3 ms·

> He was certainly one of mine & my sibling's favourite characters. Why? He doesn't actually do anything except drone on and on about the color of his boots.

• forgotmypw17 4y ago
  Tom represents the Great Mystery, the great unknown of the beyond that is all seeing and all knowing and all powerful. Omitting him is like omitting the whole premise of the book. It's like making a movie based on the Bible but omitting the Resurrection of Jesus.
  • lisper 4y ago
    Sorry, but that just doesn't compute for me at all. Tom is a silly character with no gravitas. He puns his own name just to make it rhyme with "yellow" -- over and over again. And there is nothing in Tom's story that is even remotely comparable to the Resurrection. The Resurrection is a key event in the Bible story. It is something that happens to change the dramatic arc of all mankind. In Tom's story, nothing happens at all. The scene at Mount Doom where the Ring is finally destroyed is analogous to the Resurrection, not Tom Bombadil.
    • adamc 4y ago
      He's more the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime. Who is he? Why does no one know of him? Incongruent facts are always interesting. IMO.
    • WJW 4y ago
      Tom is perhaps silly, but just the fact that he can is seemingly immune to all the Ring can do (with it being implied to be the most powerful artifact in all of Middle Earth, strong enough to even influence Maia like Gandalf) makes him have enough gravitas. If anything, his silly antics make him even more intriguing: how did he gain that power and is it because or despite his silliness?
• slaymaker1907 4y ago
  He's extremely mysterious and in a good way. He is one of the only characters able to just casually put on the one ring with seemingly no effect and then give it back immediately afterwards. I think he gives off eldritch horror vibes, but in a mostly benevolent way. If everyone else were ants, he would be an etymologist intrigued by our behavior or something.
  • lisper 4y ago
    > He is one of the only characters able to just casually put on the one ring with seemingly no effect and then give it back immediately afterwards. OK, that's fair enough. But to my mind, this is just a setup that cries out for an explanation that never comes. It's a major flaw in the dramatic structure of the narrative, a bug not a feature. But I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.
    • PeterCorless 4y ago
      See, that's the best part. It's what makes people "fall into" Middle Earth. That there was whole parts of the backstory that don't get explained. That there are periods of history you get a glimpse into to believe there is a huge depth to it. That the way we see the continent now is not how it always was. Who were the barrow wights? Why were they cursed? As a kid first reading it, I feared the barrow wights as much if not more than the Nazgul. The whole aside was to show that the hobbits had truly "left the Shire" and that perils lay along the road in any direction they might turn. But, again, there were allies or, at least, guides all along that road as well. Bombadil and Old Man Willow are a foreshadowing of the Ents to come.
      • lisper 4y ago
        > The whole aside was to show that the hobbits had truly "left the Shire" and that perils lay along the road in any direction they might turn. OK, but Tom doesn't strike me as particularly perilous. He just seems weird.
    • fleetwoodsnack 4y ago
• gilrain 4y ago
  His boots _are_ yellow, though. Truth is on his side!
• lucideer 4y ago
  > He doesn't advance the story in any way He advances the world and builds context for many elements in the later story. Fangorn has many parallels to the Old Forest, and much of the storyline involving Ents & Huorns benefits from the context given by the earlier encounters with Tom's neighbouring spirits (and his enchantment of them).