Spirits and Enigmas

Why this category exists

Most of the peoples and creatures of Middle-earth fit into an order: the Ainur, the Children of Ilúvatar, the beasts, the corruptions of the Enemy. A few do not. The published texts introduce them, let them act, and decline to say what they are. Tolkien did this deliberately. He wrote that every story needed some things that were left unexplained, and that a world in which everything had been catalogued would feel smaller and less true. This category gathers the beings for whom the honest answer is that no one knows.

Tom Bombadil

Tom Bombadil lives in a house on the edge of the Old Forest, above the river Withywindle, in a small country whose borders he never leaves. He is short, broad, red-faced and merry, he sings nonsense that turns out to have power, and within his own land nothing can withstand him: he commands Old Man Willow, breaks the spell of the Barrow-wight, and handles the One Ring as a trinket, making it vanish and putting it on without vanishing himself. He calls himself Eldest and says he was there before the river and the trees, before the Elves came west, before the Dark Lord came from Outside. Goldberry answers Frodo's question about him by saying only that he is, and that he is Master, which does not mean owner.

What Tom is has never been settled. He is not a Vala, since he has no dominion; he seems not to be a Maia, since he stands outside the conflict altogether and the Ring has no hold on him; and he is plainly not Elf, Man, Dwarf or Hobbit. At the Council of Elrond Gandalf rejected the idea of giving him the Ring, because he would forget it or throw it away, and Glorfindel warned that if all else were conquered Tom would fall last, and that he could not resist Sauron alone. Elrond called him by an ancient name, Iarwain Ben-adar, which means oldest and fatherless. Tolkien, in a letter published with his correspondence, said that he had intentionally left Tom an enigma and that he represented something like a pure delight in things as they are, with no wish to control them. That is as far as the sources go.

Goldberry

Goldberry, Tom's wife, is called the River-daughter and is described as though she were the spirit of the Withywindle itself: her dress is green and silver like young reeds, her hair yellow as the flag-lilies, and her feet are surrounded by bowls of water-lilies. Tom found her in the river among the lilies and carried her home. She is a gracious and slightly unearthly figure whose presence makes the hobbits feel as if they had stepped into a song. Whether she is of the same kind as Tom, a lesser spirit of the waters, or something else entirely, the texts do not say. Like Tom she does not leave their country.

The nameless things

When Gandalf described his pursuit of the Balrog beneath Moria, he spoke of a region beneath the mountains far below the deepest Dwarf-delvings, where the world is gnawed by nameless things older than Sauron. He would not describe them, and he said that Sauron himself did not know of them, since they were older than he. The Watcher in the Water at the West-gate of Moria may be one of their kin come up to the light, or a corrupted beast of some other origin; the texts give no ancestry for it. These creatures are treated in their own entry among the monsters, but they belong here too, because they are placed by Gandalf outside every known order of being.

Other enigmas

Several other figures in the histories resist classification. Ungoliant, the spider-shaped darkness who helped Melkor destroy the Two Trees, is said by the Elves to have been a spirit that came down out of the darkness surrounding Arda, corrupted by Melkor perhaps but never truly his servant; she may have been a Maia, but the Silmarillion does not say so, and her hunger was such that she may in the end have devoured herself. The Ents themselves, as Treebeard admitted, do not fit the old lists cleanly, and no text explains exactly what animates them. The Nazgûl's steeds, the fell beasts, are described as survivors of an older world that Sauron fed on foul meats, without further explanation. And in Hobbit lore the walking tree seen on the North Moors is either an Entwife or nothing.

Reading the enigmas

The legendarium works partly by contrast: the Ainur are explained, so Bombadil's inexplicability is felt as a real strangeness rather than a gap. Gandalf's refusal to speak of the nameless things works the same way, coming from the character who normally knows most. The best approach for a reader, and for this atlas, is not to resolve these beings into a hidden system but to record what the texts show them doing and to note where the texts fall silent.

The beings in this category share no common form. Tom Bombadil appears as a stout, short man with a brown beard, blue eyes, a blue coat and yellow boots, and a hat with a feather. Goldberry appears as a tall, golden-haired woman clothed in green and silver. The nameless things of the deeps are never described, and the Watcher in the Water is known only by its many pale-green tentacles. Ungoliant took the form of an enormous spider whose darkness was not merely absence of light but an active thing that swallowed sight.

Tom Bombadil and Goldberry keep a house of extraordinary hospitality where songs are as natural as speech and time seems to stand still. Tom's speech falls into rhythm and rhyme without effort, and his names for things are old. He gathers tales and gossip from Farmer Maggot and the Elves who pass, and he knows the whole history of the Barrow-downs. He has no possessions he values and no ambitions. The other enigmas have no culture that the texts record.

No origin is given for any being in this category. Tom claims to have been the first, before the Elves, before the river, before the Dark Lord came from Outside. Gandalf places the nameless things before Sauron. Ungoliant is said to have come from the darkness beyond the World. Tolkien deliberately gave no more.

Tom Bombadil and Goldberry remain in their country in the Fourth Age; Gandalf, after the War of the Ring, went to have a long talk with Tom before leaving Middle-earth. The nameless things persist beneath the mountains. Ungoliant's end is unknown, though the Elves believed she devoured herself in her hunger.