Tom Bombadil is the best NPC in the Lord of the Rings Online MMO, if only because he yells "HEY DILLY DILL-O!" every time you click on him. Every time, with no limit to how many times the sample will play simultaneously (beyond what your hardware can handle). So if you spam-click the ever-loving shit out of him, it summons a cacophonous nightmare into a brief yet painful existence.
Don't sleep on LoTRO surprisingly fun MMO to pick up for a couple weeks
It was damn better than al the minute by minute descriptions of their forest travels.
Or the extensive geological report on various rock strata in Helm's deep.
SMH, kids these days can't even appreciate the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, their too busy with their smartphones.
Landscape descriptions are the veggies of classic literature. Gotta eat them to deserve the desserts. And without them the imagery of the story, from the earliest illustrations to the films, would likely be much poorer.
My favourite part of the books.
Was Bombadil supposed to be a Creator analogue or what?
That's not an uncommon theory, but I personally interpret him as just a part of the world that is outside the knowledge/mythology of the elves. He wouldn't be the first character that's true of. For all of her impact on the story, the Elves don't really know what Ungoliant was, exactly.
thanks for the context of other similar characters.
It's been a long while since I was big on all my Tolkien... is Bombadil seen as roughly as powerful and capable as others outside the knowledge of elves, or is he still particularly powerful when comparing to those sorts of mysterious characters?
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
Tom Bombadil fits more with the lighthearted Hobbit than the brooding LotR, though the fact that the ring has no power over him, unlike every other character, is cool.
The Old Forest is one of my favorite parts though. The ancient graves alive with deadly magic unrelated to Mordor - scary stuff.
It’s funny how much China Miéville hated Tolkien cuz I’m pretty sure LotR and Perdido Street Station had the same creative process. Dude creates fictional universe he really likes and characters for it, puts all his energy into the world then realizes he doesn’t have a good idea for a story set in it, creates some boilerplate disaster narrative that’s basically an excuse for the more relatable characters to go in a walking tour of the world where just happen to bump into all the cool shit.
That's a really good way of putting it. See also: The entire bibliography of Larry Niven.
I mean, I’ve only read two other books by China and I quite liked both of them so I think he has some chops as a writer. We should keep in mind PSS is one of his earlier books.
And heck I’ll even say I found a good amount to enjoy in PSS, to the point me and a friend made a whole DND campaign inspired by it. But yeah I think China is kinda cocky and seemed to inject a lot of unneeded edgy shit in the story. I get it’s supposed to be all GrimDark, but come on dude.
spoilers
Also I saw the fucking reveal of bird dudes crime from like a mile away. Thought maybe he’d make it something more clever and morally ambiguous but no, just go for the worst crime of passion you can thing of!
I started reading that movie's synopsis thinking it was going to be a dentist-themed horror movie and goddamn did i go on a trip lmao
I think you'll still like the books even if you know the entire plot.
Yeah but I know that some fucking eagles deusexmachine the day, and then Frodo has PTSD and then goes in a journey to somewhere, and before that Aragorn becomes king, another deus ex with a ghost army, something with a damn that gets destroyed, smeagol bitting Frodo's finger off, emm, count Duku doing some things, the part with the spiders, ermm, oh right, how Gandalf dies, but actually didn't, etc.
The canon explanation for the eagles is that they tried, but they just got mercd every time they tried to get in there because Sauron could see them coming. It only worked after they destroyed Sauron and he couldn't just vaporize them.
Just watch the fucking movies, they didnt get 20+ oscars for nothing
Something with a dude from a white city in a mountain wanting to torch his son that wasn't actually dead,
Something with a dude under some dark spell that make him old and tired, the logo of that dude was a tree, that was cool
A woman killing the bad guy, something with elephants, etc
LotR is your basic story of the idle rich and religious oligarchy forcing the incident worker to invade a sovereign nation based on lies and rumors. It's also pro-ethostate, monarchism, and blood/racial superiority.
Absolute garbage
