Goldberry is a character from the works of the author J. R. R. Tolkien. She first appeared in print in a 1934 poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where she appears as the wife of Tom Bombadil. Also known as the "River-woman's daughter", she is described as a beautiful, youthful woman with golden hair. She is best known from her appearance as a supporting character in Tolkien's high fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, first published in 1954 and 1955.
Like her husband, Goldberry's role and origins are enigmatic and have been debated by scholars. On her possible origins, scholars have compared her with a character in George MacDonald's 1867 fairy tale The Golden Key, and with the eponymous character in the late-medieval lyric poem The Maid of the Moor. Her characterisation has been described as a mixture of the domestic and the supernatural, connected in some way with the river Withywindle in the Old Forest of Middle-earth. Some have suggested that she may be a divine being in Tolkien's mythology; others, that she recalls the biblical Eve, a token of the unfallen creation; and an embodiment of joy, serving with Tom Bombadil as a model of the Catholic sacrament of marriage.
Both Bombadil and Goldberry were omitted from Peter Jackson's film trilogy; they were, however, included in the 1991 Russian television play Khraniteli and the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Origins
J. R. R. Tolkien never explored the specific details regarding Goldberry's origins. Tom Bombadil says that he discovered her in the river Withywindle within the Old Forest, and her title "River-woman's daughter" strongly suggests that she is not a mortal human being. In a 1958 letter, Tolkien wrote that Goldberry "represents the actual seasonal changes" in "real river-lands in autumn". He conveyed this notion through a poem recited by Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring, specifically the lines "O spring-time and summer-time, and spring again after!"
For the scholar of literature Isabelle Pantin, the sequence involving Goldberry in The Lord of the Rings is reminiscent of a passage from The Golden Key by George MacDonald: the heroine, Tangle, after having almost been suffocated by a tree believing herself being pursued by the bears of Goldilocks, is taken in by a kindly old lady dressed in a mermaid's finery and holding a basin full of fish. Pantin noted that Goldberry herself is reminiscent of the Goldilocks character: she has a similar hairstyle and her house appears to be as comfortable as that of the bears.
The Tolkien scholar John M. Bowers writes that Goldberry recalls The Maid of the Moor, a late-medieval lyric familiar to Tolkien which contains the lines
Appearances
thumb|upright=1|Goldberry is associated with [[Nymphaeaceae|water lilies, and her house is surrounded by a water lily pond. Painting by Claude Monet, 1897]]
Goldberry first appeared in Tolkien's 1934 poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, re-worked into a 1962 poetry collection of the same name.
Goldberry's final reference in Tolkien's works prior to his death is in the poem Once Upon a Time, published in 1965. Described as wearing "a wild-rose crown", she blows away a dandelion clock from within a lady-smock.
Analysis
Type of being
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Goldberry does not fit easily into any of Tolkien's definitions of sentient beings in his world, and like Tom Bombadil she remains an enigma. The scholar Ann McCauley believed that she is likely a water sprite,
Goldberry's association with water, writes , thematically links Bombadil with Väinämöinen and his fiancée Aino from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic.
The scholar Ruth Noel calls Bombadil and Goldberry "undisguised personifications of land untouched by humans".
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Another proposed explanation is that she is one of the Ainur, specifically the Vala Yavanna. Taryne Jade Taylor associates Goldberry with the Greek myth of the goddess Persephone, for the way she is captured by Bombadil and its association with the rhythm of the seasons, as well as Étaín, a deity in Irish mythology associated with light. For Christina Ljungberg, Goldberry is one of the three divinities of personified Nature that exist on the side of good: she represents the immanent goddess, while Elbereth or Varda represents the transcendent goddess, and the elf queen Galadriel combines these two aspects.
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