Goldberry

The River-daughter

Goldberry is called the daughter of the River, meaning the Withywindle, the stream that winds through the Old Forest and past the house of Tom Bombadil. What manner of being she is the histories do not say, any more than they say what Tom is; the Hobbits' songs of the Shire and Buckland tell that Tom found her in the river among the water-lilies, and the lilies that he gathered on the day he met the four travellers were for her, a last gift before the winter. She appears as a young woman with long yellow hair, clad in green shot with silver like the water she came from, seated among bowls of lilies with her feet in the pool of a floor made to look like the river. Everything about her is water: her voice, her movements, and the sound of the rain, which the Hobbits learned to think of as her washing-day.

The house under the hill

Goldberry keeps the house on the edge of the Old Forest where she lives with Tom, and the peace of that house is as much hers as his. When Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin came in out of the forest on 26 September T.A. 3018, she was the first to greet them, and she quieted their fears of the trees at once. Frodo, moved by her as by the voices of Elves, asked her who Tom was, and she answered simply that he was the Master of wood, water and hill, and, when Frodo pressed, that the land did not belong to him but that all things in it belonged to themselves; Tom had no fear because he was their master. It is the plainest account of Tom in the whole history, and it comes from her.

Farewell

The Hobbits stayed two nights, and on the second day, while the rain fell, Goldberry was busy about the house and Tom told his tales. On the morning of 28 September, when they set out for the Barrow-downs, they found her waiting for them on the crest of the hill above the house, and from there she showed them the lands to the east and south and sang them on their way. She warned them to keep to the west of the Downs. It was the last the Hobbits saw of her, and Frodo turned back to her from the road with the feeling that he had seen something he would not find again.

Legacy

Goldberry is mentioned only in the tale of the Hobbits' passage through the Old Forest and in the songs of Buckland, and nothing is told of her afterward. With Tom she stands outside the wars of the Age, untouched by the Ring and unconcerned with it, a picture of the world as it might have been before there was anything to fear.

Goldberry remains with Tom Bombadil in the house by the Withywindle.