So Long, Bombadillo

Vacillus pointed out that my last post felt incomplete. Very astute of him. I did not manage to communicate everything that I felt like communicating. The truth is, I was half asleep when I wrote last night. If I had watched a lesser film than Pan's Labyrinth, I would not have bothered to write at all.

So let me make another attempt to explain why I love fantasy. I'm going to try to explain with the help of Tom Bombadil, one of the most engaging literary characters I have ever met. Tolkien created Tom, but he never found his way into Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies.

At first, Tom Bombadil appears to have a perfect existence. He lives in a house on a hill with his beautiful wife. They simultaneously live in harmony with nature, and in control of it. Tom is above evil, and it cannot touch him. Yet his invincibility is what makes his story tragic.

All over Middle-Earth, the Dark Lord Sauron's agents sow terror through open conquest and secret murder. Yet Tom's idyll is unaffected. He lives in an oasis of peace. Which he cannot leave. Because just as evil cannot lay a finger on him, he cannot fight it either. All he can do is watch while all that is worth fighting for draws deeper and deepr under a shadow of forbidding evil. He has no choice to do otherwise; he is a prisoner of his own utopia. So his strength becomes his weakness. Eventually the Dark Lord is defeated, but that defeat changes the balance of forces in the world and leads to Tom himself fading away into legend.

In the end, all the reader is left with is a wistful image of pastoral bliss so intense that it's mortality was inevitable.

Tom is just one of the reasons why fantasy is special. One of these days, Vacillus, I'll introduce you to Lyra. Then you'll discover a new level of bittersweet.