on Tom Bombadil as unfallen Adam

The latest issue of Mallorn has a nice article positing that Tom Bombadil represents Tolkien’s conception of an unfallen Adam.¹ As the author mentions, the idea of an Adamic identity is not new, having appeared, apparently, in obscure fanzines from the 1970s, in Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, and in a 2018 article by Jane Beal.² But the author argues that Tom is not identical to Adam nor prelapsarian, as he doesn’t appear to be the progenitor of all man-kind and betrays none of Adam’s weakness; he embodies, instead, “an alternative Adam who never fell,” that is, “what would have happened had the serpent… failed”.³ I suppose I would wonder, then, why Tom has no progeny; this is the one point that seems incongruent with the divine command in Genesis 1:28: “And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,’” it says. Perhaps he just hasn’t yet gotten around to it.

Otherwise, the issue contains three other research articles. I passed over the two about elements of horror in The Lord of the Rings (specifically, the use of ‘gaps and indeterminacies’) and about renunciations of immortality.⁴ The last discusses the ex nihilo nature of Ungoliant herself and her ability to create Unlight; such notions have disturbing implications for the Tolkienian cosmology.⁵ It was interesting but could, I think, have been about half the length.