Tom Bombadil

[radagastly]

Originally posted by Mithalwen:

I certainly don't think he is "retarded" (which you should be aware is considered an offensive term in the UK though I understand it isn't so in the US)... just too different.

Actually, it is also generally considered offensive and "politically incorrect" here in the U.S.

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by radagastly

Originally posted by Mithalwen:

Actually, it is also generally considered offensive and "politically incorrect" here in the U.S.

I stand corrected - it was in use when I was there but it is quite a long time ago.

[radagastly]

Originally posted by Mithalwen:

I stand corrected - it was in use when I was there but it is quite a long time ago.

It is a fairly recent thing.

I believe that much of Tom Bombadil's wacky personality was already established when Tolkien wrote "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil." I don't have "Letters," so I can't really comment on Tolkien's explanation, but I believe he does say something about the hobbits "needing an adventure" before they reached Bree, or something like that. He chose to insert Bombadil at this point as an enigma, something unexplained. He appears in the story at a point where, I believe, some "strangeness" is needed to underscore the transition from the relatively mundane world of the nice, safe Shire into the wider, more dangerous and unpredictable world of All Middle-Earth.

As for Tom being asked to take the Ring to keep it safe, Gandalf's opinion was probably right. It certainly would have made for a very different story if the Council of Elrond had chosen this as a course of action.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by radagastly

I believe he does say something about the hobbits "needing an adventure" before they reached Bree, or something like that. He chose to insert Bombadil at this point as an enigma, something unexplained. He appears in the story at a point where, I believe, some "strangeness" is needed to underscore the transition from the relatively mundane world of the nice, safe Shire into the wider, more dangerous and unpredictable world of All Middle-Earth.

I find this explanation quite a good one. And also, any good literature leaves somethings unexplained - how boring it would be if you could explain everything?

On a second note - and I'm not sure how seriously I'm giving this one - let's think about the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle. The prof was sure well educated with the classics and as a catholic he sure was knowledgeable of the scholastic battles of the Middle-Ages on the nature of God and the question of his perfection...

Now from the tradition of the Greeks we have the idea that a perfect being would probably only concentrate on her/him/itself as a perfect being, as everything else to him (I'll take the common nominator here only for convenience's sake) would be just boringly imperfect and not worth of his time or energy. The argument goes something like this: if some one being is perfect, the imperfections are not interesting as the perfection it can grasp is so overwhelming.

We of today's world might disagree with the premises, but I think Tolkien was still raised into that old world and there the argument could have made sense to some people (his educators?) - while his toying with it might already show that it was not self-evident to him any more, or that he even wished to rebel against that idea by introducing Tom?

So Tom Bombadill is this kind of "perfect being" who needs not to think of anything else, feels no need to think of anything else but himself (in the tradition of Aristotle), but the concept of which the author kind of criticizes by making the reader think he should take some responsibility of the more inferior beings' futures according to the Christian worldview?