...now it's stuck in my head and I'm going to sing it at odd moments when I drop my guard

MUAHAHAHAHAAAAAA

PUT TOM IN THE FILLUM

Goldberry: /comes in on the chorus at the top of her lungs

Ab so lutely

I mean the basic problem has always been

that Bombadil doesn't fit the tone fans want the story to have

He fits in the ACTUAL NARRATIVE just fine

Yeeeeeesssss

weird and blue and given to doggerel as he is

He is not gritty

He is himself!

Yeeeeeeeeesssss

and he is inherently old-fashioned

he's not a modern person

(most of the other characters aren't either but)

(Speaking of, Aragorn knows him.) (WHERE IS THE FIC ABOUT THOSE INTERACTIONS) (I know I know still stuck inside my head mostly)

seriously

Aragorn: OH MAN that guy.

Yeah but it's very hard to write out or elude with Tom, how very Not Modern he is

yep

Elide

you have to take him seriously on his own terms or he doesn't work

and a lot of people can't or won't

or don't want to, rather

One does imagine Tom occasionally rescuing an In Over Their Head Dunedain

Aragorn: /embarrassing but we lived to be embarrassed so hey

This is part of how you become The Hardiest Of All Living Men

Yeeeeeeesssss in some senses he's like Gollum that way, but without the safety valve of you know. The horror.

If you can't handle an unselfconsciously goofy nature spirit saving your life at random, how tough can you really be?

Exactly! Drink your roots and berries in a mug, Estel. He says to himself.

the unselfconsciousness is so important

you may find him hilariously incongruous! you may think he overdoes the ring a dong dilloes!

but Tom Bombadil isn't clowning

he doesn't find anything particularly silly about how he lives

Right! It's part of his whole being his - the way nothing has power over him

Yeeeeeeeeees

and it's always sort of strange to me when people can't grok that

(Not even the Ring)

Like they think JRRT wrote him in there for the cheap lulz

Yeah

(because I mean. I read LOTR very young?)

(/nodnodnod)

(and I remember I found the whole Bombadil sequence confusing in the same way it confuses the hobbits)

the half-otherworldliness

it wasn't silly to me, it was just strange

Yeeeeeeesss that makes sense

like the folktale where the old lady has a key to the tree bed

I do not remember how I responded to it I'm afraid

But that makes total sense it's very-

Yeeeeeeeesss

And since Tom is FROM a constructed fairytale that makes sense

The whole sequence has some elements in common with a George MacDonald story

The somewhat more naturalistic novelesque tho still folkloric, hobbits -

Coming into contact with this other genre element

And when Tolkien does that with the Hobbits and the epic form later it - goes differently

It's interesting

yeeees