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To my thinking, being playful and singsong does not preclude wisdom.
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Agreed. No question Bombadil was wise. But Wisdom does not imply that one is the only inhabitant of Arda that has been/is personally immune to the marring of Arda, this is lcearly a whole other 'category of Being'.
I raised the question based on that, that for Tolkien to whom music's place in the Legendarium was essential if not central, it seems strange that the embodiment of Ea would be so consistently simple and childlike in expression seemingly for millenia! It certainly can be argued quite strongly from the '...Exept you become as little children, you shall in way inherent the Kingdom of the Heavens', and I am not as adverse to doing so as some might be, but it still leaves me unsatisfied as to the musical connection - which I admit - may well just be prejudice on my part.
However Tolkien's many descriptions of Ainurian, Elvish, Dwarvish and Dunedainian music lead me to have slightly higher expectations. I would expect that Tom [and as I mentioned in the last post he may well have] had a larger 'repertoire' if you will.
More representative of the whole of Ea.
Too me his sort of musical parochialism it seems the only [possible] incongruity in an other wise near perfect theory.
As for the Rivendell Elves, as I have postd elsewhere, we see them making music at 2 different levels;
*The feast of the victory of the 'battle' Ford of Bruinien.
*when the Dwarves first arrive [presumably very few if any Dwarves had been to Imladris in an extremely long time, if Durin's Folk do not know the way, no of the other more distant clans are likely to] in Rivendell the Elves have already discerned their purpose and are I think mocking them, and using sill music and rhymes to do it with.
In no other place do we hear of or see such jesting from Elves, in general for them music was a 'high art' and while I do not doubt they had their more light-hearted material it was clearly not the sole or primary content of their repertoire.
So in general music making was almost always very taken seriously by all of the Children of Eru and of Aule and Yavanna, not to mention the musics of the Ainur themselves, which would undoubtedly be direct expressions of their being and varrying 'elemental' natures. The hobbits and [oddly enough] the misty mntn Goblins seem to be the primary purveyors along with Bombadil of the the 'lighthearted'[if lighthearted and wicked in the case of the goblins] sort of thing.
If we are seeing Tom likewise express his essence through song, it truly to my mind takes his paradoxical strangeness and uniqueness to new heights and depths.
So I think even after a slightly closer analysis only yeilds forth the same 2 possibilities:
1 your childlike/innocence idea
2 we are only seeing a small slice of the 'music' of Bombadil when the Hobbitss are there. He may have been in 'Hobbit-mode' so to speak. I rather doubt this but we have only a few stray mentions in the LotR along with the four Hobbits encounter and the Shire-coloured 'Adventures' which only re-inforce the tale of the 4 hobbits.
a third possibility [from outside the Legendarium ] is that Tolkien created Bombadil first [which is attested to] and then after landing in the stories as the shire's closest neighbor, Tolkien was content to leave all of his oddness completely intact and not 'fully integrate' it cosmologically (which seems the case from the Letters, that he resisited analysis of TB), or musically.
What we do have though in the Master is a breath of extremely fresh air, or better what one of my favorite musicians, Bill Bruford might call 'the sound of suprise'.
[ August 15, 2003: Message edited by: lindil ]