Under the Guise of Tom Bombadil

Passage from the text:
"He reappeared, hat first, over the brow of the hill, and behind him came in an obedient line six ponies: their own five and one more. The last was plainly old Fatty Lumpkin: he was larger, stronger, fatter (and older) than their own ponies. Merry, to whom the other belonged, had not, in fact, given them any such names, but they answered to the new names that Tom had given them for the rest of their lives. Tom called them one by one and they climbed over the brow and stood in a line. Then Tom bowed to the hobbits."

Pg#s: 141

Comments & Questions:
As Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin make their way out of the forest after a scary encounter with death, the jovial Tom Bombadil retrieves the group’s lost ponies. What I find interesting about the wording in this passage is that it exactly parallels Genesis. My inclination that Tom was an “Adam, the first man” character was completely confirmed after this paragraph. What first clued me in was when Tom explained the history of all of the Old Forest in a perfectly blissful fashion- it was not a pleasant story either. If “Adam” was still living he might be able to do the same. Aside from his constantly cheerful demeanor, Tom seems to resemble man at the height of creation. No matter what, he’s always happy. Tom is constantly singing and dancing, his meals and fire-side stories are something to write to the Shire about, he refers to himself as “master” in relation to the rest of the forest, and his wife, Goldberry, is just as perfect, beautiful, lovely and blissful as Eve would have been in Eden. When given the ring, it does not do the same things to Tom as it would do to anyone else that were to slip on the ring. From Genesis,

“Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock...” Genesis 2:19-20

Tom clearly names the hobbits’ ponies. And those are their names. They come obediently too. That Tom is truly master of the Old Forest and all those animals relates to Adam’s primacy over the domain of creation.