Archetype: The Green Man and Tom Bombadil
When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why people got so excited about nature. Why go outside where you’ll only be bothered by ticks and direct sunlight?
So it surprised me to reach my 30s and find myself wanting to stare at trees. Now I love to wander, looking up at the bare arms of winter or the turgid greens of summer. This likely coincided with my disillusionment with organized religion. I admitted to myself that I didn’t feel anything when I was baptized (though to be fair, I was baptized inside a building and not in a river), but I did feel something while staring at a tree. God calling to me through the tree? That kind of weird thing.
So now I can slightly better understand the Green Man, a being both natural and divine who lives in the forest and is at times depicted as covered with leaves and vines. He is a mystic of the forest. The canopies of branches are his golden cathedrals. He knows every animal and plant by the names we call them and by the names they give themselves.
The Green Man can be benevolent or terrifying. Sometimes he’s both, just as nature is beautiful in its intricacy and majesty while also being bloody and dangerous.
One relatively recent appearance of a Green Man I have come to appreciate is Tom Bombadil. People DO like to complain about Tom Bombadil…even the most fervent Tolkien fans. I did, too, when I first read The Lord of the Rings (where even Gandalf speaks of him as a moss-gatherer). If you haven’t read the books, I can tell you that Tom Bombadil is an ancient being who calls himself a “fellow” but seems more like a fairy, and he lives in the forest with his wife Goldberry, “daughter of the river,” who seems like a sprite. He lives in nature and has no concerns or ambitions, and he doesn’t care who is in power or if there’s a war going on. He simply enjoys being alive and relishing the beauty of the forest.
He’s been excluded from the Peter Jackson movies, as Jackson said: “What does Tom Bombadil ultimately really have to do with the Ring? I know there's Ring stuff in the Bombadil episode, but it's not really advancing our story.”
To be fair, the Peter Jackson movies are already extremely long, and it would take a truly dedicated fan to want them to be longer. But his reasons for leaving him out of the movie echo many fans’ complaints. What does Bombadil have to do with the story? He’s a distraction, a side quest. He doesn’t want to join the fight, and he doesn’t even care that the world is ending.
Now he’s one of my favorite parts of the story. I mean, yes, he talks about himself in the third person, and maybe he’s not the best lyricist in the world, but he’s one of the most significant people in the book, in a way, because he’s the only one who truly isn’t tempted by the ring of power. By showing that he isn’t tempted, he provides an example to Frodo.
Frodo shows him the ring, and when Tom tries it on the tip of his little finger, he doesn’t disappear. Instead, he makes the ring disappear for a minute with a kind of magic trick. He laughs at it! No one else who encounters the ring has this light reaction to it. Even Frodo, a humble hobbit, wants to show off the ring. He tries it on in Tom’s presence and disappears, and Tom says, “Take off your golden ring…Tom must teach the right road, and keep your feet from wandering.” Tom has no desire to be somebody, and he knows his lack of ambition is the example Frodo needs. That is what it means to be a true creature of nature…it means to be small. You have your little place in the ecosystem, your speck in the cosmos, and you enjoy it. You are nobody, but you can laugh about it. That is one way to resist temptation.
A spiritual/philosophical explanation of the way of nature is in the teachings of Lao-Tzu. He advised people to surrender to nature. From the Tao Te Ching: “The universe is sacred. You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, you will ruin it. If you try to hold it, you will lose it.” And: “The sage does not act, and so is not defeated. He does not grasp and therefore does not lose.”
Honestly, I think Tolkien’s presentation of the character in his separate work The Adventures of Tom Bombadil falls short of the ideal of true surrender to nature. Bombadil gets mad sometimes, making enemies with a willow tree and a pack of badgers, and he threatens to roast a wren who displeases him, and he has to capture his wife (Goldberry, the river’s daughter) instead of wooing her with his easy ways. My wild guess is that Tolkien loved the idea of a return to nature, but he didn’t quite know the way himself. He was an Oxford Don, and in his conception of the universe, even nature was divided strictly between good and evil. So in Tokien’s world, the badgers had to be the bad guys, and Bombadil had to outsmart them.
It’s hard to divide the universe into good and bad this way. Some things don’t fit. The Green Man knows this better than anyone. A tree is beautiful, but is it ethical or unethical? Is your pet cat immoral for disemboweling the cute chipmunks scampering around your neighborhood?
In spite of his moral outlook and his desire to live in a world of stark light, Tolkien had a sense that a man of nature like Tom Bombadil wouldn’t want to fight in anyone’s war, no matter what the stakes. If everyone followed the way of nature, there wouldn’t be wars. And yet, since there are people who want to dominate and destroy, the Green Man can’t solve all problems. Maybe some of us were made to fight while some of us were made to wander.
I’m only beginning to explore this archetype, and I’m sure I’ll return to it. After all, the Green Man is sometimes quite monstrous (as is nature at its worst).