Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

'He destroyed the single wooden bowl he possessed on seeing a peasant boy drink from the hollow of his hands. He then exclaimed: "Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!"'

'while Diogenes was relaxing in the morning sunlight, Alexander the Great, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Diogenes replied, "Yes, stand out of my sunlight." Alexander then declared, "If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes." "If I were not Diogenes, I would still wish to be Diogenes," Diogenes replied.'

'Some one took him into a magnificent house and warned him not to spit, whereupon having cleared his throat he discharged the phlegm into the man's face, being unable, he said, to find a meaner receptacle.'

The dude was a modern lunatic homeless man venerated into legend status for thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_of_depth_in_The_Lor...

If you keep salmon jerky in your tent, that's a great appetizer and you're a convenient meal. Doesn't make the bear evil though.

>'We cannot go further tonight,' said Boromir. `Let those call it the wind who will; there are fell voices on the air; and these stones are aimed at us.' `I do call it the wind,' said Aragorn. `But that does not make what you say untrue. There are many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been in this world longer than he.' 'Caradhras was called the Cruel, and had an ill name, said Gimli, `long years ago, when rumour of Sauron had not been heard in these lands.'

Aragorn explains that there are evils older than Sauron and we get the sense that the mountain itself may hold a prejudice against the company but this is never explained or developed elsewhere. Caradhras the Cruel doesn't appear elsewhere either. I'll add that the film unfortunately dispels this uncertainty from the original novel.

Yeah, same. On Tolkien forums in the early to mid 2000's, I think these were the most commented on complaints about the movies:

* No Tom Bombadil

* No Scouring of the Shire

* Movie Faramir vs book Faramir

* The Ents deciding to not help Merry and Pippin at first (tbh, this is the one that still gets me the most. It sort of ruined a key attribute of the Ents just for a tiny bit of extra tension for a short scene.)

I'm probably missing some, but those were the ones I remember coming up the most.

Also, I submit as evidence this scifi.stackexchange thread: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1586/who-or-what-w...

I think Tolkien fans, on average, have long enjoyed the mystery that is Tom.

Probably the people who most need to understand why he is in there.

A lot of people likely would have despised such a characterization.

Also the fight scenes in the Fellowship.. they haven’t aged great for me. An elf, two men, and a dwarf can kill a hundred orcs? The battles in the book are awesome, but less of a one sided bloodbath. Aragorn cutting off a goblin’s head, which causes them to get freaked the fuck out and retreat. That’s way more believable than that these guys are super warriors who can take down an army when outnumbered 100:1.

But he is definitely one of the most interesting characters and one of the best ways the story shows it is taking place in a big world with a lot of different things going on.

Why? He doesn't actually do anything except drone on and on about the color of his boots. He doesn't advance the story in any way (which is why it is so easy to omit him in adaptations).

First, he represented all the small pockets of unknown magic that could exist in Middle Earth. I would stare at the map of Middle Earth in the front of the book and wonder about the parts not covered in either The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. What strange things might be there? Tom heightened my sense of wonder about the world.

But second, Tom showed up just as the hobbits seemed to have met their darkest hour. You can dismiss this as deus ex machina on the part of the author, but it was a needed break from the stress and anxiety that had been building to a crescendo at that point. And I thought perhaps Tolkien was suggesting that sometimes you have to trust in the benevolence of strangers — or that some higher power is watching over the most vulnerable.

Perhaps it was the age when I first read the books (~12 or so years old) – but I loved the contrasts between the cozy world of the hobbits and the more savage, epic nature of the rest of Middle-earth.

For me, Tom Bombadil never fit well into either of these categories. There was a while where I heard about Tom Bombadil potentially being Eru Ilúvatar, but that theory has been found pretty lacking in various aspects, as well as having been debunked by Tolkien himself.

Yeah, exactly this. To me, Tom is a part of nature, even moreso than the elves or the ents, which isn't really good or evil. That's another reason I didn't like this post at all. Tom isn't some malicious force, biding his time until Sauron leaves when he can dance upon the corpses of the Hobbits. He's a mystery, a hint at the depth of the world, and a curious aspect of nature.

I think characters like that can make the world seem more... worldly. It gives a perspective that everything doesn't just revolve around the central plot.

But I’m also not aware of anyone who actually dislikes him, as the article asserts.

Couldn't the same thing be said of Tolkien's colorful description of the countryside that can go on for pages at a time?

I see you point, but there are so many chapters in our meandering lives that don't add nothing to our "story". It still does add a layer of depth to the LOTR as others have pointed out. And in a way he acts as a comic Cerberus, scaring away the materialistic minds that want to speedrun through a completely coherent story once again.

Or, did you just not understand what he contributed?

Why was Tom Bombadil invulnerable to the ring's power? Why was he not tempted by it? If you can't cogently answer that, I feel like you've probably just not yet understood what Tolkein was trying to represent.

He was in the books to add depth, history and verisimilitude to Middle Earth. He was an important part of world building. Tolkien could have left him out and the story would not have suffered but the same could be said for the appendixes and map as well.

Absolutely agree he needed to be dropped from the theatrical release. Would have been nice to see him in the extended edition though.

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)...

Then again, I’m not one of those folks who considers Tolkien sacrosanct. I generally think that he’s a bit like George Lucas: a pretty good idea guy, some interesting ideas, but not the best person to write the stories.

I say that as someone who has held up LOTR as some of my favorite books my whole life. I started re-reading them recently after 20 years and had to quit after Tom Bombadil.

    There was silence. At last Elrond spoke again. [...] The Barrow-wights we know by many names; and of the Old Forest many tales have been told: all that now remains is but an outlier of its northern march. Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew. But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. But many another name he has since been given by other folk: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by Northern Men, and other names beside. He is a strange creature, but maybe I should have summoned him to our Council.'

Tell me you wouldn't pay to see this.

[EDIT:] Highly recommended! [/EDIT]

LoTR is interesting here because it explicitly contains examples of language change. In fact language change was one of Tolkien's original motivations for developing the history of Middle Earth - to provide a historical context for the evolution of Elvish. E.g. Elves being sundered during the First Age and then developing independent languages. Even Frodo is aware of 'high' Elvish. The language of the Rohirrim, to the hobbits, sounds something like Old English does to us.

Tolkien himself uses archaic modes of English to describe some of the events near the end of the story, some of which might already be difficult to understand for modern readers. One example is when he states that some characters were 'in the van' meaning 'vanguard' rather than a road vehicle.

Even today, a significant part of the readership of the Lord of the Rings already read it translated.

Bearing that in mind, it’s not completely unreasonable to assume that a certain number of people will read it in a millenium.

It's also complicated since Beowulf was essentially lost for most of that time period, and is attested from a single manuscript. It's unlikely to be the case with LotR, short of massive civilizational collapse.

Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to compare 1000 years ago to 1000 years from now. Things are radically different, and using the past to judge the future is rife with opportunities to make mistakes.

Some people have suggested that it may actually be worse, in that so much of our current knowledge is contained in non-durable formats (digital instead of hard copy, for instance), which is an interesting idea. Here a comparison could be made to inscriptions on stone and clay vs. on papyrus. It may be that when the Walking Dead happens, rebuilding our knowledge will depend on the large numbers of libraries that will still exist, but are less than up-to-date, since so much of the modern knowledge isn't contained there, but instead in a PDF on some cloud server.

Still it is strong evidence against == Eru unless Tolkein was playing semantic games.

https://archive.org/details/the-lord-of-the-rings-bbc-radio-...

(no sign of Tom Bombadil here either though, IIRC)