Tolkien’s Goldberry and The Maid of the Moor

Tom Bombadil remains one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most mysterious characters. Clearly an example of the genius loci, he is master of his domain but not its owner, eldest among all living things before the river and the trees: “Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn” (FR, I, vii, 142). But equally mysterious is Tom’s consort Goldberry, the River-daughter. Hesser provides the prevailing view of Goldberry as an elemental figure of the woodlands as well as nurturing female companion of hearth and home. This paper proposes that Tolkien developed this character in some measure from a folkloric reading of the enigmatic late-medieval lyric The Maid of the Moor, which he knew thoroughly as a scholar of Middle English literature at Oxford.

Tom Bombadil has his origins in a colorfully dressed, wood-peg “Dutch” doll that belonged to young Michael Tolkien, was stuffed down the lavatory by John Tolkien, and was turned into the subject of the poem The Adventures of Tom Bombadil which their father published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934 (Scull and Hammond 2:23–25).¹ The character became fixed in Tolkien’s imagination as he explained to his publisher Stanley Unwin in 1937 when discussing a sequel to The Hobbit: “Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story?” (Carpenter 165; see Hammond and Scull 127–28). A visit to his peaceful homestead by Frodo and the other three hobbits formed part of the earliest drafts of The Lord of the Rings: “Tom Bombadil is an ‘aborigine’—he knew the land before men, before hobbits, before barrow-wights, yes before the necromancer—before the elves came to this quarter of the world” (Shadow 117; see also 115–16). In a letter from 1954, Tolkien clarified his thinking about this figure: “the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge” (Letters 192).²

Tom’s consort Goldberry also appeared in the original 1934 version of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. She emerges from the river where Tom has been sitting and grabs him by his beard, much like a nixie or watersprite pulling her victim into the water to drown:

There his beard dangled long down into the water: Up came Goldberry, the River-woman’s daughter, Pulled Tom’s hanging hair. In he went a-wallowing Under the water-lilies, bubbling and a-swallowing. . . “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!”

(Tolkien Reader 11).³

Already Goldberry the River-woman’s daughter possesses her essential features as an aquatic spirit associated with water-lilies and accustomed to sleeping among the shady pools, never displaying any of the warriormaiden traits found in Tolkien’s other female characters. After being taken from the river and domesticated, she resembles more the royal hostess serving food and drink in Beowulf, and even Galadriel as a figure of domestic harmony with her consort Celeborn (Donovan 110; see also Startzman). In the earliest drafts of The Return of the Shadow, Tom explains his mission to the Old Forest “for some white water-lilies for Goldberry (my wife).” In these preliminary sketches Tolkien jotted down the basic connection between the woman and the flower: “Water-lily motive—last lilies of summer for Goldberry” and again “Description of Goldberry, with her hair as yellow as the flag-lilies” (Shadow 117).⁴

In the published version of Fellowship of the Ring, the first mention of Goldberry occurs in “The Old Forest” when Tom comes to the rescue of Merry and Pippin by singing his spell of enchantment:

Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight,Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,There my pretty lady is, River-woman...