4 ms·

I tried to read LoTR when I was 11. I got to Tom Bombadil and just gave up. 70 pages of him singing with no real point. I just couldn't go on. I finally read i

• Hayvok 4y ago
  As a kid I would get bored and skip the Tom Bombadil section - it was only years later as a young adult and I was starting to get deeper into the lore that I found him to be a fascinating character, with deep implications. Absolutely agree he needed to be dropped from the theatrical release. Would have been nice to see him in the extended edition though.
• slavik81 4y ago
  The first LotR movie released when I was in grade nine. IIRC, of the 14 students in our class, 11 started reading the books after the movie. Of those, maybe 4 finished. The boredom of Tom Bombadil was the cause of a lot of the dropouts.
• IlliOnato 4y ago
  I think a lot of kids just don't like (or get) poetry in general, and there are lots of verses in LoTR. I guess in most cases they are easy to skip, but not in the Bombadil chapters. Myself I enjoyed the poetry, but my first reading of Tolkien at the age of 12 was in Russian translation. The poetry was translated absolutely beautifully, and I memorized several poems from the book. But I don't know how I would like the original poetry if English was my first language. I think the Tolkien's books are very poetic overall, not just the verses, and it's much subtler than just an adventure story of the fight between good and evil. These days, when I re-read LoTR, I do it for this "poetic" value, for impressions, rather than for the story (which I know so well, it becomes just a background)...