In a previous lifetime—as it seems to me—I read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings many times in a row. I discovered The Fellowship of the Rings some years before the rest of it, though; for some reason there was a paperback copy of that first LOTR volume, and none of the others, among the books that our RL parents had amassed in the small apartment where my sibling and I lived until about 1985 or so. It's confusing in retrospect, because when I discovered the rest of The Lord of the Rings in adolescence my RL mother's reaction was one of such extreme disgust that now I have to wonder why she consented to have even one Tolkien book around the household. Perhaps she was able to persuade herself that it was mostly harmless children's fare, a permissible distraction in early years but a stupefying influence later in life.
Maybe she was right. I did, after all, grow up to be a failure.
Rereading Tolkien sustained me through unhappy and lonely years in the 1990s, especially after I failed out of Caltech, but then I learned more about Tolkien's literary circle and his friends like C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and I stopped leaning so heavily upon Tolkien per se. Ironically I think it may have been Peter Jackson's appalling LOTR films that finally put me off the habit of going back to reread The Lord of the Rings when was feeling at a loss for anything better to do, and needed some comfort. It was no longer possible for Tolkien's LOTR to be entirely comfortable after seeing what Jackson had done to it, and after colliding with the toxic fan community that exploded into existence around Jackson and his noisy movies. I was forced to realize that the bulk of Tolkien's online fandom had very different ideas from me about what was worthwhile in The Lord of the Rings, and I got nowhere trying to explain why I thought the Jackson movies trampled on the spirit of the text. It seemed to be taken as an article of faith—defended fiercely, with anger and abuse—that Jackson had made the best LOTR films possible.
As a result I simply drifted away from Tolkien altogether. There were always other things to do, other books to read. Not until re-visiting Ralph Bakshi's sadly truncated Lord of the Rings animated adaptation a few years ago did I feel the old spark again—I actually wept when I saw it, in fact, because I felt vindicated. "Yes! it IS possible to make a LOTR film, even a haphazard and imcomplete one, that feels like Tolkien." Bakshi's film, I felt, had the spirit in it; Jackson's coarse action-movie treatment did not. Some day, I told myself, I'd finally put together all my thoughts about why Jackson's LOTR movies feel like such a travesty to me, and perhaps that would also serve as a pretext for examining my own ideas about "respectful adaptation" vs. "bad adaptation" of a text into a movie.
Right now, in Tolkien's text, I'm up to the house of Tom Bombadil. Poor old Tom—bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow, but to a massive subset of fantasy fans he's the veritable symbol of Tolkien's failings as a writer. Peter Jackson's Hollywood-formula condensation of The Lord of the Rings was necessary, goes the conventional wisdom, because Tolkien is a "boring" writer; it's like Jackson made his movies specifically for the readers who skip half of Tolkien's book because they're impatient to get to the magic and the fighting. Bombadil has a lot going against him as a character: he's a deus ex machina, he talks too much and half the time it's doggerel poetry (even his ordinary speech has a sing-song quality to it), so it's like the hobbits have stumbled from a horror film into a musical when they meet up with Bombadil. And Tolkien lingers on Bombadil for a while; he's in three chapters.
And yet...cutting him out means, effectively, excising an enormous chunk of Tolkien's text in which we get to see the hobbits—all of them—being as clever and resourceful as they can given the circumstances, and sure they end up needing Tom's deus ex machina powers to bail them out, but that seems fitting to me: the hobbits have reached the outermost edge of their knowledge of the world. Tom Bombadil and his chatter end up serving as a bridge, not merely between the Shire and the regions beyond but between the hobbits' limited perspective and the vast stretches of time and history that they've never known much about. The world isn't just much bigger and more dangerous than even their worst fears have told them; it's also immensely older, and Tom gives the hobbits a little taste of that immense age.
"I bet you're mad that Peter Jackson ditched Tom Bombadil," is something I've read many times. And I'll say it; I'll cop to it. Yes, I'm peeved that Jackson did that, and I don't buy the excuse that there wasn't time for old Tom, not even a few minutes—not in a film that turns Moria into a protracted and ridiculous theme-park ride.
~Chara of Pnictogen