Once upon a moon on the brink of June by Himring

It is a warm summer night. Tom is out walking under the stars. He is not stomping down the path in yellow boots like a cow charging down to drink, as he sometimes does under the sun, nor carelessly singing nonsense rhymes. He is walking barefoot, feeling the grass moist with dew between his bare brown toes, whistling softly between his teeth.

Oh, Tom Bombadillo!

Although he is not truly one of the Big People, he is still much larger than many of the beings that are abroad under the cover of night tonight. All those rustlings and swishing and other soft noises in patches of shadow and faint moonlight—they are very familiar to Tom, for this is his home, and he can identify the little people that make them, slipping through the grass and wandering through the bracken, unerringly and without much thought.

But what it is this? In this clearing where the moon shines bright and light drips like twinkling glass and shining silver from dew-laden stems and stalks, there is a sound that Tom has not heard, a scent he has not smelled, tiny movements the like of which he has not seen before.

He stops and listens:

‘Ho! New neighbours?’

He kneels down to speak to them.

‘Little people, have you come to drink the dew? Welcome! But mind my big, clumsy feet!’

A sound like laughter, quickly fading…

‘Oh, stay! Will you not talk to me? I am Tom Bombadil! And who are you?’

But already, whoever they are, they are gone, and a shadow falls, as if a host of little stars had winked out.

Tom sat chatting with Durin by the West Gate of Khazad-dum, long before there were any Gates there, when in Eregion only holly grew. From back then, the Dwarves call him Forn.

Tom spoke with Beleg, fatherless with fatherless, before Beleg first crossed into Beleriand, and welcomed Gildor, when Gildor first entered Eriador. The Elves still call him Iarwain.

Tom knew the Eotheod well and the ancestors of the Mearas in the North, long before Eorl the Young followed Cirion’s call south to Rohan. The Rohirrim remember him as Orald.

‘Why would they not stay and speak to me?’ says Tom. ‘The willow and the wren, the badger and the swan, the hobbits and the wights, they may not all gladly acknowledge my mastery, but they listen and answer. Even the River-woman considers my words. But they were here and left and I still have no idea who they are!’

The moon goes down and the stars fade in the sky and the sun comes up. In the grass, the daisies open. In the early hours of the morning, Tom meets Goldberry by the house, blowing away a dandelion clock.

‘A strange people I met last night, Goldberry, gathering silver dew! There was a subtle scent as if of mice and the stems shook and I heard a tiny sound like laughter. But whether they are she or he or it and what their name is, I do not know. They may have slid down a moon beam, for all I can tell, and they disappeared just as suddenly, without speaking to me!’

Goldberry laughs, too, and it is like the sound of a chuckling stream.

‘Of mice? Are you sure?’

She lays her hand on his arm.

‘They call themselves the lintips. Shall I introduce you, then, next time?’

Chapter End Notes

The title is taken from the poem "Once Upon a Time".

We don't know anything about the lintips except for what is said in the poem.

I have set the plot of the poem more firmly in Middle-earth.

And it was I who decided that Goldberry knew more than Tom.

Tom's other names are taken from The Lord of the Rings (FOTR), from the "The Council of Elrond".

Nerdy note on: "fatherless with fatherless": Tom's elvish byname "Ben-Adar" means "fatherless" and of Beleg it is said in the Lay of Leithian that "he wist no sire" (I haven't made up my mind what exactly is implied in Beleg's case, as there is more than one possibility).

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