Tom Bombadil

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Nonsense.

Repeating that insult doesn’t prove anything. It suggests you cannot argue coherently.

You are speaking in a vacuum, Mr. Hoover.

Or perhaps you simply don’t understand what I am posting. You admit that we know Tolkien answers many of my questions, but not in the chapter “The Council of Elrond”. My point is that in that chapter, where alone we find Tom discussed at some length, other questions that also might arise are not considered. It seems to me that you just don’t want to notice that. Instead you respond with an insulting name.

Thank you, Wiki Warrior. There is a validity in the silence in this case because the omniscient author purposefully withheld any such information, did not offer a history of the character, and therefore the other characters could not offer any detail.

Gandalf, as an example, does not offer any information about the currency of Gondor, or the Shire, or the political systems of eastern or southern countries. Does this mean that he must be conceived not to know anything about them, because he is not recorded to have said anything about them?

Your argument seems to only an argument from silence. If Gandalf did not say it, he did not know it. I completely reject this argument. Gandalf and Elrond must be conceived of knowing much beyond what they are shown in the story, and other tales, as knowing. Do you suppose that neither Gandalf nor Elrond, for example, did not know multiplication or division because they are not shown practising it?

But we do know much about "magic" (which is an inappropriate term as you must know) in Middle-earth.

But we have no details about how magic works, because Tolkien has no details. Similarly a time travel story may present a protagonist who is supposedly an expert in creating time machines without the author of the story actually knowing anything about it, and perhaps not even believing that time machines are possible. That Tolkien doesn’t get into technicalities about things beyond his ken doesn’t mean that the characters he writes must be similarly ignorant. The characters are fictional.

In fact, the majority of his references to Bombadil are outside of Middle-earth proper.

Prove it. List all Gandalf’s references to Bombadil and show how most are “outside of Middle-earth proper”.

Doesn't that vacuum hurt your head?

Sticks and stones may break my bones but using inapplicable names won’t hurt me and just makes you look foolish.

Tom was inserted into Lord of the Rings on the authors whim, as when Tolkien said he was "'integrating' Tom with the world of L.R. into which he was inserted." In fact, if you look at every description Tolkien gives of Bombadil, Tom is not described in terms of Middle-earth, but what he represents outside of the story to the author. And even Tolkien had to forego his disdain for allegory when he admitted that Tom "is an allegory or exemplar".

But in the story neither Gandalf or Elrond can say the things that Tolkien says as author about the origin of Tom Bombadil and what Tom represents. You seem to me to persist in confusing Bombadil as a creation of Tolkien and Bombadil as he appears in The Lord of the Rings.

I agree with much of what you post about Tom’s origins, but that is entirely irrelevant to a possible origin of Tom within Middle-earth. And once Tolkien has made Tom an important character within The Lord of the Rings, he is an important character within Middle-earth. Therefore he does, from an in-universe standpoint exist within Middle-earth, have an origin of some kind within Middle-earth and more data about his nature. For Tolkien, he remained in enigma, and I think Tolkien meant an unsolved enigma.

That doesn’t mean that Tolkien also supposed that Tom did not have a solution within Middle-earth, but wished for a solution which seemed right to him. Nerwen is quite right in indicating that Tolkien may have not known exactly what Tom was in Middle-earth, but that he does not represent Elrond or Gandalf as stating anything on the matter at the Council of Elrond, does not prove that Tolkien imagined that neither Gandalf or Elrond knew the answer, nor does it prove the opposite.

Your analysis of Elrond’s description of Tom does not convince me at all either that Elrond must be interpreted as knowing Tom’s origin or that Elrond must be interpreted as not knowing Tom’s origin. This is only your own speculation.