18 Facts About Goldberry

Goldberry is a character from the works of the author JR R Tolkien.

Goldberry first appeared in print in a 1934 poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where she appears as the wife of Tom Bombadil.

Goldberry 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.

Goldberry's 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.

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.

Goldberry first appeared in Tolkien's 1934 poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, re-worked into a 1962 poetry collection of the same name.

The hobbits' stay is brief but strange, for Bombadil and Goldberry are clearly more than they seem.

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.

Goldberry seeks nothing, longs for nothing, yet appreciates and nurtures everything and everyone around her.

Tolkien Encyclopedia, Katherine Hasser observed that Goldberry appeared to the hobbits in the diverse roles of "goddess, nurturer, and manager of domestic responsibilities".

Goldberry is sometimes discussed in critical commentary about the roles of women in The Lord of the Rings.

Goldberry is presented as a hospitable domestic figure, a good hostess who feeds passing travellers.

Hasser noted that Goldberry is the sole female character in The Lord of the Rings who does not have a personal agenda, and that she provides a feminine figure who is "pure, content, significant to the world around her, and wise" in its narrative.

Goldberry appears in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game The Lord of the Rings Online.

Goldberry is found in "Goldberry's Glade" in the Old Forest, where a quest to gather lilies on her behalf at the foot of Old Man Willow is given to the player by Bombadil.

Goldberry's race is referred to as "River-maid", as the game features Goldberry's sister Naruhel, an original character who is of a darker and crueller nature.

Goldberry's name was a reference to Haight-Ashbury, a district of San Francisco nicknamed Hashbury and widely seen as the origin of hippie counterculture.