I felt confused and a little irritated at first meeting Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest and also when getting to know him at his house by the Withywindle. Tolkien created a number of unique, unusual, and different peoples, but Tom Bombadil sticks out as singularly different. That bothered me because I wanted to place him in one of Tolkien's mythical categories, and I couldn't. Tom wasn't a man or a hobbit; he wasn't an elf or a wizard. He seemed to defy even the fantastic classifications of Middle Earth. He wasn't the same as anyone else.
I've since come to appreciate Tom much more than I did when first encountering him with the heroic hobbits. Tom, you see, is an expression of alterity, something I've also come to appreciate more with the passage of time. Tom is different in a way that other characters in Tolkien's tale are not.
John D. Caputo distinguishes between two kinds of differences, a distinction that is relevant here. There's the difference we note in multiplicity and variety. In Middle Earth we meet a variety of different peoples, a multiplicity of creatures: elves, men, ents, dwarves and so forth. Each group is different from each other, and within each group are found different kinds: wood elves, high elves, etc. There's another kind of difference, though. That is the difference of alterity, the difference of "the other one of the two, the other one, with a force of singularity, not multiplicity, not one more among many others, but just one, just that other one, over there." Alterity, for Caputo, means "being one-on-one with the other," an experience Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin and I had with the adventurous Tom Bombadil.
Tom doesn't seem to be one of many. He differs from others because he is fundamentally singular. At first I found that singularity irritating. Now I find it a wonderful visitation of alterity, startling but strangely reassuring. To paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in Heaven and Middle-earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. It's okay that I cannot categorize the whole of the world; the whole of the world cannot be categorized.
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