[Kalimac]

Omitting - I'd say Tom Bombadil, no question, if only because it's one of the few omissions (other than a few scenery descriptions) which wouldn't have a serious ripple-effect on the rest of the book. Tom is a great character in himself, and the scenes with him are definitely entertaining, but if you make a clean lift of him, and of the Old Forest episode with Old Man Willow, I honestly don't think you lost much out of the story. It doesn't really contribute to the characters' development in any way (except to show how helpless they are in the beginning, but to be honest Weathertop and the scenes where they meet with the Black Riders on the road and in Bree are enough to do that); Tom basically saves them from a side-trip gone sour and then disappears. Gandalf makes a few one-sentence references to him at the Council of Elrond, and at the end when he says he's going to have a long talk with Bombadil, but these could be cut painlessly.

Not that I'm saying they SHOULD be, of course [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]. Just that if anything had to be edited out, that would be my choice.