/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17701349]

Whats the point of Tom Bombadil?

[Anonymous No.17701350]

>>17701349

To make readers seethe because they're mad that something is what it is and doesn't fit into their idea on how a book should be written.

[Anonymous No.17701368]

>>17701349
To show the reader that there are forces older and more powerful than sauron and the ring

[Anonymous No.17701437]

>>17701349
A comfy digression.
>>17701368
Also this^

[Anonymous No.17701696]

fun ditties and whacky antics.

[Anonymous No.17701980]

what is the point of the elves? what is the point of farmer maggot? what is the point of Ugluk? what is the point of Gloin? What is the point of Eomer? What is the point of the sackville bagginses? Kill your self retard

[Anonymous No.17702482]

>>17701349
LotR is an allegory for WW2, and Bombadil is an allegory for the petite bourgiouse. Little masters over their boat dealerships, and realtorships. Happy little fools with their wife and white picket fence. They have immense power if nudged (well off whitd middle class) but will fall to fascism all the same.

[Anonymous No.17702514]

>>17701349
Bombadil is an allegory for social recluses. They are most powerful but only within their domain and being withdrawn from society and therefore not a part of it, they aren't under the influence of it, not even a president, or in this case an Evil Overlord can touch them. A real life example would be Diogenes who can tell the Kind to fuck off from his sun because they're are so far removed from each other so as to be untouchable.

[Anonymous No.17702583]

>>17701349
The books of Tolkien are similar to mythological stories from different cultures. Bombadil represents forgotten element of the myth

[Anonymous No.17702626]

>>17701349
He is basically Odin.

[Anonymous No.17702637]

>>17702482
I don't think so. Bombadil is Shown in a positive light.

[Anonymous No.17702709]

>>17702637
>positive light
He could single handily stop hell on earth if he just cared and moved his ass. Instead he's fine because in the long list of "First they came for X but I did nothing because I wasn't X" poem, he's the last one.

[Anonymous No.17702721]

>>17702709
>He could single handily stop hell on earth if he just cared and moved his ass
No, he can't. His only power comes from his domain and even then after Elrond suggested they hid the ring with him, Gandalf replied that even he will eventually succumb to Sauron's attacks.

[Anonymous No.17702739]

>>17701349
The point of bombadil is being a based super autist that is secluded in a forest giving two shits about the problems of neurotypicals.
He is basically what I want to be

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.17702843]

Tolkien studied a lot of folklore and mythology, something that happens often is that we lose important information or things just simply are never explained. These things become lost to time. These things can often still have important roles within myth but again we only see them in fragments.

Tolkien writes in his letters at one point that all myth more or less needs this type of enigma and it is Tom which is specifically designed to be this. So he represents broadly speaking the mysterious and long forgotten legends which exist just in vestige.

However my own interpretation is that he is innocence, childlike goodness and due to him being “the oldest” and existing before anything else in the world, he either is one of the first of those angelic beings which exist as one with the Song of the creator or as an allegory for outside parts of the world, such as Tolkien himself, the reader or the like. Even time as married to Mother Nature.

Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hop along! Fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!

Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!
Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.
Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight,
Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,
There my pretty lady is, River-woman's daughter,
Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water.
Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing
Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing?
Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o!
Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o!
Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away!
Tom's in a hurry now. Evening will follow day.
Tom's going home again water-lilies bringing.
Hey! Come derry dol! Can you hear me singing?

Hop along, my little friends, up the Withywindle!
Tom's going on ahead candles for to kindle.
Down west sinks the Sun: soon you will be groping.
When the night-shadows fall, then the door will open,
Out of the window-panes light will twinkle yellow.
Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow!
Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you.
Hey now! merry dol! We'll be waiting for you!

Hey! Come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties!
Hobbits! Ponies all! We are fond of parties.
Now let the fun begin! Let us sing together!

Now let the song begin! Let us sing together!
Of sun, stars, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,
Light on the budding leaf, dew on the feather,
Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather,
Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water:
Old Tom Bombadil and the River-daughter!

[Anonymous No.17702951]

>>17701349
I don't think Tolkien had any conscious scheme in mind when he made Tom B. He explicitly said he rejected allegory. You can still speculate about the feelings that impelled him though.

For what it's worth I think Tom represents the spirit of the countryside (specifically the English countryside). Something a bit deeper and more fundamental than Nature — more like the geography itself. Think about the qualities of the landscape:

* It's infinitely enduring and immutable. An enemy might invade your country and kill everyone but the land itself will remain.

* It can be benign, up to a point, if you approach it with humility (you can coax a living out of it, for example) but it doesn't really care about you. If the invaders manage to replace you, the land will go on being itself under their feet instead of yours, and it won't mind a bit.

Tom's just like this. He will help the Hobbits to an extent but after that they're on their own. As Gandalf says, it's not that he has power over the Ring; it's just that the Ring doesn't have power over him. You can't enlist the countryside into your army, but at least your enemy can't enlist it into *his* army either.

Remember the Elves called Tom "the Old one". The landscape was there a long time before the first people. (It was there a long time before the first dinosaurs.)

[Anonymous No.17703460]

>>17702482
>allegory
i want you faggots to die off as quickly as possible

[Anonymous No.17704641]

>>17702514
its not an allegory for social recluse, he just is a social recluse

[Anonymous No.17704652]

>>17701349
So Tolkien could jerk off once again to his poetry and singing while the reader has to endure it, I am sure he thought he was very good ad it

[Anonymous No.17704679]

To make the too long book even longer.
And no, I don't shy away from long novels, I love long novels. But LOTR just doesn't do it for me and consists mainly from descriptions of roads and lanes.

[Anonymous No.17704719]

>>17701980
Yuck!

[Anonymous No.17704861]

you find weird people during a long journey, simple as that

[Anonymous No.17704889]

>>17702951
>For what it's worth I think Tom represents the spirit of the countryside (specifically the English countryside
>the English countryside
Is this why the hobbits fell into a deep sleep during their first night at his house? Was it intense boredom?

[Anonymous No.17704916]

>>17704641
king post
>>17702514
right except for 'allegory'

[Anonymous No.17704942]

>>17701349
Fairly certain he's there because Christopher liked him.

[Anonymous No.17704991]

>>17701349
Bombadil is the divine among us. Watching things as they unfold.
>What if god was one of us.mp3

[Anonymous No.17704998]

tolkien created his world from various fragments and each writing about it was written with a different style, voice, and narrative perspective. while you can (and many do) lash all these together to create a single, ostensibly coherent structure with a single cosmology (eru creates x, x causes y, y create z, etc.) and straightforward eschatology, in fact if you dig a little deeper there is much about the setting that is unexplained and open-ended, like the ultimate nature and destiny of morgoth and other entities that rebel against the cosmic plan (if there is one), the nature and agency of eru, the interactions of beings with eru and other supra-worldly entities (like when gandalf goes back to the source - what actually happened?), etc.

all these things point to the fact that tolkien's cosmology is anything but certain, and when we recall that each book and story is written from a perspective (is it a dream-like myth, half-understood and half-venerated as simply "given" by the teller himself? a tidied-up historian's narrative? folk tale?) we realize tolkien himself didn't understand the nature or fate of the world he was providing a window onto as meta-narrator, much like we don't understand our own. middle earth is open-ended, just like our own world. tom bombadil represents something that isn't for or against the stated eschatology of the setting, something that remains even when the superstructure is laid out and harmonized and all the rough edges are smoothed over with too-easy pseudo-solutions like "well that was probably just another of morgoth's servants or something" or "well eru probably just helped gandalf idk he wanted the good guys to win." tom bombadil might represent a mythic fragment preserved in the text though no longer understood, because even the editors of the text (however sophisticated they may be philologically or text-critically) know that they can't smooth down EVERY rough edge, some things simply don't square with the structure and you then have to ask: do we trim this completely? is this our ancestors simply being confused or stupid? is this just whimsy? invariably in these situations (cf. any sacred text's tradition of redaction, from the vedas to the bible), the editors and cleaner-uppers of the narrative err on the side of caution, and the fragment is preserved even though it damages the integrity of the narrative.

this is frustrating at first blush because we, like the editors, want the narrative to tell a single story, a single teleology and eschatology. but if they had done that, their text would have been dated to the day they wrote it, and it would have obscured rather than explained the world, because the world exceeds any narrative.

tom bombadil is there to destabilize any eschatology, teleology, or dialectic emerging from eru and concluding with man. middle earth is so big it's bigger even than tolkien's ability to tell it

[Anonymous No.17705071]

>>17701349

[Anonymous No.17705087]

>>17702843
nice efforpost Frater

[Anonymous No.17705094]

>>17704652
he was

[Anonymous No.17705147]

>>17704998
great post, thanks fren

[Anonymous No.17705151]

>>17702482
Stupidest thing I read today. Cool.

[Anonymous No.17705219]

>>17701349
To me he represents Nietzsche’s final metamorphosis, the child. He creates his own meaning and doesn’t care for ideology, power, or acceptance. The ring has no power over him because he wants for nothing, he simply is. It has a lot of parallels with taoism and the concept of nirvana and so on.

[Anonymous No.17705749]

>>17701349
he painted the characters into a corner and need a way to extract them. Its a fun digression but i was suspicious of him, kept thinking he had some evil motives. He seemed to be too good.

[Anonymous No.17705762]

>>17701349
What if 'ol sharkey and tom bombadil got into a fight?

[Anonymous No.17705781]

>>17702709
>He could single handily stop hell on earth if he just cared and moved his ass
It is stated multiple times trough out the books he has little to not power at all outside his domain.

[Anonymous No.17706716]

Bump

[Anonymous No.17707159]

>>17701368
This. how do you not understand this.

[Anonymous No.17707327]

>>17701349
wtf has he been doing through the Ages?
Has he really been at the exact same place, at the creation of the Lamps; during the Years of the Trees; The 1st, 2nd and 3rd Ages?

[Anonymous No.17707907]

>>17704679
Fucking city dweller detected.

[Anonymous No.17707911]

He's Eru Iluvatar avatar.

[Anonymous No.17707948]

>>17702482
>tolkien
>allegory
retard

[Anonymous No.17709425]

>>17701349
Scope

[Anonymous No.17709573]

>>17702709
>He could single handily stop hell on earth if he just cared and moved his ass
he dont care of anything anon, why he has to care NOW and not before? when things were worst, or after sauron if ever things get worse again?
he dont care of anything, he is a natural force

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.17709580]

>>17701980
What is the point of bad shoops

[Anonymous No.17709874]

>>17704998
Very nice

[Anonymous No.17709907]

>>17704889
kek

[Anonymous No.17709914]

>>17709580
This is what you look like now.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.17709954]

>>17709914
If I make a googy face.
She’s seven years older than me, so of course I still look younger

[Anonymous No.17710133]

>>17709954
holy shit you are actually 48, are you kidding me? no wonder you obsessively tripfag

[Anonymous No.17710173]

>>17704998
>>17702951
>>17702843
Tolkien invented Tombombadil in the 1920s or so, long before he thought about adding him to the LotR cosmos. Tombombadil was meant to be the merry ghost of Oxfordshire. He later used the figure of Tom to write funny songs.

[Anonymous No.17710215]

Tolkien liked forests and inventing poems

Bombadil=Tolkien
Goldberry=Edith