Toke-a-lid! Smoke-a-lid! Pop the mescalino!
Stash the hash! Gonna crash! Make mine methedrino!
Hop a hill! Pop a pill! For Old Tim Benzedrino!"
Forget not the magical words of Mr. Benzedrine when he was rescuing the boggies, “First, second, neutral, park. High thee hence, thou leafy narc!”
The Hildebrandt Brothers’ Tolkien calendar of 1977 has a wonderful picture of Goldberry. I find it difficult to imagine this fey spirit to be evil. But, I am a sucker for a pretty face.
Image of Goldberry from Tolkien calender of 1977
More specifically: http://www.tolkiencalendars.com/calPictures/1977/BAL277.jpg
I had that calendar! Yeah, hard to picture Goldberry as evil. Hashberry was more of a drugged out bimbo in Bored… At first Frito saw nothing amid the iridescent wallpaper and strobe candles but what appeared to be a heap of filthy cleaning rags. But then the pile spoke again: [INDENT] *"Hither come and suck a pipe, *
-
Turn thy brains to cheese and tripe!"*
And then, as the boggies squinted their smarting eyes, the heap stirred and sat up revealing itself to be an incredibly emaciated, hollow-eyed female. She looked at them for a second, muttered, “Like wow,” and fell forward in a catatonic stupor with a rattle of beads.
[/INDENT]
I always liked this theory: Tolkien Crackpot Theories
Ha!
The dude’s reappraisal of the events in episode IV in the light of I-III is just as brilliant. Frankly, he should’ve gone into politics—if he can make sense of this, he can make anything sound sensible!
As always, I’d like to note that Tom Bombadil is the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun in Middle Earth, which presumably means he’s Treebeard.
I may hate the earlier movies a bit less now.
This is how I see it. Perhaps the evil stuff even flourishes there because he doesn’t care about it, and no one else wants to interfere in his territory.
For me, this is quite relevant. I certainly do find it an interesting idea, but given the thought and work that Tolkien put into Middle Earth, there’s only one right interpretation of the history of Middle Earth, and it’s his.
I dunno. It’s entirely possible that he’s a total Outsider, the way Ungoliant was, but with a different nature. He may have relocated to the newly-minted Middle Earth before anything inhabited it. That said, in light of this:
I’ve always really thought that Tom Bombadil represented Nature, and the “evil things” didn’t really concern him because, from his perspective, they aren’t evil. They’re just part of the fabric of reality. In the same way, we may be tempted to see a destructive hurricane or some hungry predator eviscerating a young, tender animal under an uncaring sun as evil, but they’re not. They’re neither good nor evil. They simply are what they are. We merely lack the proper perspective. Tom Bombadil has that perspective. Hell, he may BE that perspective.
I don’t know, if a spirit is pro-nature and against settlement and civilization, that does make it against hobbits and men, but doesn’t make it outright evil. Sauron’s variety of evil destroyed nature and life. Bombadil, as a spirit of nature, would be the polar opposite of them… though not on “our” side, either.
Yeah, no, I don’t think so. The fellow comes off as very clever, but he misrepresents several things and draws some false equivalencies, such as that “dangerous” is the same as “evil”. I mean, all we have to do to refute -that- poorly conceived idea is to go to Gandalf:
And curiously, one of the very things he explains as dangerous but wise and kindly is a forest. Go figure.
So this is a funny, crack-brained idea, but it’s a house of cards that doesn’t stand without glue.
I assumed when Gandalf said “Fangorn” he was referring to Treebeard.
I agree with this.
And it seems clear to me that Bombadil is beyond Middle Earth notions of good and evil. Bombaldil is and has always been. He’s very Old Testament.
Fangorn is Treebeard and vice versa. The wikipedia article makes that clear enough even as it says Tolkein was aware of some confusion of the two.
I can’t find anything to back up the idea that Treebeard/Fangorn and Fangorn Forest are the same entity. Clearly they have a close link, perhaps like Celeborn and Galadriel with Lothlorien, but everything I’ve found seems to imply they are not one and the same.
I’ll admit it’s a minor point one way or the other. 
No, they are not the same thing. Fangorn is the name of the Ent, the oldest living thing in the forest named after him. Fangorn means ‘Tree Beard’.
Treebeard is the “oldest creature under the Sun”, which I interpret to mean that he was the first creature to arise after the first sunrise. Which is impressive to us, but not actually all that big a deal in Middle-Earth as a whole: Galadriel and Cirdan certainly predate the Sun, as do Gandalf, Sauron, the Balrog, and all the rest of the Maia, and probably a great many other elves we know.
Bombadil, however, is not “oldest under the Sun”; he’s just plain “oldest”, with no qualification.
I had that calendar too! And the crush on Goldberry to go with it. 
I also have my original copy of Bored of the Rings. (tote up another one on the register, Jocko. ”Ching!”)