Arwen exists in the books, she just has a much smaller role. They expanded it for the film, but it’s certainly within the realm of the universe.
It’s a film, which is a very different medium from books, which have the time to expand and explore in ways that films do not. A direct translation would likely make for a more boring film. I think that Jackson managed to balance adding action and exploring the mythical side of the universe pretty well. I can’t imagine anyone would have done a better job at that. YMMV, of course.
“Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings” was a classic, in its own right ^^’ .
Tom Bombadil and Goldberry (his wife) are the “First Man” and “First Woman”; they were literally the first humans ever. And as all of the Middle Earth races go, the earliest/first versions are always sublime/more potent, compared to what comes later (see alsoAragorn and the Dúnedain),
This is exactly why Tom Bombadil and Goldberry have authority over the plants and animals; they named them, and are basically “Adam and Eve” in Tolkien’s mythology. The main difference from Genesis, is that they never “fell”, as it were.
He was extraneous to the story and they already had to leave a lot of things out, but It would still have been amusing to see the animators render him as a wooden peg doll, like Pinocchio, but have the other characters not notice anything odd about him
There is a running struggle in Tolkien’s works between Christian and pre-Christian myth, and Tom Bombadil is a part of the messier, less explainable pre-Christian side.
As Tolkien got older and more devoutly Catholic, he tended to sand down the pre-Christian side, but he couldn’t get rid of it entirely. It probably wasn’t intentional, but it parallels a lot of the legends of Arthur, where the earlier versions were a lot more heavily influenced by pagan traditions, while by the late Middle Ages there was a lot of explicit theology forced on Galahad and the other knights.
Tolkien tried to make his world conform to a greater extent to a highly structured Catholic worldview as he got older, but he never got there. It’s simply not a monotheistic place. It has many gods, and there is simply no way to make them fit in a Catholic model.
He tried to at least make them all subordinate to a higher god, but Tom Bombadil is a leftover piece that is something like the way that the older legends in Great Britain had room for creatures who weren’t a part of the Christian world. And I think it’s pretty clear that Tolkien never fully wanted to excise all of the loose ends and non-Catholic parts from his world. He really wasn’t by nature a strong structuralist, which is part of the reason he never finished very much.
I had this conversation many years ago with a friend.
His answer was the best I have heard, so here goes:
I said, why not just give Tom the ring to either look after or destroy as he sees fit?
It would save a lot of grief for the little fellas. And in the book that is exactly what Frodo does - offers the ring to Tom.
My friend’s reply - Tom is basically a God, therefore all this worrying about a silly ring is beneath him - he is as likely to lose it and not worry about it. No skin off his nose.
So to leave it out of the film makes sense - too laborious and boring to explain.
But in the book it makes better sense - as an illustration of the capriciousness of the gods, of which Tom would be a perfect example.
In the end, Frodo fucked him off anyway, so, good on him…
All this discussion when the book is very explicit: Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow with a blue jacket and yellow boots. Sheesh, learn to check the source materials.
I feel like he doesn’t need to fit neatly into the etiology of Tolkien’s work. The mythologies and stories Tolkien based his writings on, indeed all mythologies I’m aware of, are internally inconsistent and there are always characters that don’t fit neatly into a system of gods and demi-gods and stories that had clearly had a different theological/cultural background that were only later incorporated into a specific mythology. Tolkien, as a scholar of Anglo Saxon and Norse literature, would have been very comfortable with that concept. Scholars, as a rule, can live very well with ambiguity.
ETA: having now read the Polygon article @Grey_Devil posted above Susana Polo says the exact same thing in there:
In another way, Tom Bombadil actually makes The Lord of the Rings more like a real world mythological system than not. Our understanding of ancient mythology is replete with strange additions, [like Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zeus, that many academics believe is due to those stories being adopted from other mythologies — a deific cameo. Tolkien’s favorite mythological system of all, Norse sagas, are also full of references that we may never know the origins of, due to the incomplete and in some cases biased textual record of living oral traditions.
Can’t imagine anything less hippy-like than Tolkien’s elves, tbh.
I can see how it could be read that way in the context of the times but not in any context that Tolkien would recognise.
Also known as tobacco
(Sorry for being so grumpy about this issue in particular but as someone who studied the same subjects as Tolkien I can’t help but see things from his vantage point, and that definitely wasn’t a counter-culture one but rather one of deep fascination with the structures and themes of pre- and early medieval Northern European storytelling)
