I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I read it as a kid in middle school and loved it. Before that, I read The Hobbit in 5th grade. It's fair to say that The Hobbit was the first novel I wanted to read, and in a way, was the first mile in the road that led me to get a BA in English. So why haven't I gone back and read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings before now? Well, for one, I don't reread much. I think I reread Where the Red Fern Grows because I had it assigned two different years in school, but beyond that, I'm scratching my head to remember any other books I've read more than once. If I had to put my finger on it, it's because there's so many good books out there that I don't want to waste my time reading one of them twice (which is somewhat ironic if you've read the "About" section of this blog).
Several months ago, I decided to reread The Hobbit. Since the movies have been coming out the last several years, I've found myself wishing I could remember which parts are in the book but not in the movies and if anything is switched around and what not. I felt the same way about The Lord of the Rings movies too. When I bought The Hobbit for pennies on Kindle, I still wasn't sure it was going to be worth it. I was wrong. I think I'll be rereading a lot of books. Granted, this is a bit different because I'd forgotten a lot about the books. I'd forgotten that Tolkien's style in The Hobbit is drastically different than The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is written as a children's book which, being a child at the time, was somewhat lost on me -- though it probably explains why I love it so.
One of the things that hit me while reading the The Hobbit through this time was the world which Tolkien creates. Oodles and oodles have been written on this. He created his own world. It jump started the renaissance of the fantasy novel. While the movies move so quickly that you hear a name or a reference to a time long gone, the novels are a go-at-your-own-pace affair. I would stop and look up names and places on Wikipedia, and nearly every one of them has a long history. Did you know that there were multiple races of elves? I didn't. What about that the dwarves came from Mount Gundabad? Nearly everything in Tolkien's universe that he created has a backstory and history.
Except for Tom Bombadil.
This has also been written about extensively. I just reread the section where Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin are saved by Tom Bombadil twice, once from Old Man Willow and the second time from the Barrow-wights. Tom is a bit of an enigma because he doesn't show up anywhere else in Tolkien's history. There is no backstory on Tom, and for that matter, there is no epilogue for him in the Red Book of Westmarch.
I really, really, really like that we have no idea who Tom Bombadil is, and here's why: Tom is a force of good that is unknown. There's an unexplainable hope that happens when good triumphs over evil, and it's big, strong, joyful, unknowable, and inexplicable. Tom is, in a way, deus ex machina, a term that comes from Greek drama. In ancient drama, a character would get into a jam, and there would be no way out. Then, when all hope was lost, a machine, probably some type of rope and pulley system, would lower an actor playing a god onto the stage to save the day. Literally, deus ex machina means "god from (or 'out of') the machine." This is Tom Bombadil. He's dropped right into the middle of The Lord of the Rings for no other reason than to remind the reader that there is more out there than we know that is good and right and it is winning.
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