Quote:
Originally Posted by Sir Kohran
Ah. So for loving Bombadil you are intelligent, whilst I am nothing more than a popcorn munching moron who should be taken outside and beaten for my disgusting behaviour in daring to have an opinion beyond 'everything Tolkien did was absolutely perfect'.
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The whole Bombadil 'mythology' (which, let's not forget, was imported virtually wholesale into LotR from 'outside' - the poem 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil' pre-existed LotR) is full of folkloric elements, & I suppose any reader unfamiliar with British folklore may struggle with Tom - though many readers with no such knowledge take to him straight off.
I find (& I'm generalising here) that those who don't like the OMW/TB/Barrow Downs episode don't like Tolkien's constant 'digressions' into M-e history, & also tend to skip the poems as unnecessary too (& all that description of landscape!- Why didn't Tolkien just tell the story?- a decent editor could have trimmed the whole thing down to about 250 pages & it would have been much better for it, etc, etc.).
This little 'argument' can never be won because its all down to personal taste. For myself, the whole Old Forest, Bombadil, Barrow Downs episode is one of my favourite parts of LotR, & the book would be much, much less without it. I love the strange 'familiarity' (or familiar 'strangeness') of the whole sequence. If the Shire is a depiction of rural England around the time of (Queen Victoria's) Diamond Jubilee, as Tolkien stated, the Old Forest/Downs episode is a perfect depiction of an older, wilder England. I'd also venture to say that without those three chapters of LotR we may never have got Smith of Wooton Major. Both could be seen (on one level) as meditations on/explorations of England's Fairyland, & the Old Forest/Barrow Downs episode must be included, because of its (far more so than the Shire) quintesential 'Englishness'.