Was Tom Bombadil Jewish? (A serious thread...)

[Matthew Bailey]

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:

‘I know little of Iarwain save the name,’ said Galdor; ‘but Glorfindel, I think, is right. Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself.

“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

Aaaargh!

I read Tolkien's translation of Jonah, hoping for some flair that did not exist in other translations. Alas, he was probably too keen to be accurate. Still, I bet he could retell most of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) adventure stories better than most who've made a living out of it.

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

 

[Olorgando]

What about all his other names? What do they mean? The only one I can remember at the moment is Orald by the dwarves.

Not quite:

Whether Tom Bomabdil was Jewish or not I do not know. The name you are referring to is mentioned in TFotR - The Council of Elrond:

“I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. But many another name he has since been given by other folk: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by Northern Men, and other names beside."
[CoE P258]

BluestEye then answered Legolam's post with:

This is what I asked a number of times on this thread, Legolam, and it seems nobody knows, or is too shy to answer

At least for "Orald" I can contribute a farthing (that's one quarter of a penny):
modern German has the adjective "uralt", which simply means extremely old.
As the Rohirrim are strongly based on the Anglo-Saxons (with a pinch of more of the Goths for the cavalry), and are said to be related to, in part descended from the Northern Men, that would make the latter some undefined tribe in northern Germany and / or southern Scandinavia, which in early times included the Goths before they started on their southward migration (not the only Germanic tribe to do so, much to the discomfort of the Romans).

 

[Matthew Bailey]

No, categorically no.

Tom is, first off, a literal “Alien” to Middle-earth, in that he originated “elsewhere” than “within Eä.”

Secondarily, when Tolkien inserted Tom Bombadil into Eä, and specifically within Arda within Eä, and within Middle-earth within Arda, Tom became what is known in Myth Studies as a “Protoplast“ (First Form).

Famous Protoplasts are Ask and Embla of Nordic Myth, Grandfather Mortal of the Aborigines and Greg Stafford’s Glorantha (a semi-famous fictional Protoplast, like Tom, but different than Tom in existing in a Universally Syncretic, Creative Myth Metaphysics that has no “Foundational Reality” within the World (you must be “External” to Glorantha to “See” the Base-Reality — But that is hardly different from our own, even if we CAN “Detect” the Base-Reality, albeit poorly), and in the Judeao-Christian-Muslim/Islamic Myths, you have not one, but a Multitude of Protoplasts: Adam & Lilith; then Adam and Eve; then Lilith and the Nephilim; the Nephilim themselves, etc.

But within Eä, and specifically Arda, Tom is an Emergent Spirit Created by the Ainulindalë that is the embodied figure of “Life,” and of “Language and Ontology/Existence.” Specifically: Tom is “Arda’s awareness of itself” and like Adam giving a “name” to everything, so to does Tom “Name things,” which is not so much a “Power” so much as just part of his existence.

Examples of this are:

• How he “names” the ponies, who seem to recognize “Yes! That IS my name!” And thus respond to those names afterwards.
• His descriptions of Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight where he is not so much “commanding” them as describing “What will be.”
• His immunity to the Ruling-Ring. This is NOT a “Power” over the Ruling-Ring any more than a fish has “Power” over the water by not drowning in it. Or a Human’s ability to breath air as opposed to dying from it as would a fish.
• His ability to “Be” rather that “Do.”

And, lest anyone think that these ideas are mine, and I am “imposing” them upon Tom Bombadil… Tom Shippey and Tolkien both seem to share that view, although only the former puts it into the explicit language that I use in his work The Road to Middle-earth.

The Dwarves represent a kind of Quasi-Judaic People in their insular nature, and other aspects that are really less flattering than Tolkien imagined. But he bore no ill-intent in applying the stereotypes in question to the Naugrim. He was just repeating the current beliefs about Jews and Judaism that were prevalent up to WWII in most of the Human Population in the ”West,” and which have persisted afterwards in specific populations.

In terms of a Literary Device confined to a fictional world, this “Judaic Template” is a functional device to give an “identity” to the Dwarves distinct from the rest of the Miroänwi of Arda. But the problems are that people often use fictional works as justification for their beliefs in this World/Universe. That isn’t Tolkien’s fault, but those who would abuse his work for ends he would categorically oppose.

There are very, very, very FEW “Mysteries” within Middle-earth, Arda, or Eä as a whole. Even among those things Tolkien had yet to really “Decide” we have a selection of “Possible Choices” that are constrained by his beliefs and the knowledge he had access to during his life.

But most things, like the Identity of Tom Bombadil… That is something Tolkien (whether JRR or CJR) has told us, and that others like Tom Shippey have expanded-upon.

It just requires reading beyond the “Stories” themselves, and into the various Secondary and Tertiary Sources that exist related to the work, and paying attention in the Secondary Sources to everything that IS NOT more “Story,” as the Principal Focus, rather than trying to piece together more “Narrative History” of the world.

That Narrative History is really where any “Mysteries” actually exists. And there it IS NOT a matter of “What is ’x’, ‘y’, or ‘z’?” But rather “What happened during the period of nnnn Second Age to nnnn Third Age?”

We know only a basic “form and trajectory” of that history, but none of the specifics.

MB