I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 144: To Naomi Mitchison. April 1954
This has always been my understanding of Bombadil as well. The most popular/accepted view of who he is among Tolkien-dom that I've heard is that he represents the lands of the West themselves (or perhaps all of Middle-Earth?). In the Tolkien legendarium power comes from knowing the right names for things and the right words to say to them. Tom Bombadil is the most powerful being in Middle-Earth because he is so old that he knows the proper name for everything and how to address them (he chastises Old Man Willow to release the Hobbits like he is a child).
I do want to credit the author of this post with the observation that the rulers of lands in Tolkien's legendarium have influence over how those lands express themselves, but I think this letter is the answer to that. Tom is the exception; he eschews power. One of Gandalf's reasons for saying that they wouldn't want to give the ring to Tom is that he would probably lose the ring, not thinking it very important. Tom only cares of eating and drinking and making merry. In that regard he is a Dionysian figure. If you read the Adventures of Tom Bombadil (which this author surprisingly doesn't reference) he is clearly modeled on the Dionysus cycle of myths.
Tom Bombadil is quite clearly what Tolkein referred to as a "subcreation echo" of biblical Adam. Oldest, fatherless, unaffected by original sin and thus not tempted or influenced in the least by the ring, literally living his life as uncontested master of a lush garden. He is Adam, if Adam had contented himself with a Gold Berry instead of that apple...
I get that Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, but he was also a preeminent philologist trained in a way that few people today are. He was deeply familiar with all forms of human myth. To blindly assume that all characters in LotR must have a Biblical corollary is lazy. Tom Bombadil "rapes" Goldberry (in the ancient sense of the word[1]) in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil that comports nicely with other myth cycles and not very well with the idea of the "first Man" or "Adam" (it's not even clear that Bombadil is Eru's direct creation). I think if you actually read the secondary Tolkien texts you might see it differently. They are almost all worth it.
But one day Tom, he went and caught the River-daughter,
in green gown, flowing hair, sitting in the rushes,
singing old water-songs to birds upon the bushes.
He caught her, held her fast! Water rats went scuttering
reeds hissed, herons cried, and her heart was fluttering.
Said Tom Bombadil: "Here's my pretty maiden!
You shall come home with me! The table is laden...
That being said, I thought that his appearance in the book was just a contrivance to introduce the sense that this was all middle earth, successor to an older earth older than the "old" things of Middle Earth, perhaps a purer and less subtle place.
We have such a brief time with him in the books but he's one of my favorite characters because of his hints of depth in the narrative and in himself. I think his carelessness is partially an act: sure he's old, and sure he just lives for the moment, but perhaps he knows some deeper sins he's trying to drown out with drink? Or maybe it's simply that his perspective is so long -- so much longer than, say, the elves -- that anything he encounters seems transient.
I thought that his appearance in the book was just
a contrivance to introduce the sense that this
was all middle earth, successor to an older earth
older than the "old" things of Middle Earth
Yes. On a nuts and bolts level, he has a single purpose: so that the reader knows there are things older than elves; things that elves (and maybe even wizards) don't know about.
I see why many people hate Tom, particularly many engineer-types who want their fantasy worlds to be meticulously detailed and explained.
And from a traditional storytelling standpoint, he's a total dead-end with zero effect on anything else in the story.
Yet, I love him. It added to the sense of wonder and mystery in the world. Even Elrond doesn't know about this guy? Bonkers.
Gandalf, being older than Arda itself, has certain advantages even Galadriel does not in terms of "knowing about things" - his vows might limit him in terms of what he can do or say, but sometimes the rules can be bent.
"He appeared already to know much about them and all their families, and indeed to know much of all the history and doings of the Shire down from days hardly remembered among the hobbits themselves. It no longer surprised them; but he made no secret that he owed his recent knowledge largely to Farmer Maggot, whom he seemed to regard as a person of more importance than they had imagined. ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open,’ said Tom. It was also clear that Tom had dealings with the Elves, and it seemed that in some fashion, news had reached him from Gildor concerning the flight of Frodo."
> there's wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open
No proof whatsoever, of course, but just the existence of Tom Bombadil reminds us that there are people in the world (perhaps even the majority) who actually care very little about this whole "Ring" business and just go about living their lives.
What a strange way to look at it, when most of the inhabitants of Middle Earth had no choice in the matter of whether they were involved in the business of the Ring, as catastrophe came to them regardless as to their interest, as evidenced by the return to the Shire at the end of the trilogy, the ending left out of the movies. Frodo even laments his own role at one point, and says he wishes that he did not live in a time with these events, and Gandalf assures him that is how all who live through historic events feel.
It was only because of the selfless sacrifice of Frodo and Sam that any may have been able to live a life untouched by the turmoil of the reawakening of Sauron. If they had failed, nobody would have had a choice whether or not to "care" about the Ring -- they'd simply be oppressed by it.
I think there is some "fortuitous things just keep happening to these people" in much fiction, and certainly the LOTR series, right? If you or I was given a knife that glowed when trolls were around, that would probably be the most amazing thing that ever happened to us. To Frodo it's a footnote, right along with "met and was rended minor aid by the oldest corporeal creature in the universe".
Ultimately, I can only offer conjecture, but given what we know of Tolkein's deeply religious personal perspective, it's not difficult to imagine that his fantastic universe is pervaded by an overwhelming force of goodness that seeks to bring events to their right conclusion through divine providence.
> his fantastic universe is pervaded by an overwhelming force of goodness that seeks to bring events to their right conclusion through divine providence.
That is, in fact, explicitly stated in The Silmarillion.
"Then Ilúvatar (the God/Yahweh creator spirit) spoke, and he said: 'Mighty are the Ainur (the angels), and mightiest among them is Melkor (Satan / the fallen angel); but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined."
with much study over time, I have come to see one of the resiliant aspects of Christianity is an eagerness to consume all myth and lore and recast it as some story from the desert lands. There is no Adam and no Old Testament g*d in Tolkien, despite thousands of hours of Sunday school and preachers and AA meetings encouraging us to look more superficially at old stories and just resign ourselves to "yes, actually this is told in the Bible"
Tom Bombadil does not need your story of the Garden of Eden and you are invited to take it elsewhere, today.
> The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
Tolkien may have said that, but it is difficult to find much convincing similarity between his world and Christianity - even less so between the LotR trilogy specifically and Christianity. Most of the the Wikipedia article is a real reach. Some of it would even be contradictory: for instance if Varda corresponds to the Virgin Mary, she would co-exist with Mary in the present age as a separate entity. Surely Elbereth is exactly what she is presented as: a female Vala, wedded to Manwë since before the creation of Arda.
And what are the Valar? In the mythos, they are sub-creators. In Christianity God alone is the creator: angels have no part in creation.
The article draws similarity between the resurrection of Jesus and of Gandalf: but in Christianity, Jesus is literally one of the three persons of God, while Gandalf is a Maia, one of the lesser Ainur.
There are a lot of parallels drawn in that article, and I will not go through every one, but as far as I can see they are all contrived. The closest parallel is that of the rebellion of Morgoth - but there is no real equivalent of Sauron in Christianity.
It is also worth thinking about one thing that is missing. The fall of Adam would have taken place long before most of the sections of the Silmarillion, and yet there is no hint of this foundational event.
Tolkien's statement there, I take as a nod towards universal spirit.. basically accepting some validity in the Christian mythos, kindly, into his own unique realms.. but as said "only later" ..well after the invention and initial drawing.
This confirms, not contradicts, my own statement about Christianity "absorbing" all other mythos As If It Were Actually Christian. The acknowledgement from Tolkien is kind and generous, while the Christian theologians are somewhere in the middle, and the daily practice of socialized education is simply the opposite " no one is saved but through Christ"
pedantic, nagging insistence on "accepting primary sources" is exactly the closed-minded approach that is inevitable in lowest-common-denominator reading of the texts. unimpressive and unenlightening.. Is there really no other source of Truth than the Bible ? ask yourself
Not sure about Adam (he'd probably be an Elf as they were the first created) but Eru Iluvatar seems very akin to the God of the Abrahamic religions to me tbh. They're both all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful yet simultaneously mostly passive deities of their respective universes. Malkor is a very thinly disguised devil-character too, being one of the angels who has turned to evil.
Reminds me of the (apocryphal?) anecdote about Diogenes the cynic:
Diogenes was eating bread and lentils, when Aristippus told him that if he would only be subservient to the king, he would not have to live on bread and lentils. Diogenes replied that if you learn to live on bread and lentils, then you never have to be subservient to the king.
'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.
> The dude was a modern lunatic homeless man venerated into legend status for thousands of years.
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” It's funny, but if you visit some of the vagabond subreddits you can read some very Diogenes-esque philosophies. I don't think they're all crazy - there's a subset who chose that life, and I think some of them have chosen well. Diogenes wasn't mad; he could just hear the music we can't.
It's romantic in a way to imagine that these sorts of people have deeper wisdom than we do, but I think it's better to say that we can't tell for sure from the outside if they're listening to music we can't hear or are just crazy. In practice there's almost certainly some of both.
I was amused to read in his review of Fellowship that one of C.S. Lewis' favorite characters was Tom Bombadil:
But there is more in the book still. Every now and then, risen from sources we can only conjecture and almost alien (one would think) to the author’s habitual imagination, figures meet us so brimming with life (not human life) that they make our sort of anguish and our sort of exaltation seem unimportant. Such is Tom Bombadil, such the unforgettable Ents. This is surely the utmost reach of invention, when an author produces what seems to be not even his own, much less anyone else’s. Is mythopoeia, after all, not the most, but the least, subjective of activities?
Though it has to be said that this aloofness is a lot easier to maintain during a war when you're as immensely powerful as Tom apparently is. Hobbits, for example, did not have the choice to remain neutral and unconcerned; the Scouring came to them.
A Zen teacher I know gave a dharma talk titled “The Absence of Tom Bombadil”, centered around his nonappearance in the movies, interpreting it in terms of how when we dramatize we tend to omit elements that aren’t good or evil, and so beyond Hollywood we also in our minds tend to forget what Zen lore calls “the original mind that you had before your parents were born.”
To me, Tom Bombadil is the introduction of natural magic. He is nature, indicating to the reader that there is a source of magic beyond the elves, Wizards, and Sauron.
There are many magical creatures in Middle-Earth without a described source, which to me makes the whole story feel more magic. The Ents probably being the chief example.
Another important role of Tom’s is his introduction of magic and power outside of the “good vs evil” struggle.
Sounds indeed more in line with what Tolkien said, although everyone can create their own version of the story of course.
Tolkien:
"But Tom Bombadil is just as he is. Just an odd ‘fact’ of that world. He won’t be explained, because as long as you are (as in this tale you are meant to be) concentrated on the Ring, he is inexplicable. But he’s there – a reminder of the truth (as I see it) that the world is so large and manifold that if you take one facet and fix your mind and heart on it, there is always something that does not come in to that story/argument/approach, and seems to belong to a larger story. But of course in another way, not that of pure story-making, Bombadil is a deliberate contrast to the Elves who are artists. But B. does not want to make, alter, devise, or control anything: just to observe and take joy in the contemplating the things that are not himself. The spirit of the [deleted: world > this earth] made aware of itself. He is more like science (utterly free from technological blemish) and history than art. He represents the complete fearlessness of that spirit when we can catch a little of it. But I do suggest that it is possible to fear (as I do) that the making artistic sub-creative spirit (of Men and Elves) is actually more potent, and can ‘fall’, and that it could in the eventual triumph of its own evil destroy the whole earth, and Bombadil and all."
I really like this. In many many many works of fiction, if you are presented with an odd detail that seems extraneous to the plot or the aesthetic, there’s a huge chance that this will turn out to be some kind of pivotal point later in the story. I love that Tolkien was introducing them simply to create depth - and to a great extent - to provoke the feelings that bring about posts and discussion like this
Thanks for the link to that Wikipedia page, I'd never seen it before. Really amazing stuff. There have been many authors since that have done a good job at replicating that "impression of depth", but I still feel like none of them has ever done it at Tolkien's level.
For my tastes, it's not a matter of the biggest scope or the most obsessively detailed world history.
What I appreciate about Tolkien's world is the sense of wonder I felt when reading LOTR. He explained soo many details of that world but just as crucially he was very artful about what he chose not to explain. Adding to that, Tolkien and the characters themselves seemed to share this sense of wonder. Gandalf, who knew more about the world than even the Elves, never lost his sense of wonder and reverence for things.
GRRM's fantasy world is, well... more realistic, that's for sure. Characters are mostly just trying to be king, or to fuck, or get money, or simply survive. I like those books too. And GRRM has said of course that he was explicitly trying to create something like an anti-LOTR that showed the lives of people who weren't necessarily heroes or even good people.
I like the GRRM novels but I still prefer LOTR's sense of wonder. But, nobody's wrong if they have the opposite opinion. Or if they hate both. :)
Kind of strange that the only other two authors they talk about are Ursula K. Le Guin and J.K. Rowling. I don't think the use of depth by either was particularly noticeable compared to other authors, and certainly nowhere near what Tolkien was doing (and I'm saying that as someone who would rather read Le Guin than Tolkien).
That seems like an example of Chekhov's gun rather than the opposite of it. The seemingly unnecessary thing is actually quite vital, adhering to Chekhov's idea that you should only introduce vital things, just with a bit of subterfuge.
It's funny, this is somewhat consistent with TFA. Humans consider nature to be evil and scary. Tolkien has no fear of his creation; it is what it is, but TFA's author is terrified at the notion that nature could overgrow the creations of man- and elf-kind if the simple powers of good and evil are removed from the world.
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.
I have long considered him to break the fourth wall, but I lean toward Tom being an oblique author self-insertion, irrespective of Tolkien’s claim to not be embodied within his works.
My default assumption when I read any of the many "middle-earth x is not real world y" statements Tolkien has been provoked to make is that it's either a lie or an honest mistake. I believe that he was perfectly capable of writing about the war he served in while firmly believing that he was not.
The primary function/role I'd ascribe to Bombadil is almost the same same as that of the hobbits: the common man who'd like nothing more than not being bothered with The Great Game. Just with the twist that unlike the hobbits, he actually has the means to make that a reality. Everything else, the age, the powers, the mystery, it's first of all a requirement to make that role possible in Tolkien's world. That it adds depth, mystery, hn frontpage posts, that's all just a nice side effect.
He declined that... Tolkien said Tom Bombadil had been 'invented'. He considered his wife Edith: to have been Lúthien, so that would make Tolkien - Beren. "I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of The Silmarillion."
Tom Bombadil predates the story of the ring. It's placed there as a very powerful creature - still would lose to Sauron if all the world fell apart according to Glorfindel [and Gandalf doesn't object either]. That creature has no direct influence on the story, being more of a bystander... similar to the reader.
I suppose it would come down to if you think the Ring could influence the reader of the story, if it were possible for the reader to actually acquire the Ring. Tbh, it seems obvious to me that any ordinary human would probably fall to its pernicious influence. I certainly would, and its powers are such that I just can't imagine any human could resist its charms. Yet, Bombadil is completely untouched by it.
Tom Bombadil is like the Middle Earth equivalent of a Buddhist sage, just existing without wishing to be more or less than he already is.
Much like Tom, the reader is out of that world, so the ring power doesn't extend... the reader can see the unseen (Frodo/Bilbo having the ring on) and so on.
This is one of those theories that can't really be disproven (like the many eyeroll-inducing theories about the contents of the briefcase in Pulp Fiction) but it also makes little to no sense and is clearly not what the author intended.
Consider:
Perhaps Tom Bombadil represents Santa Claus? After all, Santa Claus has magical powers that utterly transcend what mortal humans can even comprehend. And yet the remains detached from worldly events, never taking a side in wars, never helping human beings during crises that could clearly benefit from his powers, etc.
The truth is that, characters like Tom (and Santa Claus -- if they are indeed not the same person) are fairly common throughout fiction and mythology.
After all, if you invent a character with absolutely transcendental superpowers, you need to explain why the character has chosen not to use those powers to i.e. cure world hunger, or end war, or whatever.
You can see this in... well, any major world religion. Notice how God never directly intervenes in the New Testament, even though he clearly could? Yeah, it's explained.
Yeah I agree, and I don't think it needs to be complicated beyond that point. Him and the other stuff that happens very close to that point (Old Man Willow and the barrow-wight) are just showing that this is a naturally magical world without being tied to just elves and wizards and rings. Unfortunately the movies did away with almost all of that part of the books, making it more like a Harry Potter style of magic: simply that there are indeed magic beings and wizards but generally the world itself is un-magical.
> There are many magical creatures in Middle-Earth without a described source, which to me makes the whole story feel more magic.
As far as I know, this isn't true. Virtually all creatures and major characters in LotR have a clear source in the lore Tolkien developed. Of course, only a fraction of this lore is in LotR itself, and the rest was in notes published after his death, e.g. in The Silmarillion.
That's precisely what makes Tom Bombadil such an eye-catching exception.
I disagree. Tolkien leaves plenty to the imagination and often alludes to histories or events which he doesn't bother explaining elsewhere.
>'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.
> Aragorn explains that there are evils older than Sauron
Caradhras contained Durin's Bane, a Balrog, which sufficiently explains this comment. There are certainly many evils predating Sauron, notably Morgoth.
> Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the story.
I've been a fan of Tolkien for decades, and this doesn't match up with my experience at all...Tolkien fans seem to generally love Tom, and many were deeply disappointed that he wasn't in the movies (even though his exclusion makes perfect sense). Did I just run in different Tolkien circles than the author?
Absolutely thought "I must be living in a bubble" when I read this: I don't think I've spoken to a single book-reader who wasn't vocally disappointed by the omission of Tom from the films. He was certainly one of mine & my sibling's favourite characters.
Agree. Tom represented a couple of things for me when reading the books.
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.
And beyond that, I thought the first half or so of this reading (that Bombadil is a lot more than meets the eye) was also common.
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.
> the first half or so of this reading (that Bombadil is a lot more than meets the eye) was also common
Certainly that he's more than meets the eye (that seems plain) but the conclusions here seem less common...
I think it's interesting to contrast the speculation in this article with the depiction of elves in The Hobbit (book) - much less obviously a benign force than as portrayed in LoTR.
The author's assumption - accepted as given at the outset - is that the "evil" within the Old Forest is genuine, rather than a representation of a certain perspective. The thesis is then that Bombadil must be guilty by association.
This initial assumption seems simplistic to me. A common trait of mystical (especially nature-connected) beings in northern European mythology (at least!) is a duality of intent - being a perhaps-positive yet untrustworthy force. This seems reflected in a lot of Tolkien's world; while Sauron / the Ring / others do have a more directly corrupt "evil" attributed to them, there's much more ambiguity elsewhere - it says of Old Man Willow that "his heart was rotten, but his strength was green": rotten != evil and in the context of nature has positive connotations (alcoholic fermentation) elsewhere in his writings. Green isn't necessarily positive either, but the usage here is notable.
It's admittedly in a different part of the book, so may be linguistic styling rather than lore-indicative, but the Old Forest felt more "wild" than "evil."
In the Old Forest, there were certainly dangers, including some lethal ones, but loosely organized and operating independently. More druidic.
Whereas Sauron / Morgoth were far more hierarchical in structuring their domains, exerted dominion over their forces, and attempted to implement a master plan.
The forests are selfish and harsh to outsiders but wish merely to sit and be left alone. The evil of Sauron and Saruman is their wish to spread and dominate (which puts Saruman in direct conflict with the forest, to his loss).
Interesting, because I've always seen the hobbits as being so insular that they wouldn't need any conspiracy forest to keep them inside the Shire: it was such a paradise (and most hobbits so "boring") that nobody felt any desire to venture outside. Bilbo and Frodo were very much viewed with suspicion for their world-wandering ways, after all.
I read the books as a kid, twice. I was glad they left Tom out of the movies. I mean, what he means to the story and the mythology is STILL being debated, 40 years after I read the books, and that was decades after they had been written. If Jackson had included him in the movies, he would have had to make an interpretation about his nature, one way or the other, or face endless waves of criticism from people (casuals) who don't understand that the character was left vague in the writing. I'm glad he didn't try to nail it down in the medium of film.
The thing is, he didn't need to be in the movies _per se_ --- they just needed to have the Hobbits swallowed up by Old Man Willow, then fade to black, then they awaken on the Barrow w/ a couple of swords, and the ponies tied up nearby, and a figure riding away on a pony humming/singing a tune.
Folks who had read the books would know what had happened, folks who hadn't would just have to accept it as a magical incident/rescue w/o explanation.
Jackson would've had to make an interpretation about his presentation, not about his nature. I see no reason a similar approach to his literary description couldn't be achieved cinematically.
Fwiw I would've cast Tom Waits. And had musical scenes.
> 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. He doesn't advance the story in any way (which is why it is so easy to omit him in adaptations).
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.
> 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.
One of Tolkien's goals was to create something which resembled history rather than literature. Or if not history, then mythology that plausibly belongs to a real place, rather than a neatly-constructed story. So, some of the things that he does are "janky" from a purely dramatic perspective, but fulfill that purpose.
A common example from Lord of the Rings is having many related characters with the same or similar name. The convention in literature is to make characters distinguishable for practical reasons, but in "real" history naming conventions are messy and people aren't always distinguishable. There are even real debates among historians about whether a name refers to multiple people or not!
Tom Bombadil is a similar thing. He serves no dramatic purpose. But a history, or a mythology, doesn't always have events that fit together in a neat way. Sometimes stuff just happens, or there are things that are only tangentially related. And it's difficult to draw a circle around events and say inside the circle is our story, and outside the circle not our story. There are other stories, intersecting.
In part, I think it's one of the ways he mimics the form of books like Beowulf or Gilgamesh or other works of that sort—that kind of thing tends to be full of digressions and whole scenes that simply seem like mistakes—dragging down the "momentum", not "advancing the plot"—if you're going by modern very-focused standards of what constitutes acceptable plotting, which of course is the kind of thing most people are used to reading/watching.
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.
The naive reader’s expectation of conformity to dramatic structure is an expectation that plenty of authors have played with, for reasons including stylistic effect, subtext, and for fun. It’s not a flaw, bug, feature, or other arbitrary and inappropriate use of software jargon.
Chekhov's Gun is but one playwright's opinion on what makes for "correct" dramatic structure.
As others have also stated, Tom is one of my favorite characters purely because he is left so unexplained. Tolkien sought to create a world. In order to create a world [0], it doesn't make sense for the whole of that world to be defined by a singular story or set of events. Least of all a world created by an author who so dearly loved folklore and mythology.
It's not that I'm taking Chekhov's Gun as an axiom. The rest of LOTR hangs together quite well on this criterion. I'm judging Tom by that standard. Gollum, for example, makes sense. In fact, Gollum is probably one of the best examples of a dramatically coherent character in all of literature. He is introduced as a bit player and ends up being a pivotal and very complex character, almost a protagonist in his own right. But that only happened (and let me apologize in advance for venting some frustration here) because he didn't just fucking vanish after being introduced!
How would one demonstrate a character who is so powerful that they can "just fucking vanish" without having them do just that?
You could go on to explain that fact or similar, but I think driving home that point any more than Tolkien did just muddies it and makes it more clumsy.
David Lynch directing The Lord of the Rings would be a fascinating experiment. Lynch would make the experience of the Ring-bearer, in particular, sublime.
The goal to some is the journey and not the destination. I wish I had a link, but there's a TikTok of some woman that always thought the Lord of the Rings looked stupid, but then her partner mentioned that it had all this backstory lore like the family trees and she then read all the books in like a week. She didn't care about the ring or Sauron, just the fun world building. I'm fairly similar.
I have a system that I use to rate movies: "Must see", "Worthwhile", "Wait for the video" and "Don't waste your time." After watching Mulholland Drive I had to invent a fifth rating: "I want those two hours of my life back."
Lynch fills his works with characters and scenes that are—at best—plot-adjacent, whimsical/incongruous/uncanny, and full of often-unexplained and apparently-metaphysical mystery or magic. He's as likely to let mood or theme drive the content of and editorial-decision-to-include a scene or a shot or an entire character(!), as plot. It makes sense you'd dislike his stuff if you don't like the Bombadil section of LOTR.
(this is not intended as some kind of judgement, to be clear, I was just curious if works with similar qualities had the same effect for you, or it was something specific to that kind of element being in LOTR in particular, maybe because of the context or something)
It's both. I like a story to go somewhere, to have a point. I want it to at least be possible to figure out what the fuck is going on, even if it requires some effort and isn't obvious on a first reading (or viewing in the case of movies). In fact, the best stories are the ones where you have to do some work (The Godfather is my poster child). But if I put in the work, I want it to at least be possible that I could figure it out.
LOTR is mostly like that. Most of the events make sense in the context of the overall arc of the narrative. If you ask, "Why is this scene here?" there is usually an answer.
Except Tom. He appears, puts on the ring, fails to disappear -- which is quite extraordinary! --- and that's it. The end. Toodle-oo. Vanishes entirely from the story without so much as a by-your-leave. Why was he introduced? To this day I have no idea. And that is why Tom bothers me particularly. With Lynch you know what you're getting. Tom seems like a bit of a bait-and-switch.
> He is one of the only characters able to just casually put...
He is the only character in the middle earth that can do that actually. The ring, and its immense power, has control over everyone else incl. Gandalf, Galadriel, and Sauron.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
Possibly. But I know a lot of people who find Tom irrelevant to the plot. It looks more like a silly digression just at the time the book had shifted from "Hobbit sequel" to serious epic. He talks in poetry that can feel singsong and childish.
Tolkien fans seem to focus on the bit with the Ring, which is an engaging enigma without a resolution. It makes him seem very important and powerful, but the story doesn't explore it much. It's a small part of a chapter that otherwise can feel like a distraction.
So a lot of fans, I think, are happy to see him go so you can get to better developed characters like Elrond and Aragorn. There is a lot more going on in that chapter, especially if you read it closely, but I can see why a lot of people are happy to skip on to the barrow wights, where the stakes are higher. Even if the ending to it is just "Tom comes back to fix it".
The comments on this thread make it seem more likely that your circle of people who disliked Tom is the outlier rather than those of us who thoroughly enjoy him as a character.
Scott was unusually-for-a-movie subtle about it, and it's easily lost in the atmosphere. More or less, depending on which film cut. Makes re-watching even more fun though!
I had to tell a couple people (generally college aged) to skip that chapter in order to get them to continue reading the books (around the time that the movies were coming out), as he wasn't important to the rest of the narrative.
I know I was questioning if I wanted to finish the books when I read that part in 6th grade. The rest of it obviously made up for it.
From your link, the set of comments under the first answer also shows there is clearly a debate.
I'm not arguing that there aren't some people who don't enjoy Tom, only that it's not a clear and overwhelming majority. The comment arguing that Tom is extraneous has 5 votes, on an answer with over 400. Though, to be fair, that's a self-selected sample, because Tolkien fans who aren't that interested in Tom probably wouldn't click on the question. But still, I think more evidence has been provided in this thread and that one for Tolkien fans enjoying Tom as a whole than for fans not enjoying him.
It's pedantic to argue about really, but hey, it's the internet! And what better way to take a break from beating one's head against one's cloud provider than to have a gently pedantic argument about something that matters not one bit on the internet ;)
I have a large circle of friends with a wide diversity of opinions about Tom. It's not representative, so I have no idea who is an outlier. But I understand why each of them sees it the way they do, and I'm certain that none of them is unique in their outlook.
I believe a stackexchange conversation is a very skewed set of Tolkien fans, who are there specifically to discuss those kinds of questions. There are many ways to be a fan of Tolkien.
I like Tom a lot but my own theory as to why he is in The Lord of the Rings is because Tolkien had already created him. You get a sense that the world-building Tolkien did began with a somewhat more fairytale-like world with characters like Tom Bombadil. First The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings took the world up to something less childish, more ... Arthurian?
Tom was at that point a round peg in a square hole, but Tolkien shoehorned him in nonetheless.
The History of Middle Earth gives an almost unprecedented insight into how an author works. Which is fortunate, since Tolkien himself is an unprecedented writer.
He had a singular way of revising, almost pathologically, holding some key points utterly fixed and revamping everything else to make them fit. It's why he never finalized The Silmarillion, and why when his son finally did publish it, he discarded a lot of the work done post-Lord of the Rings.
I believe you are correct: Tom was one of those fixed points, for no reason he could explain. He later said that Tom was left as a deliberate mystery. Which is a bit disingenuous, but that's fine. Tolkien worked by instinct, and his works are extraordinary. If his instinct tells him that Tom needed to be in the narrative, that's fine by me.
If other readers are perplexed by it, they will hopefully forgive it long enough to get through the book and read it again. It's very much the kind of book that you won't fully understand in a single reading, if ever.
It provides some pretty key context to where Merry got his blade from and why it is able to break the spell and make the Witch King killable. Bit of a better explanation than Eowyn's "I am no man."
I think “I am no man” is a perfectly good explanation in the movie. It implies that the witch king is relying on a prophesy he doesn’t fully understand (rather than a spell). “If Croesus goes to war, he will destroy a great empire.”
There's also a strong tie between this kind of prophecy and Tolkien's (and Anglo-Saxon literature generally's) love of the riddle form; "riddles in the dark" draws clear inspiration from Vafþrúðnismál, which doubles as both prophecy and riddles. Along these lines, I also recommend Adam Roberts's The Riddles of The Hobbit.
That "I am no man" thing is annoying because it's a loose thread on the tapestry of Middle-Earth. It's obviously a Macbeth reference:
"Fear not, Macbeth; no man that's born of woman. Shall e'er have power upon thee."
In Macbeth that turns out to be a man who was a Caesarean birth but Tolkein thought that was a cheap solution to the problem. A hobbit and a woman, now we're talking.
And if you think about that you realize the ents and huorn were a reference too:
"[he] shall never vanquished be until the Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him"
It turns out that Tolkein confirmed that the huorn and the ents came from his disappointment as a child that the trees in Macbeth were just guys wearing branches.
Once you know that it's hard to look at the books in the same way. You have to compare Denethor's role as unfaithful steward with the stewards in Macbeth and pretty soon you're just running a comparative literature class in your head.
Who's Wormtongue supposed to be? Is he a reference to King Lear's daughters? Is the scene where he tries to marry Eowyn a reference to Richard III?
Aragorn's speech is awfully Henry V, and the return of the Army of the Dead is awfully like the WWI short-story of the Angels of Mons where Henry's army returned to the aid of the British line.
Searching for tropes is a normal part of reading literature but normally you're just looking for parallels. I wish he hadn't included an actual reference to Macbeth to force the issue.
I don't recall it explicitly making him killable? Eowyn still finishes him off in the book without (I assume?) an ambiguously magical blade.
I always thought it was more of a misleading prophecy, very like Macbeth (probably inspired by? Tolkien certainly drew some inspiration from Macbeth in other areas); "No man of woman born" and "Not by the hand of man" are both interpreted as "can't be killed" but really turn out to have very significant loopholes.
Merry's sword was Númenorean, but there was no need of that entire digression to get Merry a Númenorean sword. The movie has Aragorn tell them "here are some weapons, help yourselves", which is just as good.
You can argue that much of the books can be eliminated because they're just not Hollywood, reading is for boomers after all.
The origin of the blade is relevant because they nearly died in getting it, and because it came from the tomb of a prince who himself died battling the Witch King, so in a sense he obtained vengeance from beyond the grave. "Wow, this sword just turned out to be magic, what a coincidence" isn't nearly the same thing.
Film--even a whole trilogy of films--is a different medium from books. Books are in general much more tolerant of diversions that don't move the story forward. Bombadil was pretty much a diversion.
The films also had to deal with the fact that the LoTR books had a lot of material after the ring was destroyed--and that's not even counting all the material in the appendix of RoTK. Say whatever positive things you like about LoTR but the narrative structure of RoTK in particular is a bit of a mess.
I don't think it was "a mess" (just reread it this spring). Books support a lot more alternatives to structuring a story than most movies, with their tight time limits, want to explore.
That doesn't mean movies are better: in fact, movies are clearly more limited and worse, from the point of view of telling long, complicated stories. But people enjoy movies (me too), so... compromises.
> And his absence from the films was remarked upon, negatively in my circles.
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.
The axe to the ring was bad enough, but when the character later explicitly suggested that they go through Moria, ranting about food and beer, that’s when I knew we had gotten a clown on our hands. By the time the tossing was discussed, I was thoroughly disillusioned about the character, and expected no better.
Witch King vs Gandalf in the movie distorted a key point about the wizards: they were tasked to assist humans and elves against evil, but not to use their power to defeat the enemy on their own, or to rule over Middle Earth. Saruman tried do do both, and lost eternity for it. Peter Jackson understood that, but chose for theatrical reasons to sweep it aside, just as he did the enigma of the Old Forest and the (in Tolkien's own words) "most important chapter in the book" on the Scouring of the Shire (the author compared it to "the situation in [Britain] after the war").
That the whole Sauron business was a local and temporary nuisance seems central to the roles of Tom B and the ents. The ents' complaint was, in the end, only with Saruman.
100% agree with you. Tom was my favorite character and an essential one in my opinion. I was one of those people that was deeply disappointed by his absence.
Tom is entirely beyond caring about "good" or "evil". His peace is such a vital contrast to every other character and has stuck with me over time.
> Tom is entirely beyond caring about "good" or "evil". His peace is such a vital contrast to every other character and has stuck with me over time.
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.
>Tom is entirely beyond caring about "good" or "evil". His peace is such a vital contrast to every other character and has stuck with me over time.
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.
A good point. He is an indifferent character, much as nature is indifferent to humanity. However, to “humans” experiencing peril, indifference can feel like evil.
Global Climate Disruption is (1) a looming catastrophe for human civilization, (2) potentially a major setback for us as a species with a population crash from billions to millions, but (3) barely a hiccup to the biosphere, just one among many pulses of extinctions.
Your experience matches my own. For me and my circle Tolkien's works were a draw in part because of how much lore and detail was in the world and yet there were huge mysteries all over that ignite the imagination. Tom was one of those, and as kids he was a source of long debates about how powerful he was, and as we got older and read wider and deeper he still prompts conversation on nature, the nature of power, mystery in story telling - he's the reason I read the Kalevala. Anyway -Tom's awesome and this blog post did not resonate with me much at all, I was glad to see this and most of HN's comments in response.
I like him in the books, but he also seems like a really good example of why making movies their own thing instead of slavishly following the source material is a good idea. There's no way having the hobbits break the tense flight from the Shire->Rivendale for a weird musical number with an unexplained character who's never referenced again in the story would've been anything but confusing for the film audience.
Yeah, I've never felt the way about Tom Bombadil that the author implies. I find his character fascinating. But I also understand why Jackson didn't include him in the movies. There's only so much you can do before a movie becomes unwieldy.
Yeah Jackson even explained that in one of his interviews. Bombadil doesn’t really contribute anything to the main plot of the books or the character development of the hobbits. He’s a mysterious interlude that never appears again or has any effect on the plot development or outcome. It just wasn’t possible to justify giving him precious minutes in an already long movie, and would likely have confused audience who hadn’t read the book yet.
But I’m also not aware of anyone who actually dislikes him, as the article asserts.
I was so baffled by reading this opening paragraph that I assumed the entire post was meant to be read as a tongue-in-cheek or "edgy" theory, not a serious discourse on the books. Was I wrong??
Reading it again as an adult (read outloud in full to my daughter when she was 11 or 12 or so, before watching the movies) I really liked Bombadil. But I didn't dig that section at all when I read the books as a 14 year old. It seemed whimsical and childish. More fairy tale than the overall dark and serious epic tone in the rest of the book.
I see the Bombadil portion and the sections after it as Tolkien making the transition from "I'm writing a sequel to The Hobbit with a similar feel" to "I'm writing a sequel to my Silmarillion, with much more mature and darker themes". I think Bombadil fits more in the style of The Hobbit (fundamentally a children's book) than the larger Quenta Silmarillion.
I stopped taking the article seriously after I read this line. IMO Tom Bombadil was a very likeable character. The author seems to have imagined a problem (where none existed) and then proceeded to explain why it's not a problem. Almost a clickbait.
Yeah, I can't get past that sentence either, and it's the 2nd sentence. I just don't get the impression they know what they're talking about and have serious doubts about spending time reading the rest of it.
There's a bit of selection bias going on w/ Tolkien fans vs readers of the book in general. I know many people who read the and loved the book, disliked the sections on Tom (at least, beyond a few pages of it), and have never participated in any Tolkien fan community. I suspect "fans of the book" meant more the casual rather than the hard-core fan you are alluding to.
I was like you once, then I read The Hobbit to my son and had to (HAD TO) sing all the songs to him. It kind of forced me to slow down and appreciate them as atmosphere enhancing and world building that really does improve the experience for me.
Ha! I could say exactly the same thing. The songs ended up being some of the most fun parts to read/sing. Even when some of them made us laugh about how repetitive or strange they were.
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.
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)...
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.
I was disappointed he was not in the films, however everyone else I know was glad of this omission. I think his character adds a certain something- maybe something a lot of people don't appreciate. Not including him in the movies, I thought, was a missed opportunity.
I’m disappointed too, but my least favorite thing about the movies is how they made Aragorn so different. He was supposed to be kingly right from the start, taking Anduril from Rivendell and repeatedly shocking the hobbits with his kingliness. The movies made him this reluctant guy who doesn’t want to be king — where in the book he knows it’s his destiny and it makes him a total badass.
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.
I think that I really would have enjoyed the characterization discussed in the linked article, of Bombadil as the dark hand of Mirkwood, provider of the blade that would slay the witchking.
A lot of people likely would have despised such a characterization.
> Did I just run in different Tolkien circles than the author?
Almost certainly. Tolkien fans aren't a monolith, there's plenty of diversity of opinion. I remember seeing these screenshots of a Tolkien forum from 2000 and 2001 of people berating Peter Jackson in the most scathing terms. They were talking about how he's completely ruined Tolkien's legacy.
That said, if you're looking for a Tolkien fan who dislikes Tom - hi, I'm one. Fuck Tom Bombadil. He contributed exactly nothing to the story.
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.
Maybe it comes down to a difference of how people approach books? Do you think that everything in a book should ultimately have an effect on the story? Do you think Hugo's descriptions in Les Misérables contribute to the story, or that it should only ever be read in an abridged version?
Personally, I think those things (and Tom!) do contribute a lot to the story, so maybe that's why I liked Tom. There's more to writing than simply telling a story and making everything pertinent to that, and thus there's more to reading. Of course, I also like worldbuilding and would read D&D manuals simply for that, without ever playing sometimes, so another reason why I liked Tom, but I can't help but wonder if it's split into two camps because of how people approach reading and literature.
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.
Well I'm glad you said that, I was very disappointed he wasn't in the movies. My other friends seemed not to care, or they thought he would be too difficult to portray on camera.
I’ve hated Tom since the first time I read the series, which must be over 40 years ago now. I’ve hated him on every reread. Leaving him out of the films was one of my happiest moments.
You and me both. He seems like a copy/paste from some children's book Tolkien had lying around, which he then threw in as filler for LOTR. Of course, hardcore fans come up with more or less tortured explanations for the glaring inconsistencies.
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.
Honestly why would you quit after the Tom Bombadil part if you love everything but his part. He literally doesn't appear at all after the few chapters he takes up.
Yeah I usually try to avoid going “well I never saw that personally,” but even combing through this thread it seems that saying folks generally don’t like Bombadil is a very hot, but also very questionable, take.
I definitely remember many people remarking on his absence and debates about how critical he was (most conceded cutting him made sense it was just a bummer).
I absolutley agree with you! I remember reacting badly seeing first movie in cinemas when they had left out Tom. I brought it up many times with friends that it was the biggest mistake to exclude him, but many argued he is not central to the story. I have never ever heard anyone dislike Tom.
I skipped Tom Bombadil—even on my rereading of the cycle. Completely irrelevant to the story and entirely Tolkien the Old English professor marking time. Absolutely nothing is lost from the quality of story by dropping him, and ignoring him makes the whole series more accessible.
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.
Because, ~20 pages in, I wanted to throw the book against the wall and never pick it up again. I skipped past the Bombadil chapter and decided that the book was worth reading now that the professorial digression had been skipped.
A good editor would have had it shortened or eliminated.
Yeah, I've gotten a lot of positive comments for my character "Tom Bombabil" in FFXIV. It's kind of an insider thing for who read the books vs who just watched the movies. Personally, I liked him just for carefree and silly he was.
I think it depends on whether or not it's the sort of fan who read the books once, perhaps after seeing the Peter Jackson movies, or the sort of fan who reads them every few years. You are perhaps the latter sort.
I agree! an impish godlike figure that doesn't care all that much about the outside world and wants to sing and dance around in the woods? what's not to love.
It's a fun read in a fan-fiction sense, but when you look at the out-of-universe story of the events of Tolkien's life and his writing process it becomes clear that Tom is not meant to be any kind of evil.
Tolkien wrote a silly whimsical poem about one of his children's toys that they had named Tom Bombadil. In this tale he lives in a dangerous environment, but he is able to overcome the dangers and get his happy ending.
When Tolkien later was writing LotR, he drew upon his former work and put in the silly whimsical Tom as an early encounter for the Hobbits just as they are leaving the Shire and starting their adventure. This story arc delivers some early exposition about the world in his dialogue, it shows that the Hobbits are hopelessly unprepared to stand up against any foe such as Old Man Willow or the Barrow-Wight and need rescue (this way they can have character growth and become Heroes by the time they return to the Shire) and it gets the Hobbits armed for their quest towards Rivendell (and most importantly to put the right kind of blade into Pippin's hands for later).
In a more thematic sense he is just part of nature, not evil but also not actively looking to do good, just existing. He is master of his domain in the same sense a big moose might be the "master" of his local forest, he's the biggest around and isn't threatened by anything else, but he has no human desire for expansion and doesn't push back when civilization comes around to turn the land nearby into farmland either, just keeps to himself. He doesn't try to tame the angry trees because it's just protecting it's territory, as is natural, nor does he try to "exorcise" the barrows because nature doesn't actively go about trying to undo the evils created by man.
The thing about Tolkien (and I think good story telling in general), is he gives a feeling of consistency, depth and complex choices. But that's completely different from needing fine-grained consistency between chapters of a long book. I'm not a Tolkien expert but I think are a whole variety of "plot holes" one can point to but these don't particularly matter for the development of the story, where the main thing is the suffering and redemption of the main characters which only has to feel real and as well as feeling dramatic.
I think Elrond hadn't heard of Tom just because that made the council scene more dramatic, for instance.
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.'
> 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.
My takeaway from this was that Elrond wasn't sure if this was the same person - strongly speculated to be, and probably correct, but not someone Elrond had personally known or corresponded with. It felt like this was the first time he'd heard the name Tom Bombadil, and made an educated guess that it was probably old Ben-adar. Tom, meanwhile, had contact with Gildor at the very least.
It's interesting that this description is apparently "evil", even if in this framing Tom predates all, and everyone lives on his unceded land. You'd become "particular" about your role after living through several ages of that, too.
Rather than evil, it's more "biding their time until that injustice can finally be rectified". In this post's framing, literally every humanoid race is by definition an (unwitting) invader.
Interesting ideas but having listened to a mountain of Tolkien Professor podcasts, I don’t think this is a canonical view of Bombadil. My impression is that he is not evil, he is just so old and powerful that he doesn’t care about power anymore.
Depends on how well it was written. I've really enjoyed some of David Brin's crazy-premise stories. ("Thor Meets Captain America", "The River of Time", etc.)
+1...but actually she acquired her taste for red outfits in the 9th century, while impersonating a Cardinal representing Antipope Anastasius Bibliothecarius ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasius_Bibliothecarius ) in Constantinople.
Interesting! I have always thought this. R2D2 saves the day so many times across stories and drives change in ways that make Star Wars canon more than any other character.
Actually I have a better theory: R2 actually hates all humans for having enslaved robots, and through mailicious compliance ensures all those he is in direct contact with get the worst possible outcomes.
That would imply a whole lot of foresight, though.
Related: one of the coolest monsters I've seen in recent fantasy is Cthaeh from the Kingkiller Chronicles. He's an evil, omniscient being with near-perfect foresight, but he's stuck in a tree. Speaking with him is terribly dangerous because whatever he says to you is guided by a.) his perfect knowledge of all possible futures, and b.) his desire to maximize harm.
The elves did what was probably the most sensible thing they could: wall off the area around the tree and kill anybody who interacts with it in order to minimize its ability to affect the world.
I find it interesting how much Cthaeh, the Simurgh from the web serial “Worm” and Prometheus - the god of foresight - from Scott Alexander’s short story “A Modern Myth” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-modern-myth/) are basically incarnations of the same concept.
1. I'm surprised LiveJournal still exists. Genuinely. I used to have one, a loooong time ago.
2. I was always fascinated by Bombadil, he seemed to me like the embodiment of nature itself, or forests. At least, that's the concept he seemed to represent to me. I admit I skipped reading the lyrics though. This is a fascinating theory although it is quite different than what I would conclude from the same evidence.
I recently looked into LJ, it looks to be a better take on social media than many things that came after. Many ancient blogs are still live, documenting daily struggles and ramblings from 2003. It could be written into social history.
LJ was bought by some company in Russia years ago -- at which point, there was a very large exodus among Anglophone users (particularly of the LGBTQA community, and their friends). A lot of them went to Dreamwidth, which started with a fork of the LJ codebase, but not enough to make it nearly as vital as LJ used to be.
George Martin was still publishing his blog there until pretty recently, so that forced it to stay in somewhat of the public eye as the only place to get any official updates on when Winds of Winter might finally be published.
A random thought just occurred - and I welcome speculation. Do you/we think Lord of the Rings will have staying power in human history 1000 years from now or only last one century or so? Inherent assumptions: humans will survive 1000 years and so will books.
I think it will be studied and valued indefinitely, if not for anything else, due to it's massive impact on literature and popular culture in this era, which shows no sign of waning. If anything in my lifetime it's influence has increase dramatically. Nobody in the future interested in the culture of the 20th and 21st century, and quite possibly well beyond, could ignore it.
Having said that, will non-academics in that far future still read it for entertainment? That's harder to say because in large part it depends how much language evolves. We still read Shakespear, go to see the plays, and even go and see film productions of it in cinemas but it's language is only diverged from our by 400 years.
A thousand years can allow for a lot more linguistic divergence. Chaucer from 900 years ago is hardly recognisable as English, but that's mainly due to a shift that occurred in only a few hundred years. If such a shift occurs again then today's fiction might become inaccessible, but we can't know that in advance.
> That's harder to say because in large part it depends how much language evolves.
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 if I am not a native English speaker, when I have read "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit", many decades ago, when I was young, one of the main reasons why I have enjoyed them very much has been the distinctive language in which they have been written.
I cannot say what exactly made me believe this, but while reading them I thought that these books contain some of the most beautiful English language that I have ever read (and I have read many thousands of books). I have not changed my opinion later.
The movies have been fine, but reading the books has been a much more powerful experience for me.
Totally agree. There are a couple of places where the writing and language are lyrical and some of the best writing I've encountered.
Examples are the battle of the Pelennor Fields, and in fact (coming back to the subject of the article), the description of the stories that Tom tells to the hobbits - e.g.: Suddenly Tom's talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up to the Downs. They heard of the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords...
I first read TLoTR in 1973 (50 years ago, next year) and it has had a special place in my heart ever since.
It seems you make the assumption that “reading Tolkien” means reading the original text in the English vernacular from the mid-20th century. But we still read texts from Latin authors who lived 2000 years ago, albeit translated. It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but Virgil and Ovid are quite readable.
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.
I would argue it's the one piece of fiction from the last 100 years with the highest likelihood of staying power for the next 1000 years. If any piece of fiction from this period of time is still important in human culture in 1000 years (taking for granted that humans still exist), I think it would be Tolkien's work.
I will venture further out on the speculative limb, and predict that in 1000 years when virtual reality subsumes reality, that Middle Earth (and the larger Tolkien world) will become the dominant reality - as it doesn't and may never have any competition for that role.
Tolkien either defined or at least cemented what Elves, Orcs, Dwarfs and Halflings are like (including their culture, environments and architecture). Almost all of fantasy is keeping more or less close to those definitions.
If this influence continues to hold, then the popular fantasy VR reality doesn't need to be Tolkien World. It can stand completely on its own and still generally look and feel like Middle Earth would.
I bought the book a few years before the movies and couln't stand it the first time. Then someone advised me to read The Hobbit first. Good advice: not only I enjoyed The Hobbit immensely, but I was able to read The Lord later... but not comfortably.
I found some parts boring and repetitive and read them diagonally. Anyway, I did finish the book and was moved by some parts, characters and themes.
FWIW, it was a translation, so changes in the language along 1000 years could be a similar factor. I also agree with simonh in the influence factor: I chose the book because I was told that it was a centerpiece of geek culture.
But I suspect that it's more a question of which books were read by kids at a certain time. Will it be a popular book in this category in a thousand years?
I think stories that have that kind of staying power must say something about the time they originated, in order to stay relevant centuries after. It need not to be so explicit as describe the contemporary society, but some kind of link I think need to be there.
Perhaps the Tolkien books have that, but I can't put my finger on it.
1000 years is a pretty long time. Looking at literature from the 11 century, Beowulf is the only thing that stands out as still having any impact and continuing to be adapted and widely read today.
Information storage and transmission over the next 1000 years should be quite a bit better, so more work will survive and have a shot at continuing relevance, and Lord of the Rings certainly has a shot, provided epic fantasy keeps its popularity as a genre. Being fairly foundational is likely to keep it important to the genre to the point that I think we're just asking if humans in that future will still care to experience these kinds of stories at all, but you are pushing the point at which all that tends to still be read that far into the future are national foundation myths and religious scripture.
It'll definitely last more than a century, though. The Hobbit was published in 1937. A century is only another 15 years away.
> Looking at literature from the 11 century, Beowulf is the only thing that stands out as still having any impact and continuing to be adapted and widely read today.
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.
>Information storage and transmission over the next 1000 years should be quite a bit better
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.
Barrow-wights are Bombadil's servants? Ridiculous. Tolkien made it clear that they were the spawn of the Witch King, sent out to ensure that no men could settle in that particular area. This is reinforced by the fact that Bombadil himself destroys one of the wights while rescuing the hobbits.
About a week ago, I (mid 20s) began reading LoTR for the first time, despite having seen the movies long ago. I knew books are always richer in content than movies, but Tom Bombadil was the first radical departure from the movies that I encountered, and the weird encounter was an exciting switch that made me perceive the story I’m reading as new and different from the story I’ve seen.
The group has not yet arrived to Rivendell (so no spoilers please :))
Given that you have seen the movies, you may wish to contemplate the prophecy about the death of the Witch-king of Angmar and it's relation to the Barrow Downs.
A "chance" meeting of the Wight and a rescue by Bombadil where they (not of the race of men) happen to get magic knives woven with the exact ancient spells capable of undoing the Witch-king.
The fate of Gondor relied on this piece of the books that is missing in the movies. Without it, the Witch-king isn't killed and they fall to Sauron's minions.
I think the most crucial (and often overlooked) difference between the films and the books is the narrator's perspective. The films are largely shown from a neutral / omniscient narrator's perspective. The books OTOH are mostly written from the perspective of the Hobbits. (The conceit is that the books are adapted from written hobbit lore collected mostly by Bilbo and Frodo[1].) The implication is that there's much more emphasis in the books on what's important and interesting to the Hobbits, as opposed to Men or Elves. In the film, Frodo and Sam are only arguably the main characters, and only because they are the Ringbearer and those that destroy the Ring in the end. But the boook is really Frodo's Own Story.
I always felt that Tom Bombadil was filler in order to bridge events between Crick Hollow and the Prancing Pony. Tolkien had already written The Adventures of Tom Bombadil as a separate piece with Goldberry and Old Man Willow. He just dropped that into the Fellowship and used it to fill the space.
I used to skip the Tom section and move right up to Bree. Now I read the books much slower, and I savor every section, even Tom.
I always thought of Tom Bombidil as Eru, the creator, or at the very least was taking cues from Eru. Two pieces of evidence:
1) The song he gives, which seemed a positive one, and is not remarked upon as discordant or unpleasant. Eru created through song, and in that choir it was the introduction of disharmony that signified evil.
2) The passage where it's asked "who is he?" The answer is "He is." And then "he is as you have seen him". Tolkien was a religious person, and this passage has always seemed to echo that of the bible where a similar question gets the godly response "I am that I am". This echo always seemed to much to be a coincidence.
Yes, he is the GMPC in a RPG setting. As this is heroic fantasy with few or no subversions to the plot ever, the other characters are written as not meta enough to note that they are in a story, and the author of the story put his avatar in there.
> Eru created through song, and in that choir it was the introduction of disharmony that signified evil.
I take a different view:
Eru knew who Melkor was from the start, and his “disharmony” was part of a broader and richer song — as shown by the duet that led to man and the ultimate downfall of evil lords.
The only time Eru spoke to Melkor, he chided him for thinking that a being of his own essence was acting outside his intent or marring the music.
If you take the Valar as aspects of Eru, then Melkor is the internal critic that drives genius to greater heights.
Very interesting! But I wonder if it might be a bit of misdirection by Tolkein to say "there is no embodiment of the One.." After all he is good Catholic who believed in the Trinity.
Still it is strong evidence against == Eru unless Tolkein was playing semantic games.
Rather than his surroundings being a symbol of the true Tom, I take this to be Tolkien's allegory of divine intervention, God himself reaching in and tilting the balance slightly, a little nudge while otherwise letting things play out. An extremely rare occurrence both in Tolkien's creation and his own religion, which is why Tom is not more widely known, except by Gandalf who rubs elbows with the Valar when not running around Middle Earth.
This take almost makes him sound like nature inherent. Quiet in the background of all the activity of humans, elves, orcs etc but always ready to take over the world again as soon as those creatures depart or diminish.
The author of this delightful post is very wrong or at least from a very unusual bubble in thinking that Bombadil is disliked by most readers of the Hobbit, but other than that, the narrative of secret evil he constructs is wonderfully compelling, enough to create a whole fascinating story line of its own. I loved it.
The author of this has clearly not read much of Tolkien's legendarium beoynd the LoTR... This is a whole lot of speculation that does not at all fit into Eä, the World that is. Though indeed one might say the same of Bombadil, it is far from clear what role he has to play in Arda, and Tolkien took his cosmology very seriously, so there is every reason to think this mystery of who the hell is Tom Bombadil? is intentional. But the reasonings of this article is exactly those of conspiracy theorists, not those of any serious Tolkien scholar. Seemingly relying on “No hobbit has ever heard of him,” “Elrond, the greatest lore-master of the Third Age, has never heard of Tom Bombadil” as implicitly implying “therefore there must be some great dark secret,” Gandalf's explanations he simply dismisses as not “the true one.” Tolkien was a philologist, familiar with and directly inspired by many different mythologies, for example Väinämöinen, a hero and demigod of songs and poetry from finnish folklore has been pointed out as a possible inspiration for Bombadil. Though from his close connection to nature one would rather expect him to be a sort of demiurge than a hero, neither evil nor good, and indeed as opposed to Väinämöinen whose adventuring is due to his seeking a wife, Tom has a wife and makes a big point out of this, he is content, and has no desire for evil. If I may continue my rant I'll add that the very creation of Arda is by music, taught by Eru Ilúvatar, the One, to the Ainur. There is little doubt that Bombadil is among the Ainur, one of the Maia on par with Gandalf and Sauron. It seems entirely plausible to me, that Bombadil indeed is as he says, the oldest, of special significance to Ilúvatar, prior to Arda and whatever may be happening in it.
I'll also add that I have never heard of any Tolkien enthusiast not liking Bombadil before this. I suspect the author of this article is among the minority who thinks that abruptly breaking into song is lame, mistakenly of course, hehe.
> There is little doubt that Bombadil is among the Ainur, one of the Maia on par with Gandalf and Sauron.
Tom Bombadil is the slacker version of Melian the Maia. Instead of marrying Elvish royalty and running an enchanted kingdom, he shacked up with an orphan and runs a nature park full of angry, semi-sentient trees.
He could do a lot more if he really applied himself.
And the article even admits as much a few paragraphs later. Just one of many pieces of evidence that this article is not of much value, even as a work of speculative fan fiction.
If you haven't discovered it yet: Andy Serkis narrated audiobooks for the Hobbit and the entire LoTR trilogy, and it's a joy. His voice and singing for Tom Bombadil is stuck in my head forever now!
This is a strange, and Lovecraftian take on Bombadil. I always thought he really was just a jolly fat guy out in the woods. Kind of like a Middle Earth version of one of those potbellied rednecks you see laughing on a small fishing boat, surrounded by a pile of empty beer cans, who waves at you and asks you if you want a cold one, before turning back to the Skynnard blaring from the ancient boombox on their ice cooler.
In the Silmarillion, the universe was created by the music of the Ainur. At first it was in line with the mind of Iluvatar (God) but Melkor sang louder and then in discord. Some fans theorize that this discord created Tom Bombadil, along with barrow wrights, Shelob, the watcher of the water, and the ancient creatures that Gandalf saw while chasing the Balrog under Moria.
The barrow-wights are undead, things that were once living humans and were buried in the mounds they haunt. They're not primeval beings.
Shelob has a canonical origin story, as I recall, as daughter of the primeval spider-shadow thing Ungoliant. The watcher in the water doesn't seem quite spectacular enough to be truly primeval if you ask me, but then again, Bombadil isn't especially flashy either, and we know he is primeval. Maybe it's more relevant that the watcher in the water wasn't always there, it only appeared around the same time as the balrog was dug up. Which sounds pretty un-primeval to me.
Tom is the oldest in that he’s Tolkien’s oldest fictional creation. Tolkien made him up one day for his children’s bed time story. In this context, it explains why Tom feels so off from Middle Earth. Personally, I like the character and I’m surprised to hear that a lot of people didn’t like him.
And is about as faulty. The Witch-king would definitely have been affected after putting on the ring of power (and would have immediately killed them before returning it to Sauron). It is also worth noting that Frodo didn't have his normal nervousness about handing the ring to Bombadil.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, thanks for the post. Clever, fun, even if not necessarily accurate analysis and speculation. But, that's just my two cents to add to all the other bikeshedding.
Not sure which one the OP had in mind but if you're into more theatrical audiobooks / podcasts check out "An Unexpected Journey" by "Samwise Gamgee" on Spotify. Absolutely top-tier audiobook of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Wow, just listened to the beginning of chpater 1. This is really, seriously good. Thanks you. I was just thinking what's next for my morning commute...
I would not be commenting about how little interest I have in this story, if the website didn't break the back button. The people who do this, what are they thinking? That we will never leave, and keep watching their webpage until we die?
Tolkien is overrated, but this... this is useless and annoying.
I'm kind of neutral to Tom, while my brother always hated his character. I kind of disliked him on the first read, but became neutral on the 2nd. I think this was because I knew the 2nd time that most people hated him and was waiting for it to hit, but it never really did for me.
> Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the story.
It's always odd when someone picks apart a work of fiction with the tools of realism. It tells me they either have too much time on their hands, or they have missed the entire point of stories.
I always loved Bombadil. A discordant note among wizards of great power and elves of slender form and perhaps a metaphor for Nature itself, but I also have enjoyed a lot this take on the character.
I remember reading this several years ago, and I find it to be a plausible theory and pretty terrifying. I know it likely isn't canon and that TB is just a happy entity.
Maybe Tom Bombadil is just JRRT himself. Why won't he just live there and know everything without being noticed, other than occassional Deus Ex Machina action?
But Jar-Jar was highly consequential, and not pointless at all. He was a delegate to the Senate, and he wanted to make a difference. As such, he took it upon himself to speak to the Senate, to grant Chancellor Palpatine emergency powers. You may argue that anyone else could have done that, but I'm not so sure; it seems like one of those things that many may support, more or less in quiet, but nobody wants to take the initiative, as they are too careful and political to do so.
As such, he is the reason for the fall of the Republic and rise of the Empire.
Probably true, though as Gandalf himself refers to Treebeard as old.
In Chapter 5 of The Two Towers, Gandalf calls Treebeard "...the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth." In The Return of the King, Chapter 6, "Many Partings", Celeborn addresses Treebeard as "Eldest."
If Maia are included, then Sauron and Radagast (if still alive) would be just as old.
LotR stuff pops on here pretty regularly, though not in big swarms. There's the Battle of Helms Deep analysis series (or something like that) that usually gets posted, for example.
I'm sure The Rings of Power (which I assume is what you meant) will give the subject a bump, but this is more likely something someone came across and shared unrelated.
Why does it seem like everyone wants it to fail? It is almost like everyone has deemed it to be a disaster without watching one episode. I hope that is not the case and critics go in with an open mind, why sap all the fun out of it right out of the starting gate
I didn't say anything about it or alluding to it failing - I mentioned that there is LOTR content popping up at the same time as Elden Ring is getting traction. Your bias really shines through here.
Well not sure why you keep repeating name 'Elden ring' - thats a computer game completely unrelated to LOTR or incoming TV show from Amazon (The rings of power). It may sound like a jab on the TV show from you, probably hence the reactions
Tldr: "So that's what I think Tom is. He's Tolkien's version of what a pagan survival would have looked like in Middle Earth. He doesn't quite fit because he's from the bit of Middle Earth that is England, or a version of England, and from a different set of stories. "
Repeat this refrain and he'll immediately appear for a merry introduction:
Ho! Tom Bombadil, Tom Bombadillo!
By water, wood and hill, by the reed and willow,
By fire, sun and moon, harken now and hear us!
Come, Tom Bombadil, for our need is near us!
A character from Lord of the Rings. He's a hermit living in nature, and one of the more notable things omitted in the movies. Probably because apart from saving the Hobbits from some dangers early in their journey he doesn't play much of a role.
Memes don't really go over well on HN, especially not 20yo memes, and especially not non-obvious memes where you can easily be seen as being pointlessly flippant to the OP instead.
I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 144: To Naomi Mitchison. April 1954