[Amarinth]

hi! can i butt in?

i read somewhere, can't exactly remember where, that tom bombadil was some kind of an incarnation of the primitive earth, like a "father nature", in the same manner that the ents were incarnations of trees. yeah it's been suggested - was it by either of the tolkiens? - that he was indeed a maia, though this doesn't appear to fit nicely in how the ainu were described and enumerated in the silmarillion. anyway, you do get the impression that tom really was quite divorced from the going-ons outside the old forest, which sort of shows the place as a holdover or artefact of change. hence, the ring of power does not affect tom in all appearances, but as lotr says, he will get his turn in the end, as change works its way down to the unchanging.

in relation to this, was tom bombadil's part in the lotr sort of an accident that happened when tolkien later completed his full cosmology that left tom out? been meaning to start this thread but, oh well...

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every man's life is a path to the truth -- hesse