[Sir Kohran]

Bombadil, The Old Forest, The Barrow Downs, all help contribute a mood of strangeness & add a dimension of mystery to the world of M-e - its a world with other 'dimensions'/realities: the world of the OF & the Downs is no 'stranger' or more out of place than the wraith world Frodo experiences when he puts on the Ring, or Valinor itself come to that. As with the world of Smith, Faery exists alongside the 'real' world. Frodo & the Hobbits pass into a different 'reality', with different rules, & a different kind of 'logic', but the whole experience helps them see their own world with new eyes. Frodo is exposed to danger, taught old lore, & tested (will he put on the Ring in the Barrow & desert his friends in order to escape?), but most importantly he is shown that 'there are more things in heaven & earth than are dreamed of in his philosophy.

I just find it strange in that the whole sequence feels very 'positive' - Tom is happy and humorous, and this clashes with my view of what should be an increasingly dark and wary section of the story. To me it feels like having a horror story and then, just before the monster appears, pausing for an interlude with the Teletubbies. Admittedly that's a gross exagerration but that's the feel of it.

that's another reason I have a problem with the movies - if you remove the 'Bombadil' dimension you end up with a 'sword & sorcery action epic'.

So how would you have done it? How would you fit the Bombadil sequence into a two-three hour movie? Every second counts in a story this big and I can't see how the Bombadil sequence could be anything less than ten minutes.

I wouldn't call it a 'sword and sorcery action epic' - a title like that befits something truly low quality like Eragon - but that's down to opinion.

Lose Bombadil & you actually make a character like Treebeard more difficult to accept, because he & the Ents seem too 'outlandish' - a world which has Tom, Goldberry, Old Man Willow & Barrow Wights in it is a world which has room for walking, talking trees.

The difference to me being that the Ents were treated entirely seriously and 'felt' like a part of the story, no more out-of-place than the Balrog or the Eagles. Tom on the other hand does not feel like part of that world.