The first version of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil was published, under that title, in the Oxford Magazine for 15 February 1934:
Old Tom Bombadil was a merry fellow;
bright blue his jacket was, and his boots were yellow.
He lived down under Hill; and a peacock’s feather
nodded in his old hat, tossing in the weather.
Old Tom Bombadil walked about the meadows
gathering the buttercups, a-chasing of the shadows,
tickling the bumblebees a-buzzing in the flowers,
sitting by the waterside for hours upon hours.
There his beard dangled long down into the water:
up came Goldberry, the Riverwoman’s daughter;
pulled Tom’s hanging hair. In he went a-wallowing
under the waterlilies, bubbling and a-swallowing.
‘Hey! Tom Bombadil, whither are you going?’
said fair Goldberry. ‘Bubbles you are blowing,
frightening the finny fish and the brown water-rat,
startling the dabchicks, drowning your feather-hat!’
‘You bring it back again, there’s a pretty maiden!’
said Tom Bombadil; ‘I do not care for wading!
Go down! Sleep again, where the pools are shady
far below willow-roots, little water-lady!’
Back to her mother’s house in the deepest hollow
swam young Goldberry; but Tom, he would not follow.
On knotted willow-roots he sat in sunny weather
drying his yellow boots and his draggled feather.
Up woke Willow-man, began upon his singing,
sang Tom fast asleep under branches swinging;
in a crack caught him tight: quiet it closed together,
trapped Tom Bombadil, coat and hat and feather.
‘Ha! Tom Bombadil, what be you a-thinking,
peeping inside my tree, watching me a-drinking
deep in my wooden house, tickling me with feather,
dripping wet down my face like a rainy weather?’
‘You let me out again, Old Man Willow!
I am stiff lying here; they’re no sort of pillow,
your hard crooked roots. Drink your river water!
Go back to sleep again, like the River-daughter!’
Willow-man let him loose, when he heard him speaking;
locked fast his wooden house, muttering and creaking,
whispering inside the tree. Tom, he sat a-listening.
On the boughs piping birds were chirruping and whistling.
Tom saw butterflies quivering and winking;
Tom called the conies out, till the sun was sinking.
Then Tom went away. Rain began to shiver,
round rings spattering in the running river.
Clouds passed, hurrying drops were falling helter-skelter;
old Tom Bombadil crept into a shelter.
Out came Badger-brock with his snowy forehead
and his dark blinking eyes. In the hill he quarried
with his wife and many sons. By the coat they caught him,
pulled him inside the hole, down their tunnels brought him.
Inside their secret house, there they sat a-mumbling:
‘Ho! Tom Bombadil, where have you come tumbling,
bursting in the front-door? Badgerfolk have caught you:
you’ll never find it out, the way that we have brought you!’
‘Now, old Badger-brock, do you hear me talking?
You show me out at once! I must be a-walking.
Show me to your backdoor under briar-roses;
then clean grimy paws, wipe your earthy noses!
Go back to sleep again on your straw pillow
like fair Goldberry and Old Man Willow!’
Then all the Badgerfolk said ‘We beg your pardon!’
showed Tom out again to their thorny garden,
went back and hid themselves a-shivering and a-shaking,
blocked up all their doors, earth together raking.
Old Tom Bombadil hurried home to supper,
unlocked his house again, opened up the shutter,
let in the setting sun in the kitchen shining,
watched stars peering out and the moon climbing.
Dark came under Hill. Tom, he lit a candle,
up-stairs creaking went, turned the door handle.
‘Hoo! Tom Bombadil, I am waiting for you
just here behind the door! I came up before you.
You’ve forgotten Barrow-wight dwelling in the old mound
up there a-top the hill with the ring of stones round.
He’s got loose to-night: under the earth he’ll take you!
Poor Tom Bombadil, pale and cold he’ll make you!’
‘Go out! Shut the door, and don’t slam it after!
Take away gleaming eyes, take your hollow laughter!
Go back to grassy mound, on your stony pillow
lay down your bony head, like Old Man Willow,
like young Goldberry, and Badgerfolk in burrow!
Go back to buried gold and forgotten sorrow!’
Out fled Barrow-wight, through the window flying,
through yard, over wall, up the hill a-crying,
past white drowsing sheep, over leaning stone-rings,
back under lonely mound, rattling his bone-rings.
Old Tom Bombadil lay upon his pillow
sweeter than Goldberry, quieter than the Willow,
snugger than Badgerfolk, or the barrow-dwellers;
slept like a humming-top, snored like a bellows.
He woke up in morning-light, whistled like a starling,
sang ‘come, derry-dol, merry-dol, my darling!’;
clapped on his battered hat, boots and coat and feather,
opened the window wide to the sunny weather.
Old Tom Bombadil was a clever fellow;
bright blue his jacket was, and his boots were yellow.
None ever caught old Tom, walking in the meadows
winter and summer-time, in the lights and shadows,
down dale, over hill, jumping over water —
but one day Tom he went and caught the River-daughter,
in green gown, flowing hair, sitting in the rushes,
an old song singing fair to birds upon the bushes.
He caught her, held her fast! Water-rats went scuttering,
reeds hissed, herons cried; and her heart was fluttering.
Said Tom Bombadil: ‘Here’s my pretty maiden!
You shall come home with me! The table is all laden:
yellow cream, honeycomb, white bread and butter;
roses at window-pane peeping through the shutter.
You shall come under Hill — never mind your mother
in her deep weedy pool: there you’ll find no lover!’
Old Tom Bombadil had a merry wedding
crowned all in buttercups, his old feather shedding;
his bride with forgetmenots and flaglilies for garland,
robed all in silver-green. He sang like a starling,
hummed like a honeybee, lilted to the fiddle,
clasping his river-maid round her slender middle.
Lamps gleamed within his house, and white was the bedding;
in the bright honey-moon Badgerfolk came treading,
danced down under Hill, and Old Man Willow
tapped, tapped at window-pane, as they slept on the pillow;
on the bank in the reeds Riverwoman sighing
heard old Barrow-wight in his mound crying.
Old Tom Bombadil heeded not the voices,
taps, knocks, dancing feet, all the nightly noises;
slept till the sun arose, then sang like a starling:
‘Hey! come, derry-dol, merry-dol, my darling!’
sitting on the doorstep chopping sticks of willow,
while fair Goldberry combed her tresses yellow.
In The Return of the Shadow (1988, p. 115-16), Christopher Tolkien printed a short poem, or part of a poem (in five stanzas), which his father labelled the ‘germ of Tom Bombadil so evidently [written] in mid 1930s’. This text begins:
Both text and note, however, are said by Christopher Tolkien to have been written ‘certainly quite late’ – late enough that the author was looking back over enough distance of time to state ‘mid 1930s’, presumably based on the date of publication of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in the Oxford Magazine. It is a puzzling piece: if the manuscript is late, but the text is the ‘germ of Tom Bombadil’ in the sense of the origin of the poem (or of the character, or both), it must be a copy of a still earlier manuscript, and how early that document may have been produced, no one can say. To complicate the history still further, Tolkien wrote out excerpts of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil at least five times in an ‘Elvish’ script which has been dated to c. 1931. The ‘germ’, then, had to be written earlier than these. But also, the content and form of the ‘germ’ are found in development not in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but in its ‘sequel’, Bombadil Goes Boating.
Although the 1934 version of the poem is very similar to that published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red book, there are numerous small differences. Most notably, in the earlier poem Tom wears a peacock’s feather, rather than one from a swan’s wing as in the 1962 revision or ‘a long blue feather’ as in The Lord of the Rings (bk. I, ch. 6; see further, our notes for Bombadil Goes Boating); in the tenth stanza, Tom calls conies (rabbits) out, presumably to play; and there are no references to the river Withywindle, since Tom in the original poem had no connection with Middle-earth, but rather was the ‘spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (letter to Stanley Unwin, 16 December 1937, Letters, p. 26). In the final stanza in the Oxford Magazine, ‘derry-dol’ is printed ‘derry-rol’, which seems a likely error and is emended in the text given above.
The characters of Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, Old Man Willow, and the Barrow-wight therefore were at hand in the 1934 poem for Tolkien to reuse when he came to write The Lord of the Rings. There (as finally published) Tom again wears ‘an old battered hat’, ‘great yellow boots’, and ‘a blue coat’, and sings often in rhyming couplets. There also, again following description in the poem, Goldberry’s gown is green, with a belt ‘shaped like a chain of flag-lilies set with the pale-blue eyes of forget-me-nots’ (bk. I, ch. 6–7).
As Tolkien revised the Oxford Magazine poem for the 1962 collection, in a transitional version (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Tolkien 19, ff. 1–5) Tom briefly wore a broad silver belt buckle, and the poem finished with an extra couplet: ‘Old Tom Bombadil lived in merry laughter / with his wife under Hill there for ever after!’ The 1962 version adds a green girdle (belt) and leather breeches to Tom’s wardrobe; and as mentioned above, it changes the source of his feather, Tolkien having decided that a peacock feather was ‘unsuitable to’ The Lord of the Rings but that one from a swan increased ‘the riverishness’ of the poem (letter to Pauline Baynes, 1 August 1962, Letters, p. 318). Tom and company were now, as in The Lord of the Rings, explicitly within lands known to Hobbits. Tolkien says in the Bombadil preface that the poem ‘evidently’ came from Buckland (on the east border of the Shire, as the boundaries stood at the start of The Lord of the Rings). The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is ‘made up of various hobbit-versions of legends concerning Bombadil’, who was regarded as benevolent, ‘mysterious maybe and unpredictable but nonetheless comic’. The Withywindle, as described by Tolkien in his Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, p. 779), is ‘a winding river bordered by willows (withies)’, its name ‘modelled on withywind, a name of the convolvulus or bindweed’. In the poem, the river runs from a ‘grassy well’, or spring, into a dingle or deep wooded valley.
Goldberry, the ‘River-woman’s daughter’ (in the 1934 version, ‘Riverwoman’), was carried over into the 1962 poem without further explanation, though her character is notably enlarged in The Lord of the Rings. Both she and her mother, their nature and place in the scheme of Tolkien’s mythology, have been the subject of much discussion, but (as for the questions surrounding Tom Bombadil) without definitive resolution. In the poem, where Goldberry pulls Tom into the river by his beard, she resembles traditional water-sprites or nixies, sometimes accused of pulling humans into a river or lake to drown; in The Lord of the Rings, she is portrayed more as a nature spirit, related to seasonal change.
The poem episode of Old Man Willow catching Tom in a crack is echoed in The Lord of the Rings as Willow-man similarly traps Merry and Pippin. Under Tom’s protection, the hobbits are advised to ‘heed no nightly noise! Fear no grey willow!’ just as Tom himself, in the poem, ‘heeded not the voices, / taps, knocks, dancing feet, all the nightly noises’. Like Tom and Goldberry, the character of Old Man Willow grew in the later story: ‘his song and thought ran through the woods and spread like fine root-threads in the ground, and invisible twig fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs’ (bk. I, ch. 7). According to Humphrey Carpenter in his Biography, Tolkien once said that the idea of Old Man Willow shutting someone up in a crack probably came in part from gnarled trees as distinctively drawn by the illustrator Arthur Rackham.
The dabchicks Goldberry accuses Tom of frightening are examples of a small waterbird, a grebe, with a long neck and short tail. The compound Badger-brock is simply a doubled word: brock is another name for ‘badger’. In the revised poem, the badgers pull Tom ‘inside their earth’, a word for a badger’s underground home which is typically lined with straw, hay, or grass; in the 1934 version, Tom is pulled more simply ‘inside the hole’. A badger’s earth, or sett, typically has multiple tunnels and several exits, hence references in the poem to ‘the front-door’ (where Tom takes shelter from the rain), ‘backdoor’, and ‘all their doors’. In The Lord of the Rings, Tom tells the hobbits ‘an absurd story about badgers and their queer ways’ (bk. I, ch. 7).
A barrow-wight is an unearthly creature which inhabits a barrow, or burial mound. In Europe there is a long tradition of ancient burial mounds and stone circles; and in some of the barrows, the dead were interred with gold and other precious things. Wights are said in folklore to serve as sentinels of such treasure, thus Barrow-wight in the poem dwells (1962 version) ‘in the old mound / up there on hill-top with the ring of stones round’, and is bidden ‘go back to buried gold’. There is also a tradition in Northern folk-belief in which the draugr, or living dead, haunted burial mounds (and elsewhere) and represented a threat to the truly living. In The Lord of the Rings, the Barrow-downs in which a wight entraps the four hobbits are given a history from the early days of Middle-earth, while the wight itself is an evil spirit who came to the mounds some two hundred years earlier, as an agent of the Witch-king of Angmar. The bone-rings the banished wight of the poem rattles in his ‘lonely mound’ are perhaps rings made from bone, of the sort sometimes found in burials; in The Lord of the Rings, Tom speaks of barrow-wights who ‘walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers’ (bk. I, ch. 7).
It is remarkable that Tom sends Goldberry, Old Man Willow, the badgers, and Barrow-wight to sleep before he himself sleeps, like a humming-top (1934 humming-top), a variation on the adage ‘slept like a top’, or very soundly, like a spinning top when it is at its steadiest.