Asklemmy

43757 readers

1904 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

172

What is Tom Bombadil? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

91 comments fedilink hide all child comments

He is not a hobbit, neither a man, but what is he? Is he a dwarf? A wizard? A god? Something else entirely?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Tolkien was just retelling legends, folktales, fairy tales, children's bedtime stories etc. He did piece them together to create extended connected lore, but not everything gets cleanly explained away in this kind of worldbuilding technique.

So really imo Tom Bombadil is just some contrivance of Tolkien to make the story feel more like some old fairy tale.