Wrong. I see this allegation a lot and it absolutely baffles me. Tolkien would have viewed God acting like Bombadil as sacrilegious.
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Bombadil does not *need* to be in the book for plot reasons. Merry could have gotten his barrow-sword some other way, or gotten some other magic sword. It’s a super cool story hook that he has a sword made by the Witch-King's mortal enemies, but whatever.
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Bombadil is in the book to show the Hobbits, and the reader by extension, two things. First, that power without responsibility for others is ultimately meaningless. The one person who can safely hold the Ring can’t be trusted with it because he is not responsible enough.
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Yes, it’s a Spider-Man gambit. But that’s the lesser of the two reasons. The other one is far more important.
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Frodo meets basically what is left of the Gods in Middle-Earth. Demi-Gods, at least. Gandalf the Maia. Galadriel the Light-Elf. Elrond, son of Eärendil the Blessed. Aragorn, heir of Númenor and descendent of Lúthien. They are all powerless before the evil of the One Ring.
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But this funny little old man can disregard it entirely. It has no power over him whatsoever. Standing before him in a bright blue coat and yellow boots is proof that the Ring is NOT all-powerful. That there are other powers in this world than Sauron and darkness.
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He needs to see that. He needs to know it. It may not come up a lot specifically, but under it all, until his own fall into darkness, he has that to hang on to. Sauron is mighty, but he is NOT the God of this world, and his works have limits.
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Replying to @legalinspire @eigenrobot
okay. i basically considered that and discarded it because it's almost exactly the same narrative function the Shire fulfills. maybe it's important that there be things that are not-home but still homey, idk
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on reflection a valuable thing i think Bombadil does is complicate the setting in a way that relates it more strongly to the fairy tale tradition, which is probably why awful nerds hate him, it's a counteragent to the technicalization that characterizes Tolkien-derivative work
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Replying to @chaosprime @eigenrobot
Heh. This I like. Have you read "The Deed of Paksennarion?
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hunh. i... think i might have?
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Replying to @chaosprime @eigenrobot
Paksennarion starts out as mundane as can be. She basically bullies the Gods into giving her the power to protect others. ("How do you bully a God?" "Carefully. Very carefully.") But the world becomes as magical as she is willing to be. As she grows, the world expands.
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This is sort of the opposite of Middle-Earth in general but very like the journeys of the Hobbits. It's not so flowery as Middle-Earth (I mean, Tolkien literally wrote dictionaries) but it is as close as I think I've read to the spirit of it.
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