I think there are (and always have been) a lot of readers of LotR who don't like Bombadil. If you're in it for the epic battle scenes and the dungeon crawl and the nighttime fight with wolves and so on, then the time with Bombadil grates.
I, myself, like him just fine. But it is true that a lot of people who liked the more "swords and sorcery" aspects of LotR, did not like Bombadil. And that's a goodly portion of the people who read the books (tho' by no means all).
Bombadil was the remnants of a children's story left in an adult book. That's why he's a weird character, doesn't really fit anything and is quickly forgotten. He should have been edited out.
Well, you can count myself and my 10yo son in on the Tom Bombadil fan club members, for sure (my son knows from listening to the audiobook version).
As far as shortcomings go, I feel that the movie's bastardization of Faramir was the worst travesty because his honor in the face of having the ring in his grasp is one of my favorite parts of the books. Making him drag the ring-bearer back to the city ensured that I will never watch the movies again.
As well, that crap with Aragorn getting lost and then fighting back by himself was an utter travesty, and the crap with his fiance was crap, too (except for where they subbed her in for Glorfindel in the race to Rivendell), as much as I understand that they wanted a woman to play a more prominent role. That said, Eowyn's story should have been enough and at least they didn't mangle her.
But, yeah, it would've been really cool to have a Patrick Stewart Tom Bombadil.
All in all, better to make an existing king a queen, or make an existing knight a lady (but with otherwise same plot and dialogue), if you feel it is necessary, than to take one of most carefully researched and written novels in history and just rewrite it. Or make a spin off story that focuses on the role of some overlooked women. Or better, a satire or a separate work that alludes to LotR as commentary.
I'm a little biased towards the movies because they were what I experienced first, but I respect the criticisms of them.
That said, I personally feel their treatment of Aragorn was the best liberty they took. He felt fairly one-dimensional in the books; his whole character was about his destiny to be king and he reminded everyone he met. In the movie he doesn't want power; he struggles between his fear of it and his desire to help the world. This struggle over the kingship mirrors the struggle over the ring (which both he and Gandalf face, among others) and makes him much more compelling as a character. I also liked the Arwen subplot; she really wasn't a character at all in the books. I thought their relationship was powerful and expanded upon his being pulled between the realms of elves and men (of which his Numenorean heritage was a microcosm).
That's the thing with deep goodness: it is always the same. It is always simple, humble, powerful, long-suffering and generally unappreciated. The vast masses of humanity just rarely give a crap, as evidenced by the populace's fascination with tribes such as the Kardashians and the ascendancy of our current US president.
I don't remember where I heard it, but it was many years ago, that the "bad guys" can come in some many varieties, have so many different kinds of character defects and obsessions and whatnot, but that the true hero is always the same kind of boring because goodness itself is not flashy. That is why Hollywood always portrays their heroes with some kind of serious character defect, unless it just writes stories with only an anti-hero of some kind.
One must never forget that Tolkien lived through WWI whose horror and tragedy gave him a firm grasp of the complex realities of both good and evil. The resulting simplicity is why LoTR has stood the test of time as a truly epic story.
The innocent goodness you're talking about is embodied in the hobbits (and, indeed, in Tom Bombadil). But it tends to be driven out by the acquisition of power, like oil from water. Holding both goodness and the power to act on goodness within oneself at the same time is incredibly difficult and pretty much impossible to do perfectly. It takes great strength and constant struggle, which is what Aragorn in the movies represents.
History has shown us that any powerful figure whose sense of inner direction comes without struggle or conflict is probably incredibly evil, even (especially) if they don't see themselves that way.
The perfection of humanity is very rare but not only possible, but definitely attainable. It takes a lifetime of effort, of questioning one's own motives and past actions and one's societal traditions through the lens of love and brutal honesty. Love is defined as selfless service to others without regard for recompense except for the inner peace and happiness that results; i.e. loving behavior is the opposite of selfishness. It is our political and industry leaders' selfish pursuit of power and wealth at the expense of others that has dominated the world since time immemorial and is the driving force behind why things are so miserable for the vast majority of human beings on Earth today (and getting worse). Only when we choose "public servants" to be our leaders will the sh*t stop rolling downhill.
Everyone who says that the perfection of the human being is impossible have never tried, thus they are acting just as the contemporaries of Boltzman and Einstein who derided their advanced understandings of the universe. The reality is that most people never try to better themselves, especially if the techniques suggested stray beyond their preconceived notions of the nature of the universe and themselves. As well, most people are caught up in their desires for pleasure and material wealth and generally have no concern for those outside of their social circle, be it based upon ethnicity, form of religion, class, sexual orientation or gender identity.
That the incremental perfection of each human being is possible is provable simply by noticing that every choice we make can be better chosen each day, by conscious thought and honest self-reflection on our past deeds combined with earnest study. We must consciously shift our societies' dynamics from destructive competitiveness to constructive cooperation, from selfishness to selflessness, from callous indifference to caring compassion. Love is the essence of humanity, without such agape (service-based love for all other human beings) we are left as the unenlightened animals we all begin as. Only we human beings have the ability to consciously rise above our foibles.
It is also our nature to require an inward connection with our Creator to effect our transformation from selfishness to selflessness. There is a science of spirituality that is beyond any form of religion but most modern scientists deny such science for lack of external evidence. The evidence must be perceived within oneself, just as Boltzman and Einstein's contemporaries needed to read the papers and understand the processes that they were describing. The difference is that denying the spiritual path indeed makes it not exist for that person, for each person must embark on that endeavor themself before being able to feel its reality. Those outside of that circle of understanding must have an open mind and heart to enter that circle or else they will never experience it and that is just another aspect of our human reality: we are free to choose to remain ignorant of it, but we all know what history says about Boltzman and Einstein's deniers.
I found the Tom Bombadil part tedious and irrelevant to the rest of the book. I don't love him. I have a friend who can't stand him - "bloody irritating character and songs" is the phrase i have recorded.
I liked LotR and Hobbit books very much and would count myself as a fan. I did not really like the movies but removing Tom Bombadil was one of the better decisions they made when making the movies. If anything, I think they did not cut enough out.
I liked the passage as a curiosity because of the (English) language, but story-wise I think it was pretty weak and did not bring much overall.
I think he represents an interesting whiff of the much older, deeper beings in the world which are only fully covered in The Silmarillion. The fact that he's such a being and also simple and light-spirited speaks to the underlying purity of goodness in the world that is the underlying theme of The Lord of the Rings, and I think that's beautiful.
I do sympathize with the decision to cut him from the movies; his chapter was a large and neatly isolated part of the story, and the movies were strapped for screen time as it was. But it was still a loss.
I dont think i have ever met anyone who thought that was the thing the films fucked up. I can totally understand that the scenes are self contained, and length was an issue.
I was far more aggravated by replacing Glorfindel with Arwen, as a first example.
Because Arwen could not have ridden against the 9, at all. They could have replaced Glorfindel or removed him, i understand, but the powers he had came from having lived over the sea. Arwen was born in Middle Earth and simply could not do what was attributed to her in the films. (It is the earliest lore incompatible change that springs to mind)
If there was ever a clickbait title, this is it. It should be "Tom Bombadil's Terrible Secret" or "Wild Speculations about Tom Bombadil" or "Let's Geek Out About Tom Bombadil" or something like that.
(NOTE: At the time of this writing, the title is "The Terrible Secret".)
An essay is allowed to have an intriguing title. The problem is on aggregators like HN for ripping titles our of context and not providing any context but domain name.
Really, Tom is old... older than the elves, and he (like the willow and the huron) are tired of having these whipper-snappers come by and ask them to save them from danger and do their -chores- adventures for them. Old men just wanna have fun... and the gold ring ain't their bag (or problem).
Merry and Frodo are lucky they remember their time with him any more than Gildor or Farmer Maggot (or they remember him differently). In the old days we didn't expect everyone to be nice or have transparent understandable motives... and we walked up Mt Doom both ways.
There are several inaccuracies and inconsistencies in this.
- Elrond knew of Tom Bombadil.
- Tom Bombadil had heard about Frodo's journey from both elves and hobbits. I.e. He was known to and communicated with both.
- Was there not a hobbit song about him?
As to why the hobbits had little to do with Tom Bombadil...
- A character of his power could easily have chosen to wipe the hobbits memories. Maybe this was his usual approach to hobbit intruders?
- Another possibility it that given Hobbits extreme social taboo about adventures and their fetish for respectability it is quite possible that many hobbits had interacted with Tom Bombadil but few talked about it (e.g. Farmer Maggot).
Or it could be that he is unremarkable in most of his appearances. As the article states, he is presented as the epitome of hobbithood: a jolly old man who loves song and drink and rarely leaves home, who just so happens to live near a dangerous place.
If Gildor and Farmer Maggot met him, they would have found him entirely unremarkable: just another hobbit with a strange taste in homesteading.
the text does not say otherwise. But the text is correct that Elrond does not seem to have clear memories of him. From LOTR itself:
> [Elrond said,]‘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.
He is not even sure it is the same person that the hobbits are referring to.
Tangent: where/how can I obtain the animated 1977 version of The Hobbit? I had it on vinyl, and remember watching the film. YouTube's got a random selection of scenes but not (AFAICT) the whole thing.
Why would you assume that? I think he's just looking for a physical copy. Given what sibling comment says, I assume it was published on DVD at some point.
Pffft, apart from several just wrong assertions about who knew who, and who likes what, I always assumed Tom Bomadil was just some archetype of Tolkien himself. Both fundamental to the world he built and completely apart from it.
Wow, I read this only a few days ago, on some kind of Tom Bombadil kick, which I think might have been triggered by a Bombadil-related question in the StackExchange sidebar.
It's definitely best that Tom was left unexplained. We humans (or maybe just me personally) love being mystified by unexplained, other-worldly powers and beings.
Tom is presented as someone both powerful enough to take the ring and protect it, but also someone who'd forget about it and lose it in a swamp. He's not playing by the rules that Tolkien established for the rest of the characters in the books.
He could have power beyond comprehension, or zero power, because Tolkien just didn't know what to do with him. But it's up to the reader to make that decision.
Is he One Punch Man, or is he really just a nobody?
From Elrond's comments on him at the Council, he's basically an Earth Elemental (which would make Goldberry a Water Elemental, I suppose), a personification of the element of earth. But, I agree that it's better that JRRT left it with room for some mystery.
Bombadil was the name of a doll in Tolkien's home. That's why he was the "oldest", because the name predates the book itself. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Bombadil
I always assumed that Tom Bombadil was a kind of ur-hobbit; a jolly being largely immune to the hostile magic swirling around him and capable of opposing it at points but temperamentally disinclined to truly rule.
If you actually want to understand why Tom Bombadil is in the story, read Christopher Tolkien series on the creation of the Lord of the Rings.
It was originally envisioned as a sequel to the Hobbit with a slightly more grown up audience. When JRR wrote it, he hadn't even settled on Sauron as the bad guy. He vaguely thought the bad guy would be Treebeard! He got Frodo and co. all the way to Rivendell before he connected his other story (the Silmarillion) to the LOR story.
Bombadil was left in, in my mind, because he had to explain how four hapless hobbits could throw the black riders off the trail and still escape from the forest. And he didn't really have any editorial constraints until the movies came along.
Sure, you can invent some just-so-story to explain him but the truth is that the tale evolved in the decades it took to write and so it has vestigial parts.
No way, Bombadil is great. He’a immune to the powers of the one ring [1]. He’d rather sing about badgers than conquer the world. He’s a reminder of weird and awesome and maybe a little scary powers in the universe that we may never understand.
Bombadil’s scene is one of my favorites alongside the one where Frodo almost gives the ring to Galadriel but she resists [2]. Another meditation on power.
Interesting, because I remember when I first read Fellowship aged 11 or 12 I was absolutely sure that Bombadil would turn out to be a bad one, beguiling and leading the Hobbits to their doom, for much the reasons outlined by the author.
I was pretty sure when they went to be in his conttage that night, they wouldn't be waking up to a happy morning. I didn;t really trust him until they got to Bree.
64 comments
[ 63.5 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIn what universe? Every Tolkien fan I know, including myself, loves Tom Bombadil and sees his omission from the movies as their biggest shortcoming.
I, myself, like him just fine. But it is true that a lot of people who liked the more "swords and sorcery" aspects of LotR, did not like Bombadil. And that's a goodly portion of the people who read the books (tho' by no means all).
I feel sorry for people with so little capacity for whimsy and magic
If that's what you are looking for LotR might be one of the worst fantasy books one could pick.
As far as shortcomings go, I feel that the movie's bastardization of Faramir was the worst travesty because his honor in the face of having the ring in his grasp is one of my favorite parts of the books. Making him drag the ring-bearer back to the city ensured that I will never watch the movies again.
As well, that crap with Aragorn getting lost and then fighting back by himself was an utter travesty, and the crap with his fiance was crap, too (except for where they subbed her in for Glorfindel in the race to Rivendell), as much as I understand that they wanted a woman to play a more prominent role. That said, Eowyn's story should have been enough and at least they didn't mangle her.
But, yeah, it would've been really cool to have a Patrick Stewart Tom Bombadil.
That said, I personally feel their treatment of Aragorn was the best liberty they took. He felt fairly one-dimensional in the books; his whole character was about his destiny to be king and he reminded everyone he met. In the movie he doesn't want power; he struggles between his fear of it and his desire to help the world. This struggle over the kingship mirrors the struggle over the ring (which both he and Gandalf face, among others) and makes him much more compelling as a character. I also liked the Arwen subplot; she really wasn't a character at all in the books. I thought their relationship was powerful and expanded upon his being pulled between the realms of elves and men (of which his Numenorean heritage was a microcosm).
I don't remember where I heard it, but it was many years ago, that the "bad guys" can come in some many varieties, have so many different kinds of character defects and obsessions and whatnot, but that the true hero is always the same kind of boring because goodness itself is not flashy. That is why Hollywood always portrays their heroes with some kind of serious character defect, unless it just writes stories with only an anti-hero of some kind.
One must never forget that Tolkien lived through WWI whose horror and tragedy gave him a firm grasp of the complex realities of both good and evil. The resulting simplicity is why LoTR has stood the test of time as a truly epic story.
History has shown us that any powerful figure whose sense of inner direction comes without struggle or conflict is probably incredibly evil, even (especially) if they don't see themselves that way.
Everyone who says that the perfection of the human being is impossible have never tried, thus they are acting just as the contemporaries of Boltzman and Einstein who derided their advanced understandings of the universe. The reality is that most people never try to better themselves, especially if the techniques suggested stray beyond their preconceived notions of the nature of the universe and themselves. As well, most people are caught up in their desires for pleasure and material wealth and generally have no concern for those outside of their social circle, be it based upon ethnicity, form of religion, class, sexual orientation or gender identity.
That the incremental perfection of each human being is possible is provable simply by noticing that every choice we make can be better chosen each day, by conscious thought and honest self-reflection on our past deeds combined with earnest study. We must consciously shift our societies' dynamics from destructive competitiveness to constructive cooperation, from selfishness to selflessness, from callous indifference to caring compassion. Love is the essence of humanity, without such agape (service-based love for all other human beings) we are left as the unenlightened animals we all begin as. Only we human beings have the ability to consciously rise above our foibles.
It is also our nature to require an inward connection with our Creator to effect our transformation from selfishness to selflessness. There is a science of spirituality that is beyond any form of religion but most modern scientists deny such science for lack of external evidence. The evidence must be perceived within oneself, just as Boltzman and Einstein's contemporaries needed to read the papers and understand the processes that they were describing. The difference is that denying the spiritual path indeed makes it not exist for that person, for each person must embark on that endeavor themself before being able to feel its reality. Those outside of that circle of understanding must have an open mind and heart to enter that circle or else they will never experience it and that is just another aspect of our human reality: we are free to choose to remain ignorant of it, but we all know what history says about Boltzman and Einstein's deniers.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
I liked the passage as a curiosity because of the (English) language, but story-wise I think it was pretty weak and did not bring much overall.
I do sympathize with the decision to cut him from the movies; his chapter was a large and neatly isolated part of the story, and the movies were strapped for screen time as it was. But it was still a loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings
BOTR: Tim Benzedrine
Allusion: Benzedrine, a stimulant drug popular during the 1950s, and a reference to Timothy Leary.
LOTR: Tom Bombadil
BOTR: Hashberry, wife of Tim Benzedrine
Allusion: "Hashbury", the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, or hash(ish)-berry.
LOTR: Goldberry
I have assumed Gene is Eugene McCarthy, US Senator from Minnesota and candidate for president.
I still think of the two hobbits as Moxie and Pepsi. And the Battle of Minestroni.
I was far more aggravated by replacing Glorfindel with Arwen, as a first example.
There were a lot of irritations, but the only really unforgiveable fuckup for me was the complete dog's breakfast they made of the Pelennor Fields.
(NOTE: At the time of this writing, the title is "The Terrible Secret".)
And I always thought Tom Bombadil was the Green Man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Man
Really, Tom is old... older than the elves, and he (like the willow and the huron) are tired of having these whipper-snappers come by and ask them to save them from danger and do their -chores- adventures for them. Old men just wanna have fun... and the gold ring ain't their bag (or problem).
Merry and Frodo are lucky they remember their time with him any more than Gildor or Farmer Maggot (or they remember him differently). In the old days we didn't expect everyone to be nice or have transparent understandable motives... and we walked up Mt Doom both ways.
- Elrond knew of Tom Bombadil.
- Tom Bombadil had heard about Frodo's journey from both elves and hobbits. I.e. He was known to and communicated with both.
- Was there not a hobbit song about him?
As to why the hobbits had little to do with Tom Bombadil...
- A character of his power could easily have chosen to wipe the hobbits memories. Maybe this was his usual approach to hobbit intruders?
- Another possibility it that given Hobbits extreme social taboo about adventures and their fetish for respectability it is quite possible that many hobbits had interacted with Tom Bombadil but few talked about it (e.g. Farmer Maggot).
If Gildor and Farmer Maggot met him, they would have found him entirely unremarkable: just another hobbit with a strange taste in homesteading.
the text does not say otherwise. But the text is correct that Elrond does not seem to have clear memories of him. From LOTR itself:
> [Elrond said,]‘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.
He is not even sure it is the same person that the hobbits are referring to.
The memeworld works in mysyerious ways.
Tom is presented as someone both powerful enough to take the ring and protect it, but also someone who'd forget about it and lose it in a swamp. He's not playing by the rules that Tolkien established for the rest of the characters in the books.
He could have power beyond comprehension, or zero power, because Tolkien just didn't know what to do with him. But it's up to the reader to make that decision.
Is he One Punch Man, or is he really just a nobody?
It was originally envisioned as a sequel to the Hobbit with a slightly more grown up audience. When JRR wrote it, he hadn't even settled on Sauron as the bad guy. He vaguely thought the bad guy would be Treebeard! He got Frodo and co. all the way to Rivendell before he connected his other story (the Silmarillion) to the LOR story.
Bombadil was left in, in my mind, because he had to explain how four hapless hobbits could throw the black riders off the trail and still escape from the forest. And he didn't really have any editorial constraints until the movies came along.
Sure, you can invent some just-so-story to explain him but the truth is that the tale evolved in the decades it took to write and so it has vestigial parts.
Bombadil’s scene is one of my favorites alongside the one where Frodo almost gives the ring to Galadriel but she resists [2]. Another meditation on power.
[1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/103559/did-the-rin... [2] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/86701/when-frodo-o...
I was pretty sure when they went to be in his conttage that night, they wouldn't be waking up to a happy morning. I didn;t really trust him until they got to Bree.
But I’d never thought of him as a conservationist and rescuer of animals (and flora) rejected by polite society! A Tolkeinish John Muir. How lovely!
That's a bit too Manichaean for me.