Recently I read very interesting articles showing some aspect of two popular sagas in a different light:
- Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil,
- A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope.

Now, you may agree with them or not, but personally I like to read these unusual interpretations of some popular works, especially when they are well thought out.

So, anyone read some different analyses that they want to share or maybe even have their own ones?

 

Considering writing a short fanfic based on his Tom Bombadil essay.

Great stuff.

Edit:

Can't stop thinking of ways to make Tom into what remains of Melkor.

A leap, yeah, but I'm starting to think it could be done.

That particularly screams Melkor to me. That is virtually the entire reason for his existence, before Time begins. To disrupt the Harmony with his own.

They are both frequently likened to hills.

Both are frequently described as the 'greatest', be it 'being' or 'power'. It is known amongst those who do know who he is that he is made up of the land, a very embodiment of the environment he is master of... the very environment that Melkor 'dispersed' into.

If Tom, in this strange, self-made prison that he commands and has grown in his own image, is actually what remains of Melkor, cut off from the spirits he originally could summon in the Discord and having created his own, weaker, 'improved' version of the Discord in the Forest he lives in... there is no reason particularly that he would want to leave. Not in his weakened state, at least. Even if he did want to, the original Discord was created by a lack of Harmony between the first songs and his own. Which would explain the boundaries that he cannot cross, the borders of his Forest.

In terms of Melkor being banished into the Void, in the Beginning he returns from the Great Void multiple times, after searching for the Secret Fire. If being put into the Void forcibly revealed what he had searched for all those times, namely Eru's Power of Creation, it's not unfeasible that he used the Flame to create that small environment in which he is 'Master' within Arda once again.

Tom, canonically, is more powerful than Sauron and his servants. The ring has no effect, benignly or malignantly. He can see Frodo while he wears it, and feels no draw towards it. It is supported by various statements in the books, but it is overall implied that he is more powerful than... any other power in Middle Earth. He has also been there since before almost all of them. This... this all fits with Melkor.

Or perhaps not. But what I'm envisioning, fic-wise, is an unnerved Gandalf riding tentatively around the borders of the Forest, talking to himself and also to Tom, who he thinks might be listening, hypothesizing on who he is, what he has always suspected him of being, trying to probe his own mind in the monologue and figure out, as Gandalf likes doing, what exactly to do by thinking aloud. Tom never appears, though sometimes a tree just within the forest seems to creak a little threateningly, or a bird's call seems slightly off, all the while Gandalf talks to the forest, and to him. This is the scene that is left out of the Trilogy - Gandalf, even after everything that has happened and Sauron's defeat, just riding out to check that everything is calm around the forest - that Bombadil is quiet, perhaps does not know of Sauron's downfall - and that the forest is not expanding.

It ends within Gandalf deciding that, within his little Kingdom, the 'Master' is content. Uneasy, he rides away from the Forest, singing softly to himself, the sound lost as a sudden wind creaks the trees behind him.

 

I read the Star Wars one first and found it pretty interesting, but Holy Shit. The LOTR one was awesome.

I would read the shit out of that, Grinning Lizard. It would be even better if someone could write a novel-length story in which Men and Hobbits (the hobbits somewhat reverting back to what they were before they settled down in the shire out of necessity) must unite forces and fight against Bombadil. Create a new hobbit main character and everything. That would be awesome.