Bombadil's magic is tied to his home in the Old Forest. He's a nature spirit, I suppose. He's not affected by the Ring's power of temptation (the temptation of power?), and I guess could be called an unfallen being in a Christian sense (unlike Men or Elves).
The creature I brought up, Ungoliant, is an incarnation of all-consuming darkness. She doesn't want power, she just wants, and that is her power. I don't think they can be given relative rankings the way that Men, Elves, and Maiar can because they're fundamentally different.
The Legendarium is enhanced overall by having these kinds of "holes". It shows that the cosmology the elves know is incomplete. For example, they don't know the circumstances under which Men "awoke" in Middle Earth. All they know is "Oh, and one day these hairy dudes showed up and they die for, like, no reason."
Which leads me to my pet theory that Tolkien left the origins of Man misty so that Paradise Lost, the great work of English literature, could be more or less canon. Paradise Lost also has these personification-characters, namely Sin, Death, and Chaos, who exist outside the families(?) of Men and Angels.
Damn, this is a really good post and I love the comparisons to Paradise Lost in that way. I enjoyed reading Paradise Lost but had never conceived of Bombadil etc in the same way, so you have given me a lot of interesting stuff to mull over.
Bombadil's magic is tied to his home in the Old Forest. He's a nature spirit, I suppose. He's not affected by the Ring's power of temptation (the temptation of power?), and I guess could be called an unfallen being in a Christian sense (unlike Men or Elves).
The creature I brought up, Ungoliant, is an incarnation of all-consuming darkness. She doesn't want power, she just wants, and that is her power. I don't think they can be given relative rankings the way that Men, Elves, and Maiar can because they're fundamentally different.
The Legendarium is enhanced overall by having these kinds of "holes". It shows that the cosmology the elves know is incomplete. For example, they don't know the circumstances under which Men "awoke" in Middle Earth. All they know is "Oh, and one day these hairy dudes showed up and they die for, like, no reason."
Which leads me to my pet theory that Tolkien left the origins of Man misty so that Paradise Lost, the great work of English literature, could be more or less canon. Paradise Lost also has these personification-characters, namely Sin, Death, and Chaos, who exist outside the families(?) of Men and Angels.
Damn, this is a really good post and I love the comparisons to Paradise Lost in that way. I enjoyed reading Paradise Lost but had never conceived of Bombadil etc in the same way, so you have given me a lot of interesting stuff to mull over.
:gold-antifa:
Thanks a lot for the response