To me he is the Spirit Loci or Genius Loci of the Old Forest. Just as Goldberry is literally the daughter of the river Withywindle. Goldberry is one of the Fae, pretty much a Naiad. A river spirit.
But that is my take and not canon. The one thing I’m sure of is Bombadil is not God as Tolkien was sure he was not God. Some suggest he is.
To me he is Gaia (spirit of the planet). Eru did not create him directly. Bombadil is an emergent result of the creation of Middle Earth. (Just how I like to think of that character…there is nothing to support it.)
It is possible he is the Spirit of Middle-Earth, but of the whole planet is very unlikely. So more like a Spirit of Europe if you’re going that big.
But the “emergent result” part matches my reasoning. Eru (God) did not specifically create Tom.
I sometimes wonder if Shelob is the dark balance to Bombadil. (again, pure speculation on my part)
IIRC her origins are likewise uncertain.
That was my problem with him, too. It’s not that he’s unexplained and mysterious. It’s that he’s annoying and stops the story dead in its tracks.
They’re pretty certain she is the daughter of Ungoliant and the spiders of Mirkwood are in turn her descendants.
Somewhere, I believe it is mentioned she was already in Cirith Ungol area before Sauron was in Mordor.
Well, he saves our heroes from an early death so that seems to propel the story.
And an interlude is not amiss in any story.
Oooh! My bad. I meant Ungoliant. (I really do know better)
Tolkien’s earliest writing said Ungoliant was the embodiment of darkness, the primeval spirit of the night. She is from before the world. Nothing he wrote later contradicted this and it fits really well. So not a Maia or Vala but something else and probably older yet.
For those not seeped in the Silmarillion and the History of Middle Earth Books, Eru Ilúvatar is God, like the Christian God but with a lot of Finnish influence as the World was created with Music. The Valar & Maiar are two orders of Angels and there are some others, like the Balrogs. The Balrogs numbered either 7 or hundreds and were either fallen Maiar or related but a different order of Fire Spirits.
The Professor was still revising his legendarium towards the end of his life. Thus the Silmarillion was in many ways his “Great Work” that was never completed and the LotR and The Hobbit his “Leaf” like his character Niggle. So he was writing and rewriting these tales starting around 1914 through 1973.
I have no problems with Tom. He does play an important part in keeping the hobbits safe, after all. For me, it served as an important intro, the hobbits are going into parts unknown, where there are strange and dangerous things to meet, and there are also strange and powerful entities that can help them. I didn’t find that he interrupted the story; I thought he helped advance it. The hobbits weren’t in Hobbittown anymore, and were going to need a lot of help.
And remember that there were other unexplained things in the story. Sauron was the biggest, when the book first came out:
“Who’s Sauron?” “He’s the Dark Lord who made the One Ring and wants to rule Middle-Earth.” “Where’d he come from ?” “Dunno. One of Morgoth’s servants.”
It was not til the Silmarillion that his back story was filled out. Robert Foster, in his Guide to Middle-earth , pre-Silmarillion, speculated that he was a Maiar or elder Elf.
I read the Appendices obsessively for years, and have always been obsessed with worldbuilding ever since. When Christopher Tolkien published the Silmarillion, and then all the History of Middle-Earth books, I devoured them - but it became obvious that JRR was ‘winging it’ a lot of the
time, making stuff up as he went along. There isn’t really a consistent history for Middle-Earth outside the appendices, and some of the material Christopher Tolkien published wildly contradicts some of the other stuff; but that is the creative process, I suppose.
That spoils it for me, nowadays, too. Tolkien was probably inspired by his experiences in the Great War, which were probably highly-skewed towards male interaction; if he had been using historical events as inspiration, there were plenty of powerful women in history to look up to (Empress Livia, Empress Theodora, Elanor of Aquitaine, Mary Queen of Scots and Elisabeth R, for example).
That’s probably why GoT was popular among women, at least at first - plenty of strong female characters to identify with. The TV series eventually spoiled that, somewhat, but still better than LotR in that department.
I still like the Dernhelm reveal in LotR, however telegraphed.
It is fair to posit that Tolkien was the first world-builder, in the sense that is meant now. There was nothing really even resembling his work for decades, and in many ways, there still isn’t. Indeed nearly all fantasy is built directly upon Tolkien. He virtually singlehandedly created an entire genre. Sure, if you don’t care for doggerel poetry, and you don’t need to know the moon phase and weather of every single day, and the Heroic Quest doesn’t grab you as a plot, he might not be your thing. But that doesn’t lessen his greatness, any more than Secretariat wasn’t a superstar just because you have no interest in horse racing.
There were other fantasy writers at the time – a slim handful. I think I read most of them then – Mervyn Peake, E.R.Eddison, George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Lord Dunsany --and none of those were much like Tolkien or at all approached his genius. I agree with all the literary criticisms. He was born in 1916, and looked backward from there. He drew on archetypes and stories from a number of ancient European epics (the Sagas, the Kalevala) as well as mythic old England, in a way that I don’t think anyone had done before and no one has done better. I remember reading LOTR when I was eleven, and feeling as though I was actually reading documents and stories from a real culture, a magic world I could not bear to leave. I don’t think, in a lifetime of reading, I have ever felt that, to such a profound degree. It was like Sam in Lorien.
My mental image of him is the tillerman on the cover of Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman.
No, it isn’t. Dunsany, Morris, Howard - all worldbuilders in exactly the modern sense, all predate Tolkien (some influenced him, too)
In the Sharing Knife universe, the answer is “you get up and do it all over again tomorrow”: the evil menace is something that crops up, repeatedly and in no pattern, so the the seekers can never drop their vigilance. No malices in living memory in these parts? Doesn’t mean there won’t be one tomorrow!
Peter Jackson made the right choice, in eliminating that bit from the movies. I didn’t MIND them in the books - like their stay in Rivendell and then with Galadriel and company, it was a desperately needed brief break from mind-blowing danger - but in terms of moviemaking, it could be eliminated entirely without taking away from the epic (ditto the Scouring of the Shire).
On rereading, since you know what’s going to happen next, I’ve read each of those bits with a strong sense of dread, since I know what’s coming after the idyll.
Yeeeees… but my main issue is that you have to really commit to getting “into” the books.
I read them all in college, naturally (a dorm-mate actually borrowed my copies, as they were part of the assigned reading for a class). But when I tried rereading them 20 years ago, I struggled. I did finally make it through them again - and of course they are on my Kindle.
I’m not sure what “the modern sense” is, but my impression is that Tolkien built a world much more complex and rich than just about anyone else before or since. Other than Klingon and Esperanto, I don’t know too many invented languages beyond Elvish that have actual speakers, for example.
I love Gene Wolfe. He really makes me work my brain in a creative way. Not it in a “test your memory to recall all these names and places etc.”
The Westing Game was fun, if a bit easy to figure out the “secret.”
I think a lot of the dislike for the LOTR books is because Tolkien was a philology professor who decided to basically write his own mythology. As such, his storytelling technique is less… dynamic(?) than most other authors, including his buddy C.S. Lewis.
He could have used an editor to help him pare down parts that weren’t really relevant to the story he’s trying to tell, instead of leaving it all in.
The Hobbit basically avoided all this because Tolkien intentionally stripped it down because he was writing for younger readers. And it moves right along as far as stories go, unlike LOTR, especially Fellowship.
So I feel like it comes back to what you’re reading the novels for- are you reading for well done language, world-building, and settings, or are you reading like you’re watching a movie in your head? Because the former type of readers will love LOTR, while the second will find it somewhat boring at best, and unreadable at worst.
Hey, I didn’t. And I read it as an adult.