as does Galdor’s comment during the Council of Elrond:
“Unless such power is in the earth itself” gives us a hint to Tom’s origins, and the source of his “being.” Gandalf tells us that Tom has no “Power,” but rather that things such as the Ruling Ring have no power over him. That is a VERY different thing!.
Anyway, Iarwen Ben-Adar is like MANY of Tolkien’s linguistic “tricks“ a name that has a source in multiple languages. It is this primarily to which I refer above about not having the sources handy regarding Tom’s Identity, as it was well over a decade ago that I “stumbled” upon Tom’s Identity after being ridiculed (friendly ridicule) by a professor at UCLA with whom I am acquainted when I used the “Tom’s identity is a Mystery” response regarding Tom, when he had said “If you think Tom’s identity is a Mystery, then you are lucky his identity isn’t a viper, as you would have been bitten and died from standing atop it.”
But Hebrew was/is one of the languages used to construct Iarwen Ben-Adar, as is Old English, Finnish/Uralic, and a handful of other related Germanic Languages. And the collection of them, combined with the mythological associations, gives us a pretty clear picture of Tom Bombadil as the “Emergent Spirit of What Is within Arda and Middle-earth,” and the first of such multitudinous emergent spirits (Goldberry’s Father, at the very least is another such Spirit. Ungoliant is very likely to be another, and whether accidental of not, she represents the nihilistic opposite of Tom: being the consuming spirit of darkness, destruction, and gluttonous lust; an abyss that can never be filled, and which negates everything).
MB
It is something of a curiosity that sadly cannot now be answered. But Tolkien’s religious devotion and obsession with accuracy might have interfered with a retelling of the Old Testament’s stories in a more “heroic” fashion.
Over the last decade, I have been looking into the debate that existed within Catholicism between the First and Second Vatican Ecumenical Councils, or what has become known as Vatican I and Vatican II.
These two ecumenical councils represent polar opposites of Theology. The first “affirming” a Biblical Literacy and Inerrancy, and condemning Modernity, the Sciences, and the growing power of The State (bemoaning the collapse of the European Aristocracy as a footnote). While the second is a kind of ’retraction’ of these, saying instead “maybe we were a little too reactionary, and threw the baby out with the bath-water?”
The first would represent a “No deviation from the Literal Text” of the Bible, while the latter would represent a “Hey! Let’s have fun with this” approach to the same text.
Obviously that is a gross oversimplification, but it does represent two opposing “sides” to Tolkien that we see manifested at different times; the first usually arising when a subject is broached that causes Tolkien some discomfort and intellectual confusion in addressing, while the second is when Tolkien feels safe with a subject, where theological paradoxes and conundrums are not likely to be hidden as land-mines to be accidentally trodden upon.
MB
I feel a bit guilty about the thread necromancy, especially given Tolkien’s negative feelings about necromancy as a whole (Sorcery, “Magic,” the occult, etc.).
But to add a comment regarding “Iarwain.”
It means more than “Oldest,” it is a portmanteau of “Old” and “Young” (seeing as I stumbled across this thread, the sources are not readily at hand, but given Tom Bombadil is something of an annoying obsession of mine — where people keep saying “He is a Mystery“ and such things, when his identity is made clear as a bell IFF you happen to catch the references Tolkien gives us, which are the obscurest-of-obscure, and the arcanest-of-arcane, making it such that few will happen to have the luxury of exploring the respective sources involved, which are quite distant to Tolkien‘s work, itself).
So ”Tom Bombadil” is the “Oldest/Youngest Son of None/No–one.”
The respective sources do have quite the connection to Judaism, as some of those sources are connected to Kabbalistic traditions, and Judaic Genesis Myths, which it’s very likely that Tolkien would have been familiar with himself.
The specific Academic Domain of Myth Studies would call Tom Bombadil a Protoplast (distinct from the term as it is used in Biology in reference to the cells of plants that have had the cell-walls stripped from them. Plant Cells differ from Animal Cells by having both a cell membrane and a cell wall, the latter of which the animal cells lack), which is, in Mythology, either the “First Man” or the “First Life/Spirit” to exist in a Universe that arises spontaneously of the explicit event of Creation.
Typically the Protoplast is the “inventor of Speech,” or he/she/it is the “namer of the world” (The Protoplast gives the “True Name” of everything in existence, if we are dealing with a Platonic Metaphysics in the Mythology. Alternately the Protoplast is just the revealer of “That which is,” which can include the names of things, but can also include other forms of revelation).
Tolkien likely would not have known that term for Tom. But the Mythological Concept predates the modern term for the form, which was only applied to such mythological beings in the Mid-to-Late-20th Century. But this does not negate Tom Bombadil’s Identity as an emergent “Spirit/Life” as the “First Living Thing” in Middle-earth, despite not being an “intentional creation” of either Eru or any Ainur from the Ainulindalë.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil provide other such clues, as does Galdor’s comment during the Council of Elrond:
“Unless such power is in the earth itself” gives us a hint to Tom’s origins, and the source of his “being.” Gandalf tells us that Tom has no “Power,” but rather that things such as the Ruling Ring have no power over him. That is a VERY different thing!.
Anyway, Iarwen Ben-Adar is like MANY of Tolkien’s linguistic “tricks“ a name that has a source in multiple languages. It is this primarily to which I refer above about not having the sources handy regarding Tom’s Identity, as it was well over a decade ago that I “stumbled” upon Tom’s Identity after being ridiculed (friendly ridicule) by a professor at UCLA with whom I am acquainted when I used the “Tom’s identity is a Mystery” response regarding Tom, when he had said “If you think Tom’s identity is a Mystery, then you are lucky his identity isn’t a viper, as you would have been bitten and died from standing atop it.”
But Hebrew was/is one of the languages used to construct Iarwen Ben-Adar, as is Old English, Finnish/Uralic, and a handful of other related Germanic Languages. And the collection of them, combined with the mythological associations, gives us a pretty clear picture of Tom Bombadil as the “Emergent Spirit of What Is within Arda and Middle-earth,” and the first of such multitudinous emergent spirits (Goldberry’s Father, at the very least is another such Spirit. Ungoliant is very likely to be another, and whether accidental of not, she represents the nihilistic opposite of Tom: being the consuming spirit of darkness, destruction, and gluttonous lust; an abyss that can never be filled, and which negates everything).
MB
It is something of a curiosity that sadly cannot now be answered. But Tolkien’s religious devotion and obsession with accuracy might have interfered with a retelling of the Old Testament’s stories in a more “heroic” fashion.
Over the last decade, I have been looking into the debate that existed within Catholicism between the First and Second Vatican Ecumenical Councils, or what has become known as Vatican I and Vatican II.
These two ecumenical councils represent polar opposites of Theology. The first “affirming” a Biblical Literacy and Inerrancy, and condemning Modernity, the Sciences, and the growing power of The State (bemoaning the collapse of the European Aristocracy as a footnote). While the second is a kind of ’retraction’ of these, saying instead “maybe we were a little too reactionary, and threw the baby out with the bath-water?”
The first would represent a “No deviation from the Literal Text” of the Bible, while the latter would represent a “Hey! Let’s have fun with this” approach to the same text.
Obviously that is a gross oversimplification, but it does represent two opposing “sides” to Tolkien that we see manifested at different times; the first usually arising when a subject is broached that causes Tolkien some discomfort and intellectual confusion in addressing, while the second is when Tolkien feels safe with a subject, where theological paradoxes and conundrums are not likely to be hidden as land-mines to be accidentally trodden upon.
MB