I am a big fan of the Tom Bombadil section of The Fellowship of the Ring. (In fact the bit in between the hobbits leaving Hobbiton and arriving in Bree may be my favourite part of the entire trilogy.) I will defend it to the last. But even if you are one of the many who hate it, Tom Bombadil provides an interesting talking point.
If Tolkien had been taking a creative writing class, he would have been warned sternly not to include Tom Bombadil. He violates the "Chekhov's Gun" principle in having no real relevance to the wider plot, and seems in all respects an unnecessary tangent at time of tension in the story. Better to cut him out entirely, as indeed Peter Jackson decided to do. (There was a point when - ha! ha! - Peter Jackson actually had the notion in his head that less could be more. If only he'd stuck to that principle.)
But Tolkien put Tom Bombadil in there quite deliberately to stand as an enigma. I don't think he himself had a clear idea who he was, except for the fact that he seems to instantiate various things Tolkien believed important (pacifism, anti-materialism, humility, etc.). The purpose is to make the reader wonder - nothing more and nothing less.
In gaming, the Tom Bombadil gambit - just putting stuff in the campaign map without a clear idea what they're for or why they're there - can be developed to even better effect than in a novel, because it not only gives he players the opportunity to wonder; at some point the DM can riff on the players' wonderings to work whatever it is into the campaign. What starts off as an enigma can suddenly become useful in that "A ha!" moment when the DM realises that things seem to be fitting together behind the scenes.
I tend to use it more and more and increasingly wonder whether one day I might run a campaign entirely made up of Tom Bombadils. Without really thinking much about it, just jotting down a number of different NPCs, locations, monsters, etc. No planning or thinking about the relations between them whatsoever - until play begins and the PCs start messing with it all.
A campaign of Bombadils?!? The horror.......
ReplyDeleteTake a look at this first!
http://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html
Yeah, I have seen that one before. It's a fun idea.
DeleteIt gets worse:
Deletehttp://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/bombadil.htm
You could argue that Yoon Suin is a TBG generator.
ReplyDeleteYou could indeed.
DeleteThe Scourge of Tikbalang from Zzarchov Kowolski had a...
ReplyDelete[SPOILERS ALERT]
... "monolith" or whatever that serves as Tom Bombadil. In the end of the module he says something like "The monolith? It is just a stone with gibberish carved or whatever. It has no real purpose."
BTW the module is awesome. 10/10
Interesting take. I agree with you 100% on the value of Tom in LOTR. And, I throw gobs of weird stuff in every dungeon I run for my group - sometimes I know what it means, sometimes I don't. Occasionally it will gain some sort of meaning when I riff off the players reaction, but I think mine have become so jaded they see something really weird and either fear it, or just plain ignore it. Very sad.
ReplyDeleteMan, I'm reading LOTR for the first time and I literally just finished the Tom Bombadil section last night. So this post stands out to me. Reading it I was like "Man, this is some ridiculous horseshit." But I've been taking notes on the book for D&D and Bombadil definitely brings this entire "There are no rules" feeling to the book so far that I actually like (all the singing aside). I like that he's a good example of a powerful NPC that low level characters could meet and that could help them fight powerful creatures like Wights, without diminishing their agency. They choose when to call on Bombadil, which is cool. And then they all get treasure, which is also cool. Anyways, rambling over.
ReplyDeleteTom Bombadil is like Marmite basically.
DeleteIf you put something in the game, even if you mean for it to be meaningless, the several players will find a way to impart meaning. They always do.
ReplyDeleteIndeed!
DeleteA few thoughts, mostly about the preamble rather than the point:
ReplyDelete-I'm a fan of the Old Forest/Bombadil section, too. It's the first real sustained trial of the nascent fellowship, for one thing. It gives them some information and gear that they go on using for a long time. It expands the world by reminding the reader that there are things just minding their own business outside of the War of the Rings. And it's just a welcome splash of folktale-feel and color.
-Tolkien kind of was taking a creative writing class. Well, more of a workshop. He was in a group that called themselves the Inklings, which also included C.S. Lewis. I'm not enough of a Tolkien nerd to know what they thought about that section of the story, though.
-What I read once is that Peter Jackson originallyl planned for The Hobbit to be two movies, but the higher-ups forced him to stretch it out to three, which is both why it's so bloated with filler and why the pacing is so weird.
-I'm pretty sure that Bombadil is in there in large part because he was Tolkien's pet. He shows up in a couple poems collected in The Tolkien Reader, so it seems like he had a life of his own before LotR and managed to find his way in at an opportune moment when Tolkien needed a deus ex machina.
-"A campaign of Bombadils" probably describes the way a lot of teenagers play, or at least played before the proliferation of modules and adventure paths. That's basically how you get a funhouse dungeon: somebody throws in a bunch of random unrelated whatever because they feel like it, and only afterwards (if at all) do they try and bind it together with some excuse like "A mad wizard!"
-That said, even if the GM is normally a meticulous planner, I totally support just throwing things into the campaign because they seem cool or fun, and looking for a chance to connect them in a deeper way later on. Surprises are part of the fun, after all!
Well, the Inklings weren't really a creative writing class, certainly not in the formal sense.
DeleteI think even if The Hobbit had been two films it still would have been bad. It is horrendously overlong and paced weirdly, but there are deeper problems than that to do with tone, dialogue, etc.
I'm in a minority in that I HATED Jackson's LOTR. Hated. That said, I respect that he made choices about what was appropriate to transfer to a film and what wasn't. That said, Tom Bombadil added complexity and diversity to Tolkien's World. My favorite chapter in LOTR was the discussion of what to do with the ring. They consider all the options including giving it to Bombadil. But they reject that because they predict he would eventually just forget about it or whatever. The equivalent bit in the movie is a simplistic cartoon. Long live Tom Bombadil and Goldberry.
ReplyDeleteI liked the "Fellowship" film a lot; my enjoyment decreased with each installment, and as I view them in retrospect I like them even less. There are some parts of the second and third films that I utterly despise.
DeleteI only watched the first installment of The Hobbit. It was so bad that I couldn't bring myself to watch the others.
I am pretty much in agreement here. Fellowship was a nice movie, Two Towers is an okay one. And then it's a descend from "disappointing" to "just awful".
DeleteIt wasn't just Jackson, Ralph Bakshi and the BBC left Bombadil out of their adaptations as well.
DeleteHe is a pretty polarizing figure, most of the people I know consider him to be either the best or the worst part of the trilogy.
Personally I like him all right, but then I am the type who prefers world building over narrative.
On a related note I actually prefer the Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings (book versions) because the Hobbit isn't afraid to leave the world big and mysterious, you get all sorts of nods to creatures and places that don't show up anywhere else in the story (or the Silmarillion and related backstory) and are viewed as "non-canon" by most Tolkien fans.
Very good post. Articulates some of my own simmering thoughts on this, though I never got further than stating it as "don't let internal consistency get in the way of a good idea."
ReplyDeleteThe Known World is basically build, unapologetically, on this principle. "This is cool", "So is this." And then figure out how they fit together down the line. It builds its own kind of coherence.
Yeah, exactly. The Known World is such a great setting for that reason.
Delete-"What starts off as an enigma can suddenly become useful in that "A ha!" moment when the DM realises that things seem to be fitting together behind the scenes."
ReplyDeleteThis is pretty much how I run all my games. Put enough interesting stuff in the world and the players will invent "whys" and "what's next" and theories all on their own. Individual locations or people might have hidden reasons, but the rest is all coincidence, similar themes, and luck to make it seem like there's an overarching plan.
I love putting little bits of mystery into the game world with no explanation, but it never works out well.
ReplyDeleteThe players always try and investigate it or game some strategic advantage from it, which always stalls the game while the players look for some hidden explanation or plot hook that just isn't there.
I used to love using a wilderness setting dressing table for overland travel from Dragon magazine, but then one day the players found the remains of an ancient battlefield. They then spent the rest of the session excavating the area, hauling the rusty old armor and weapons they found back to town, and then trying to find someone who was interested in giving them top dollar for the scrap. Not fun.
Okay, gonna get all nerdy on you. Tom Bombadil served a huge purpose to the legends of the Ring, Gandalf had no idea that he existed, nor did any of the other world scholars. He was a nature spirit, a fairy. One doesn't summon Bombadil, his power is immense but unfocused. He is familiar but illusive.
ReplyDeleteThe Hobbits at that stage were innocent. They were children, and children see things and experience things that adults cannot, especially when it comes to fairies.
Tom Sawyer finding gold in an abandoned house, triggered all of the adults searching abandoned houses, but they aren't going to find any. That is a literary theme that goes way back, and is repeated in Lord of the Rings. Nature spirits also arrived in the form of Ents.
Myth within myth is a common theme in LotR, we know that the Rangers kept the Hobbit forests safe for as long as they could, but they had help. Fairies. There is a lot to ponder in the appearance of Bombadil. It serves an emotional purpose, but a literal one as well.
Children know Tom Bombadil, he makes perfect sense to them. They don't question it. It is when we are adults and read that section again that these questions arise, and that is another point behind him appearing.
Okay, I'll stop. :)
What you're saying just isn't true, though. Gandalf and the other members of the Wise did know that Bombadil existed. During the Council at Rivendell, someone (Frodo?) specifically suggested giving him the ring since he was unaffected by its power, but members of the Council explain why, based on his nature, this would be a bad idea. They couldn't do that if they didn't know of his existence.
DeleteThe barrow-wights were clearly aware of Bombadil as well, given that his power was able to drive them off.
It's also worth pointing out that the hobbits were all adults, not children. They may have all been bachelors and therefore virgins, but I wouldn't call them "innocent." They'd all had some experience with the encroaching darkness at that point, and Frodo especially was relatively well steeped in lore of things from outside the Shire, including knowing about the terrible power of the ring.
There's no evidence for any helpful "faeries" in the Old Forest aside from Bombadil and his wife; the trees are the only other supernatural thing we see, and they're angry and hostile.
Your idea is cute, and I agree that the idea of a happy-go-lucky colorful singing spirit of unknown provenance and power would make the most sense to children, but that doesn't mean that that was his function in Middle-Earth.
LotR is full of esoteric meanings. The race of the hobbit is the key figure, and has two deep figurative elements which make them work. 1. They are Soldiers, and 2. They are Children. This goes back to the authors feelings while he sat in the trenches of WW1 for weeks or months at a time.
DeleteThe soldiers of WW1 were children. It is the blood of the youth which is most commonly spilled in any war. The hobbit is brave and bound by duty, but deep down all they want to do is go back home. These are the feelings which are projected.
There is another cool trick which Tolkien uses, the further away that one gets from the Shire, the stranger the names and more alien the world becomes. Bombadil and the May Queen are very familiar, especially to English readers at the time of its publication. That is key to understanding the novels. The shire is the English country-side, and the hobbits must leave it for foreign and exotic lands in order to protect it. They sacrifice themselves to protect everyone who lives there. When they return they are not the same people, they don't even fit in anymore. This is also how soldiers often feel when returning.
You do you, man. Just try to keep in mind that not everything happening in your head when you read a story is something that the author intended.
Delete"The Tom Bombadil Gambit" sounds like the title of a really weird spy thriller.
ReplyDeleteWow. The point made in this post is spot-on. Wonderful observation.
ReplyDeleteThe Bombadils of a world establish a reality where magical entities exist with their own lives/concerns, and that are not just plot devices. It adds depth and wonder to the world. Honestly, when I am writing an adventure and a Bombadil (good or evil) pops into the text, I find myself saying , "Oh! I didn't know you were in there!" Suddenly the otherwise mechanical exercise virtually writes itself. It's way more fun to hint at character depths without being explicit and opens the door to improvisation. Honestly, what's more fun than an enigmatic villain or ally?
The Old Forest/Downs section of the Fellowship established the characters of the hobbits and the world. Jackson skipping it was like tearing the heart out of the trilogy---it proved to me he just didn't "get it". Instead he gave us an trite Hollywood romance as a booby-prize. No visionary, he's just another mediocre director that's technically proficient. But, as I felt at the time of its release, at least he didn't make the trilogy a laughing-stock---just a disappointment to long-time Tolkien fans. He was very successful at opening the story up to a mainstream audience.
The Bombadil sequence is basically where the reader sinks their feet into the soil of Middle Earth and let them soak for a while.
ReplyDeleteApplying that particular angle to RPGs though.... I love the idea, but not sure how you'd do it well other than by fortuitous happenstance.
As for the movies - Given that one of the main functions of the first movie was basically to set the scene of middle earth and the character, it was disappointing that Bombadil was left out.
"Applying that particular angle to RPGs though"
DeleteThat's an interesting (implied) question, but I suspect that the method isn't the problem. The problem is that very few RPG worlds have the same living, lived-in feel that Middle-Earth did. Even official campaign settings with reams of official documentation tend to focus on different things than Tolkien did.
In more immediate terms, I think we'd agree that the rookie DM mistake of making extensive setting handouts or spending lots of time reciting flavor text isn't a great way to help players "sink their feet" into a world. But you can do a surprising amount just through roleplaying and mechanics.
If you use encounter tables well in the wilderness, you can characterize a region. If you have a character recognize things and give opinions about them - or otherwise slip in connections - that helps a lot too.
The spiders in Mirkwood could be a throwaway encounter, except that the elves have an opinion about them and later, they're linked to Shelob. The angry trees in the Old Forest are linked to the Ents. Bombadil isn't a one-off weirdo; he's discussed at Elrond's Council and the barrow-swords he gives the hobbits serve them for the rest of the story. The barrows themselves are said to be the remains of a lost human kingdom.
I feel like that's all it really takes. Make encounters and adventure locations like normal, but throw at least one little passing detail into each that links it to something else in the world, and have NPCs react to news of them or talk about them.