Serving animals in HOBBIT film

[Sir Kohran]

I admit, what I said was very mean and not nice at all, and I deserve to be reprimanded for it,

Well thank you for having the decency to apologise.

I have been insulted consistently by StW and once or twice by you

I haven't tried to personally insult you and would never want to do that to any member. My apologies if anything I've said has come across as rude.

Just because some people think that Bombadil is a waste of paper and time doesn't mean that everyone has to agree and it doesn't mean that you're right about what you think about him.

I don't think he's a waste of paper and time, I just don't think he belongs in LOTR.

Nor did I say everyone had to agree. I just took offense at your implication that I was 'less intelligent' for not 'loving' Bombadil.

I find (& I'm generalising here) that those who don't like the OMW/TB/Barrow Downs episode don't like Tolkien's constant 'digressions' into M-e history, & also tend to skip the poems as unnecessary too (& all that description of landscape!- Why didn't Tolkien just tell the story?- a decent editor could have trimmed the whole thing down to about 250 pages & it would have been much better for it, etc, etc.).

Well I don't know about everybody else but I've always liked Tolkien's 'digressions', particularly when it's the Hobbits hearing about it; I always grin when I read about Sam's comments on Beren.

The poetry of Tolkien is fantastic. What I like about it is that it's the complete opposite of the usual text - the book describes lots of things in great detail (obviously because they're happening in the 'present' of the story) whereas the poetry is non-specific - the characters and events and places are described vaguely, allowing the reader to visualise these ideas in their head, and it gives off this wonderful dreamy feel.

Admittedly I sometimes find the descriptions of landscape a little tedious, but I think that's only because I've read it so much.

If the Shire is a depiction of rural England around the time of (Queen Victoria's) Diamond Jubilee, as Tolkien stated, the Old Forest/Downs episode is a perfect depiction of an older, wilder England.

I'm aware of what Tom represents - he's a sort of throwback to the old days when people genuinely believed in fairies and spirits and pixies in the forests and mountains, and in this regard he succeeds. I just don't think he fits in very well with the story at hand. With the departure from the Shire and the entry into the big, unknown world with the rumour of the Black Riders following them, this is a period of rising tension for the Hobbits - and yet suddenly they're thrown into a colourful, strange, fairy tale forest governed by a bumbling, carefree man in yellow boots. The whole sequence breaks the 'feel' of the story at that point for me.

However, I do like the evolution of the threats - we begin with the dangerous yet somewhat laughable Old Man Willow and end with the creeping darkness of the Wights.

Bombadil is an incarnation of Iluvatar, the creator.

Where was this stated? I thought Bombadil was supposed to be an enigma. At the very least the chapter never states this - how many readers, when discovering this skipping man in yellow boots, thought 'this must be an incarnation of M-E's god'?

And narratively, those three chapters with TB form a valuable bridge between the familiarity of The Shire to the more perilous realms; the Old Forest is a foreshadowing of Fangorn, the Barrow Downs of the Paths of the Dead or Shelob's Lair.

Interesting point, and ironic in that during TTT movie, Treebeard in Fangorn actually used some of Bombadil's words (mostly the reassurance against the night segment).