[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by jallanite

Quite true, but I have never claimed otherwise. So what is your point?

I am uncertain if you are being purposefully inscrutable or just plain dense; I will, however, give you the benefit of the doubt and write off the comment as simply obscurant. You made the indefensible claim that both Gandalf and Elrond knew of Tom Bombadil's origins without question. You then rabbit on about currency and political systems that they must have been aware of, although not specifically stated in the book. I merely pointed out that they indeed do not know everything, and in fact are unaware of some crucial points that impinge far more on the story than Bombadil's origin.

Originally Posted by jallanite

Then you admit that Tom is in the story, as written by Tolkien. That Tom had an origin, in part outside, is in itself no more important than that Lewis Carroll’s Alice was based on a real person, Alice Liddell, that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was partially based on Dr. Joseph Bell, a brilliant surgeon and lecturer at Edinburgh University Medical School, that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn’s father is based on Jimmy Finn, a notorious drunk in Hannibal Missouri, that Winnie-the-Pooh was derived from the toy bear of the author’s son, Christopher Robin Milne, and so forth. Nor is it any less important.

Your analogies are completely off base, and absurd for the most part. Even in the case of Winnie-the-Pooh where the origin of the character was a doll, Bombadil was already quite a fully-fleshed character with the same peculiar idiom, the same geographical locus and the same cast of cohorts in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil:

Old Tom Bombadil was a merry fellow;
bright blue his jacket was and his boots were yellow

Per Tolkien, Bombadil was already "invented", and he simply lifted the persona wholesale and plopped him in LotR. Unlike your compromised comparisons, Bombadil was not based on someone or something else. "He is".

Originally Posted by jallanite

I quite agree with Tolkien’s statement and have never posted anything that disagreed with it. I posted that Tom “is an important character within Middle-earth”, and did not post anything about Tom’s importance or unimportance to the narrative. What us your problem with what I actually posted? Misquoting me does not support your argument.

You were not misquoted. What you have is a comprehension problem. You somehow want to divorce "Middle-earth" from the "narrative", the story itself and how Tolkien chose to arrange it. The statement Tom “is an important character within Middle-earth” is debatable, but that he was unimportant to the story as a narrative is not.

Originally Posted by jallanite

So what? A similar statement goes with every character invented by any author, whether an enigma or not.

No, Tom as an intentional enigma is not similar to every other character in the book. Every other character in the book has an origin and history. There are complete genealogies of many characters. There is a whole creation mythos wherein Tom does not fit. I can reply "so what" to most of your argument.

Originally Posted by jallanite

Prove it. I don’t know that this is patently impossible in Middle-earth. I do know that there is no indication of it in the original poem.

Again, you want to divorce the narrative, and now the original poem (which originally had nothing to do with Middle-earth), from the Ainulindalë. How about you prove Bombadil's origin within the constraints of Arda. I posit you cannot.

Originally Posted by jallanite

Prove it. I do not understand what you are trying to post.

Then stop replying with arguments when you can't comprehend what is being said.

Originally Posted by jallanite

You stated earlier:
I answered by pointing out many things not related by Elrond and Gandalf, and received blame from you for pointing such things out. You seemingly cannot understand anything I post which disagrees with you. Elrond and Gandalf are not verbose in extremis. I see that you would like to believe this, because it provides a lack of reason why they do not then tell Bombadil’s origin. But your statement is false.

I stated an opinion that Gandalf and Elrond are verbose based on the rambling narratives at the Council of Elrond. They do like to hear themselves talk, and they do like to disembogue a font of their knowledge. Elrond talks for hours regarding the Ring, its history, the history of Numenor, and details his own origin, "even as Elrond himself set it down in his books of lore". "Books of lore" -- a prolific writer of histories, and yet short shrift given to the enigma Bombadil. Just because that opinion does not jibe with your pompous pronouncements does not mean it is false.

Originally Posted by jallanite

You similarly try to show that Elrond calling Bombadil a strange creature must be false, as I understand your discussion, and you state that Bombadil is unsure of this creature’s past, which is merely your own speculation, and so proves nothing.

Elrond does not know Bombadil's origin, and is unsure if said Bombadil is even the same being as the one he knew of when he traveled in the West. It is not speculative but based on Elrond's own words:

But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then he was older than old. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless.

Elrond is unsure if Bombadil is even the same as the being he knew previously. "older than old" denotes a lack of a set starting point and no parameter at all, historically-speaking. The term "fatherless" is indeed indicative of not knowing an origin. Add in the fact Elrond refers to Bombadil as a "strange creature", again indicative of not being able to categorize a being with any specifics, shows beyond speculation that Elrond does not know what the hell a Bombadil is. Unless, of course, you have some sort of abstraction you'd like to type out over several dull paragraphs that expounds on nothing.

This is not an "argument of silence" as you'd like to quote from your pals at Wiki. This is the spoken word of Elrond.