The beginning of the Lord of the Rings started in the extended fairy tale style of the Hobbit and began to turn darker. It pretty much left the fairy tale style completely about the time the Black Riders trashed the room in the Prancing Pony. I believe Tolkien did this on purpose and thus why until that moment we had odd seeming things like a Fox remarking to itself on the oddness of seeing Hobbits sleeping out at night, Old Man Willow and Tom Bombadil and song about the Man in the Moon.
The darkness was already there before Bree but it turned serious and epic that night and remained so for the rest of the story.
Bombadil was older, probably. Tolkien deliberately kept mum about Bombadil’s origins, but definitely seems to imply that he was around before the trees and animals. Ents were created by Yavanna to be the vegetable equivalent of the Eagles, guardians of the plants as the Eagles were of the animals, before Elves awoke. The Elves didn’t create the Ents, they only taught them to speak.
OK, I’ll give you the barrowdowns as a place to get an anti-witch-king blade. Maybe they just needed Tom to get them out of the barrowdowns, and so that’s why he stayed in the story.
Bramma23, thanks for the link to that earlier discussion. What I took away from that was that Ents were probably originally animated by some kind of spirits, some kind of lower-level Ainur, which would make their spirits, at least, older than Arda. Tom’s age and origin is just a purposely ambiguous mystery.
Roddy
One last comment on the other-than-man killing of the Witch King.
Were either Merry or Eowyn aware of the prophecy? I didn’t think they were by the time the movie came along, it had been a while since I read the books.
It seems extremely unlikely that Eowyn was. The Rohirrim had no contact with the elves and were fairly ignorant of the wider world.
It’s possible that Merry might have known, since he actually met the elf who made the prophecy (Glorfindel), but there is nothing at all in the text to suggest this. Merry and Pippin weren’t even present at the council of Elrond.
There’s a small chance that Glorfindel took Merry off for some private encouragement, seeing that he had the barrowdowns dagger, but I seriously doubt it. I can’t imagine that Merry would take that prophecy as any sort of comfort whatsoever, more of a “OMG, I have to fight the Witch King!?” Faint.
I personally always read that section as if both Merry and Eowyn thought they were going to die horribly, but they weren’t going to cower about it first, and they were going to dish out any damage they could before they inevitably went down.
Much more powerful than if they thought they were protected by a prophecy.
Same here. I also doubt that Glorfindel would have even recognised Merry as an instrument of his prophecy. The wording of it is vague and I would think that reflects Glorfindel’s understanding of it. I don’t think he had an explicit vision of Eowyn and Merry chopping up the witch king on the Pelennor fields.
I think the question is, did they ever hear the prophecy in it’s original form? And I think we can safely assume the answer is no, as we could expect that to be mentioned in the book.