[Bêthberry]

What an incredible thread and so many very thoughtful and considered responses to lmp's hypothesis.

I think Lalwendë's observation that the Trickster figure is more than is contained in Tolstoy's list of attributes is well-taken, but still the attributes provide something to consider. I am a bit leary about some of the comments in the Tolstoy quotations, about primitive cultures and such, and the idea that the Trickster was most fully characterised in North American Amerind cultures. There are plenty of trickster figures in African culture, the Anansi or spider god in particular. It might be helpful to read over some the tales, including Loki tales, to help decide the 'fit' for Bombadil.

But I would like to return to one of the earlier comments which I think Garen Lilorien first suggested, that Bombadil is a cleaned up character.

I would not have first thought of Bombadil as a Trickster figure in fact because he is so 'cleaned up', yet thinking of this mythological archetype helps me understand why Tolkien stubbornly included Tom in LotR and defended him as an enigma.

If the moral universe of LotR is one where, as Tolkien suggested in one of his letters ( I am relying on memory here), the Christian mythology was absorbed into the symbolism of the legendarium, then an irrational character could not have god-like attributes. What is that famous line, that LotR is "consciously so [Christian] in the revision? At the very least, I do not read Eru as being irrational, nor the universe of LotR to be happenstance and chaotic. Even mistakes, errors of judgement, terrible events, become fortuitous at least. This is the aspect of eucatastrophe which Tolkien discusses in "On Fairy Stories."

Given a philosophical universe which is not haphazard, how could Tolkien have employed the Trickster god in his full nature as mischievous, malevolent, primordial? It seems to me that something had to change. Thus, we have a Bombadil who is this unusual, wily, unpredictable in some ways, but who is not part of the panoply of characters who clearly belong to the wrong side. Tom is, after all, master, as has been argued elsewhere, of himself. Thus, he is an expurgated Trickster of sorts.

Is this fair to say?