Who is Tom Bombadil?: Interpreting the Light in Frodo Baggins and Tom Bombadil\u27s Role in the Healing of Traumatic Memory in J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s _Lord of the Rings_

In Rivendell, after Frodo has been attacked by Ringwraiths and is healing from the removal of the splinter from a Morgul-blade that had been making its way toward his heart, Gandalf regards Frodo and contemplates a “clear light” that is visible through Frodo to “eyes to see that can.” Samwise Gamgee later sees this light in Frodo when Frodo is resting in Ithilien. The first half of this essay considers questions about this light: how does Frodo become transparent, and why, and what is the nature of the light that fills him? As recourse to Tolkien’s letters shows, the light is related to the virtues of Frodo’s character: love, self-sacrifice, humility, perseverance. The light in Frodo also is related to the light in the Phial of Galadrial, which comes from the Earendil’s Silmaril set in the heavens above Middle-earth, which is called the Morning Star. Because “Morning Star” is a name for Jesus in the New Testament, the light within Frodo may be interpreted, symbolically, as the Christ-light. The second half of this essay considers how this light was ignited in Frodo, specifically by asking: who is Tom Bombadil, and what does he have to do with the light inside of Frodo? The essay explores multiple explanations for the long-standing, critically-debated mystery of Tom Bombadil’s identity, ultimately showing that he must be interpreted at multiple levels of meaning simultaneously. Intriguingly, Tom Bombadil has parallels to the first Adam and the second Adam, Jesus, especially in his role as “Eldest” (or ab origine) and in his ability to bring light to Frodo in the grave of the barrow-wight, save him from death by his song, and heal him from spiritual “drowning” – a word that Tom uses to describe Frodo’s terrifying experience in the barrow and which relates to Frodo’s original childhood wound: the primal loss of his parents, who drowned in a tragic accident. When Frodo receives healing from this trauma, he is strengthened to endure what he later experiences on his quest to destroy the Ring

Weighing the work of love: on Kate Davis's re-visioned iconoclasm

This essay offers a close reading of recent work by Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis to argue that her practice engages iconoclasm in ways importantly modified by her feminist commitments. Often Davis’s source material has significant historical, political or art historical import, as in her works dealing with the Suffragist attack on Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in 1914. What is at stake in her ‘re-visioning’ of such moments, which often involves labour-intensive drawing as a key method, is a formal commitment to a kind of delicate or caring vandalism, often pursued through labour-intensive drawing (iconoclasm as a means of making images) and a specifically feminist contention with existing hierarchies of value and systems of representation (iconoclasm as contestation). To reckon with these stakes, Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘the pleasure in drawing’ and the feminist concept of the ‘work of love’ are brought into relation with Davis’s work

The Method of Contrast and the Perception of Causality in Audition

The method of contrast is used within philosophy of perception in order to demonstrate that a specific property could be part of our perception. The method is based on two passages. I argue that the method succeeds in its task only if the intuition of the difference, which constitutes the core of the first passage, has two specific traits. The second passage of the method consists in the evaluation of the available explanations of this difference. Among the three outlined options, I will demonstrate that only in the third option – as we shall see, the case of the scenario that remains the same but is perceived in two different ways by the same perceiver – the intuition purports a difference that posses the necessary characteristics, namely being immediately evident and extremely complex and multifaceted, which determine its tensive nature. The application within auditory perception of this third option will generate two cases, a diachronic one and a synchronic one, which clearly show that we can auditorily perceive causality as a link between two sonorous episodes. The causal explanation is the only possible explanation among the many evaluated within the second passage of the method of contrast