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Love in the Trees - Page 7

© Michael Martinez

For her part, Goldberry is the unspoken Mistress. Tolkien is careful never to give her either title or status, but there are clear boundaries between Tom and Goldberry. While it might seem that Goldberry is relegated to traditional roles in the household (washing and cooking), in fact, she is accorded the dignity of making crucial decisions. "This is Goldberry's washing day, and her autumn-cleaning" Bombadil tells the Hobbits. Tom doesn't assign her those duties. She decides when she will do those things. In the evening, Tom and Goldberry take turns entertaining their guests. She prepares the food they serve together, and she sings songs by the fireside before retiring to bed. Although it is Tom who teaches the Hobbits much about the world's perils, Goldberry doesn't need to learn these lessons. The world outside Tom's door, with its evil-hearted trees and barrow-wights, is a truly dangerous place. The image Tolkien paints, with Tom and Goldberry graciously providing food and shelter for the Little People, is as familiar to the reader as a family sitting down to dinner. Father Tom and Mother Goldberry are caring for their children together before they are old enough to go out into the world on their own. In fact, when it is time for the Hobbits to depart, and they realize they have forgotten to say farewell to Goldberry, they return to find her on a hill-top:

They rode off along a path that wound away from behind the house, and went slanting up towards the north end of the hill-brow under which it sheltered. They had just dismounted to lead their ponies up the last steep slope, when suddenly Frodo stopped. 'Goldberry!' he cried. 'My fair lady, clad all in silver green! We have never said farewell to her, nor seen her since the evening!' He was so distressed that he turned back; but at that moment a clear call came rippling down. There on the hill-brow she stood beckoning to them: her hair was flying loose, and as it caught the sun it shone and shimmered. A light like the glint of water on dewy grass flashed from under her feet as she danced. They hastened up the last slope, and stood breathless beside her. They bowed, but with a wave of her arm she bade them look round; and they looked out from the hill-top over lands under the morning. It was now as clear and far-seen as it had been veiled and misty when they stood upon the knoll in the Forest, which could now be seen rising pale and green out of the dark trees in the West. In that direction the land rose in wooded ridges, green, yellow, russet under the sun, beyond which lay hidden the valley of the Brandywine. To the South, over the line of the Withywindle, there was a distant glint like pale glass where the Brandywine River made a great loop in the lowlands and flowed away out of the knowledge of the hobbits. Northward beyond the dwindling downs the land ran away in flats and swellings of grey and green and pale earth-colours, until it faded into a featureless and shadowy distance. Eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess of blue and a remote white glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.

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