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From 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 M

by elric 6y ago

From 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 ago
It'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.

by elric 6y ago

jfengel 6y ago

It'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.