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Tom Bombadil was in the Fellowship of the Ring, not the Hobbit. The thing about Tom Bombadil is that he was an enigma. He wore the ring and did not vanish. Ins
by titzer 6y ago
Tom Bombadil was in the Fellowship of the Ring, not the Hobbit.
The thing about Tom Bombadil is that he was an enigma. He wore the ring and did not vanish. Instead, he made the ring vanish. It had no power over him. He was just completely orthogonal to this struggle, which detracts from its urgency. He was neither in the Ralph Bakshi film nor Jackson's, in part because it detracts from the dangerous atmosphere.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThanks, been 40 years since I read it. He's backstory. The Silmarillion was mostly backstory, is almost 500 pages, and people read that. They can stand a few pages on Tom Bombadil in their adventure story. And he's so singularly interesting, that I remember him particularly. After 40 years. With no help from the movie industry for sure.
- titzer 6y agoYep, I'm a fan of Tom, too :) If you get to re-reading it again, just imagine Tom singing his songs as if they were country, like Hank Williams or Garth Brooks-style. Hilarious!
- tjr 6y agoReminds me of the old Riders Radio Theater bit for Garth Sings Darth. "Act now, and we'll include the bonus album, Darth Sings Garth!"
- chx 6y agoOh, Tom is dangerous, you wouldn't believe how much. https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html (and yes, this has been refuted countless times but it's really funny)
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoYeah, Tom is supposed to be older and more fundamental that the current antic magics of Elves and Wizards. Like an Elemental, except even they are newer than Tom. I see him as different in kind. He can live in the dangerous forest, because it holds no danger to him. If he's dangerous, its like the old Gods are dangerous because they may be capricious. They may squash something because they aren't paying attention to it.
- gota 6y agoWarning to those who will click this - that site hijacked my browser's "back" button. Had to close the tab and about 40 entries in thr History afterwards
- elric 6y agoFrom what I can remember from Tolkien's letters, he apparently introduced Tom Bombadil as a deliberate enigma. He does not belong to any of the known races of Middle Earth, nor is he one of the Ainur. I thought he made for a nice change of pace in FOTR, a great tool for world building. LOTR is not an action/adventure book, but the Jackson movie trilogy is. I was very bitter that some characters like Bombadil, Glorfindel, and the Druedain didn't make it into the movies. But the movies are not the book, and I doubt it's possible to make a LOTR movie that's true to the book.
- jfengel 6y agoIt's more that he's refusing to explain it, and describing it as a "enigma" to justify it after the fact. Tolkien plotted by instinct, writing things down and then trying to figure out what that meant. Tom Bombadil was a character from other unrelated stories. He was introduced in a draft of Lord of the Rings that was much more stylistically "Hobbit part 2" than what we eventually got. But Tolkien was a consummate retconner: once something was written down it it tended to stay. He molded and reinterpreted but rarely removed, until he found something that felt right to him. That style of writing leaves a lot of tiny inconsistencies -- but inconsistencies that mimic the way any culture's lore evolves. That makes them incredibly intriguing, as if you'd just chanced on Greek myths or the Arthurian legends -- except instead of the product of centuries, it was one obsessive guy. His ultimate retcon, by the way, is the first published edition of The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings grew out of the Gollum chapter of The Hobbit, but changed in ways that made it incompatible with the original. (In the original Gollum really was going to just give it to him.) So he rewrote it, but the first edition still existed -- and in the intro to LotR, he explains it as Bilbo's propaganda covering up the truth about how he got the Ring.