Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#261

Post by thehappypm » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

fritztastic wrote: post #42

Trasmatta wrote: post #29

> Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the story. I've been a fan of Tolkien for decades, and this doesn't match up with my experience at all...Tolkien fans seem to generally love Tom, and many were deeply disappointed that he wasn't in the movies (even though his exclusion makes perfect se…

I was disappointed he was not in the films, however everyone else I know was glad of this omission. I think his character adds a certain something- maybe something a lot of people don't appreciate. Not including him in the movies, I thought, was a missed opportunity.

I’m disappointed too, but my least favorite thing about the movies is how they made Aragorn so different. He was supposed to be kingly right from the start, taking Anduril from Rivendell and repeatedly shocking the hobbits with his kingliness. The movies made him this reluctant guy who doesn’t want to be king — where in the book he knows it’s his destiny and it makes him a total badass.

Also the fight scenes in the Fellowship.. they haven’t aged great for me. An elf, two men, and a dwarf can kill a hundred orcs? The battles in the book are awesome, but less of a one sided bloodbath. Aragorn cutting off a goblin’s head, which causes them to get freaked the fuck out and retreat. That’s way more believable than that these guys are super warriors who can take down an army when outnumbered 100:1.

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#262

Post by thehappypm » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

eric_cc wrote: post #89

Tolkien on Tom in Letter 144: I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty…

The Tolkien letters, the J.K. Rowling tweets of the ‘50s.

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#263

Post by em500 » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

thekiptxt wrote: post #74

About a week ago, I (mid 20s) began reading LoTR for the first time, despite having seen the movies long ago. I knew books are always richer in content than movies, but Tom Bombadil was the first radical departure from the movies that I encountered, and the weird encounter was an exciting switch that made me perceive the story I’m reading as new and different from the story I’ve seen. The group has not yet arrived to…

I think the most crucial (and often overlooked) difference between the films and the books is the narrator's perspective. The films are largely shown from a neutral / omniscient narrator's perspective. The books OTOH are mostly written from the perspective of the Hobbits. (The conceit is that the books are adapted from written hobbit lore collected mostly by Bilbo and Frodo[1].) The implication is that there's much more emphasis in the books on what's important and interesting to the Hobbits, as opposed to Men or Elves. In the film, Frodo and Sam are only arguably the main characters, and only because they are the Ringbearer and those that destroy the Ring in the end. But the boook is really Frodo's Own Story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#264

Post by jfengel » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

dbingham wrote: post #61

jfengel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly. But I know a lot of people who find Tom irrelevant to the plot. It looks more like a silly digression just at the time the book had shifted from "Hobbit sequel" to serious epic. He talks in poetry that can feel singsong and childish. Tolkien fans seem to focus on the bit with the Ring, which is an engaging enigma without a resolution. It makes him seem very important and powerful, but the story doesn't expl…

The comments on this thread make it seem more likely that your circle of people who disliked Tom is the outlier rather than those of us who thoroughly enjoy him as a character. Also, I submit as evidence this scifi.stackexchange thread: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1586/who-or-what-w... I think Tolkien fans, on average, have long enjoyed the mystery that is Tom.

I have a large circle of friends with a wide diversity of opinions about Tom. It's not representative, so I have no idea who is an outlier. But I understand why each of them sees it the way they do, and I'm certain that none of them is unique in their outlook.

I believe a stackexchange conversation is a very skewed set of Tolkien fans, who are there specifically to discuss those kinds of questions. There are many ways to be a fan of Tolkien.

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#265

Post by lisper » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

epicide wrote: post #257

lisper wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that I'm taking Chekhov's Gun as an axiom. The rest of LOTR hangs together quite well on this criterion. I'm judging Tom by that standard. Gollum, for example, makes sense. In fact, Gollum is probably one of the best examples of a dramatically coherent character in all of literature. He is introduced as a bit player and ends up being a pivotal and very complex character, almost a protagonist in his own right…

How would one demonstrate a character who is so powerful that they can "just fucking vanish " without having them do just that? You could go on to explain that fact or similar, but I think driving home that point any more than Tolkien did just muddies it and makes it more clumsy.

I meant that Tom vanishes from the story. He doesn't vanish from Middle Earth.

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#266

Post by kpgraham » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

I always felt that Tom Bombadil was filler in order to bridge events between Crick Hollow and the Prancing Pony. Tolkien had already written The Adventures of Tom Bombadil as a separate piece with Goldberry and Old Man Willow. He just dropped that into the Fellowship and used it to fill the space.

I used to skip the Tom section and move right up to Bree. Now I read the books much slower, and I savor every section, even Tom.

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#267

Post by adolph » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 5:57 PM UTC

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #249

sn41 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the (apocryphal?) anecdote about Diogenes the cynic: Diogenes was eating bread and lentils, when Aristippus told him that if he would only be subservient to the king, he would not have to live on bread and lentils. Diogenes replied that if you learn to live on bread and lentils, then you never have to be subservient to the king.

Stories of Diogenes are always entertaining. 'He destroyed the single wooden bowl he possessed on seeing a peasant boy drink from the hollow of his hands. He then exclaimed: "Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!"' 'while Diogenes was relaxing in the morning sunlight, Alexander the Great, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Dio…

Interestingly similar to Lao-Zhe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laozi

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#268

Post by lmkg » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #169

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's extremely mysterious and in a good way. He is one of the only characters able to just casually put on the one ring with seemingly no effect and then give it back immediately afterwards. I think he gives off eldritch horror vibes, but in a mostly benevolent way. If everyone else were ants, he would be an etymologist intrigued by our behavior or something.

> He is one of the only characters able to just casually put on the one ring with seemingly no effect and then give it back immediately afterwards. OK, that's fair enough. But to my mind, this is just a setup that cries out for an explanation that never comes. It's a major flaw in the dramatic structure of the narrative, a bug not a feature. But I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.

Not to pile on, but...

One of Tolkien's goals was to create something which resembled history rather than literature. Or if not history, then mythology that plausibly belongs to a real place, rather than a neatly-constructed story. So, some of the things that he does are "janky" from a purely dramatic perspective, but fulfill that purpose.

A common example from Lord of the Rings is having many related characters with the same or similar name. The convention in literature is to make characters distinguishable for practical reasons, but in "real" history naming conventions are messy and people aren't always distinguishable. There are even real debates among historians about whether a name refers to multiple people or not!

Tom Bombadil is a similar thing. He serves no dramatic purpose. But a history, or a mythology, doesn't always have events that fit together in a neat way. Sometimes stuff just happens, or there are things that are only tangentially related. And it's difficult to draw a circle around events and say inside the circle is our story, and outside the circle not our story. There are other stories, intersecting.

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#269

Post by vmilner » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #259

mrex wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom Bombadil is quite clearly what Tolkein referred to as a "subcreation echo" of biblical Adam. Oldest, fatherless, unaffected by original sin and thus not tempted or influenced in the least by the ring, literally living his life as uncontested master of a lush garden. He is Adam, if Adam had contented himself with a Gold Berry instead of that apple...

That doesn’t explain why nobody has heard of him for thousands and thousands of years, and yet the Hobbits stray right into his path Willy-nilly

"He appeared already to know much about them and all their families, and indeed to know much of all the history and doings of the Shire down from days hardly remembered among the hobbits themselves. It no longer surprised them; but he made no secret that he owed his recent knowledge largely to Farmer Maggot, whom he seemed to regard as a person of more importance than they had imagined. ‘There’s earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open,’ said Tom. It was also clear that Tom had dealings with the Elves, and it seemed that in some fashion, news had reached him from Gildor concerning the flight of Frodo."

Re: Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)

#270

Post by mrex » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

thehappypm wrote: post #259

mrex wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom Bombadil is quite clearly what Tolkein referred to as a "subcreation echo" of biblical Adam. Oldest, fatherless, unaffected by original sin and thus not tempted or influenced in the least by the ring, literally living his life as uncontested master of a lush garden. He is Adam, if Adam had contented himself with a Gold Berry instead of that apple...

That doesn’t explain why nobody has heard of him for thousands and thousands of years, and yet the Hobbits stray right into his path Willy-nilly

I think there is some "fortuitous things just keep happening to these people" in much fiction, and certainly the LOTR series, right? If you or I was given a knife that glowed when trolls were around, that would probably be the most amazing thing that ever happened to us. To Frodo it's a footnote, right along with "met and was rended minor aid by the oldest corporeal creature in the universe".

Ultimately, I can only offer conjecture, but given what we know of Tolkein's deeply religious personal perspective, it's not difficult to imagine that his fantastic universe is pervaded by an overwhelming force of goodness that seeks to bring events to their right conclusion through divine providence.