Does anyone else feel that whilst he wasnt really any major part in the story, it would have been nice to see him in Fellowship of the Ring? I think it would have made a nice interlude.
No, I didn’t like him in the book and I wouldn’t have liked him in the movie.
I think it would have been very difficult to do justice to the character in the book without making him look ridiculous on screen… I like him in the book, but he’d be excessively difficult to film without being silly. And he doesn’t really fit with the mood that Jackson established. I think he made the right choice.
I was relieved that he was left out of the movie. I always find that part of the book hard to read, what with my eyes rolling back in my head so often…
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FOTR was pretty long as it was and the Bombadil part didn’t really add anything to the story. I think PJ made the right call there (but I wish he would have left in the scouring of the Shire).
I like the Old Forest & Tom Bombadil part of the book well enough, but I also think that if something has to be cut out, this section is the easiest to remove without causing plot difficulties later on. And, as other have said, Tom really doesn’t suit the tone of Jackson’s movies.
Bombadil was dispensable. I do wish they’d kept just a bit of the Old Forest – to foreshadow Fangorn and to show the hobbits that Things Aren’t Safe when you leave the Shire. I did like the Old Man Willow homage in the TTT EE.
I was a bit disappointed, but not much. PJ made the best choice as far as cutting something out.
I do wish he’d done the scouring of the Shire in ROTK, though. But since the movie was well over three hours anyway, I can see why he didn’t.
Old Man Willow was my favorite part of the Old Forest, so the Extended Edition scene when Merry and Pip get eaten by a tree in Fangorn was enough to make me happy.
My pet, and not very serious, theory about why the hobbits don’t go through the Old Forest and Barrow Downs in the film is that, in the book, going through the Old Forest is Frodo’s idea. In the movie, Frodo turns to Merry and says “Sam and I must get to Bree,” and Merry (who is not an idiot) nods and answers “Right.” And the next thing you know, they’re at the gates of Bree! Presumably, Merry knew of some shortcut he neglected to mention in the book, and Frodo followed his cousin’s advice this time and saved them all a bit of trouble.
Didn’t I read somewhere that Tolkein began LOTR simply as a sequel to The Hobbit, which as we know was more for children? You can tell the tone of the books changes from beginning to end, getting more serious and mature as the story progresses. It’s as if Tolkein’s ideas for the story were becoming more “adult,” and he never bothered to go back and revise the earlier parts of the story to make them jibe with the adult themes that came later. I’ve always thought of Tom Bombadil as being a kind of vestige of The Hobbit before the story begins to take a more serious turn.
According to the forward in my edition (by Tolkien), the Lord of the Rings was written from 1936 to 1949. The war broke out as he was finishing Book I (which includes Bombadil) and he left to pursue other duties, including reporting on the war. This could account for the darker turn the story took from then on. In addition, in 13 years his skill as a writer and storyteller would naturally improve and evolve.
As to the OP, I think that he did the right thing by eliminating Bombadil from the movie. While I enjoy that part of the book a great deal, it was a diversion from the main thrust of the story and would have left anyone who had not read the book saying “What the hell was that all about?”
The Lord of the Rings is actually 6 books. It would be cool if PJ were to go back and create six movies, filling in the details that had to be left out the first time around (like Bombadil)
I like Tom Bombadil.
I thought he actually served an interesting, though confusing and basically unecessary, purpose. He was the only person in all of Middle Earth that could put on the ring without having it affect him. He gave it back without a second thought.
Gandalf couldn’t do that (nor Saruman nor Elrond nor Galadriel). It showed that there was something beyond the world we know (or the inhabitants of Middle Earth knew). An all-powerful force of nature that has no interest in the petty squabbles of the races of Middle Earth.
I liked Bombadil in the book for the the same reason, but at the same time I’m pretty sure it’s why Peter Jackson left him out. Showing the malevolence of the One Ring is not horribly difficult when you have hundreds of pages of textual exposition, but when you only have ten hours of film (or rather, the half hour of FoTR before the hobbits reach Bree), anything that makes the Ring look weaker cannot remain unaltered. IIRC, this is also why PJ changed the character of Faramir in The Two Towers: film is too fleeting a medium to show Faramir rejecting the Ring outright without implying to non-book-readers that the Ring is far less addictive than it is supposed to be.
I agree, I was most disapointed that he wasn’t in it… They have skipped many parts where the hobbits were on their own adventures, like the returning to the shire in RotK.
Having Tom in the film not only wasn’t necessary, it would have been a terrible mistake. He doesn’t even work all that well in the BOOKS, IMHO, but in the movies it would have been a dreadful mess. It would throw the entire film’s pace off and, as Tarrsk points out, completely blow the atmosphere and the dread the Ring inspires.
Personally, I always found Bored of the Ring’s Tim Benzadrine to be a fairly weak satire, since it doesn’t take all that much of a change to make the whole Bombadil scenario into a hippie commune thing. All the singing, all the dancing, all the beautiful long-haired naturegirl sitting dreamily amongst her pot(s), all the peace-loving “what war…nothing to do with me”.
Bombadil was always an uncomfortable fit into Tolkien’s mythos.
Parody, not satire. Duh…my brain obviously shuts down with too much sauerkraut…