Wait, what? I've never been especially attached to Tom Bombadil, but have nothing really against him either. That's a new one though.
I saw a lot of in costume LOTR characters in an Air New Zeland flight safety video someone posted on YouTube. http://youtu.be/cBlRbrB_Gnc I didn't want it buried in a ridiculously long "funny videos" thread. I think it might be appreciated here.
Tom Bombadil: ok, let's put a halt to this epic book for 5 chapters to bring you something different and annoying
The Tom Bombadil section always gave me the sense that Tolkien wasn't yet entirely clear on where the story was heading at the time. I'm sure he had it all at least somewhat mapped out, but Tom Bombadil just feels so out-of-place.
The first half of Fellowship reads like a sequel to The Hobbit (Because that is what it was supposed to be, at first) in that the Hobbits head out on an adventure and encounter various challenges and characters that are mostly unrelated to each other: the Old Forest, the barrow-wight, Tom Bombadil, etc. It is not really until Bree, or even Rivendell, that Tolkien finally focuses the story on the destruction of the Ring and the war against Sauron. Bombadil is a relic, so to speak, from an earlier conception of the story. (He is also a cameo from other Tolkien stories.)
OK, big geek to the rescue here. The Bombadil section had one very important point in it that wasn't made clear until The Return of the King. Inside the Barrow-Wright's lair, they found the high elvish knives that were made to specifically defeat the Witch King and was the knife that Merry drove into the Witch King just beforeEowyn killed him.
I can tell you some trivia about it although I'm not geeky. They shot the whole sequence at night, often with big hoses making rain on the cast, and it took months, so it was the most universally hated sequence in the trilogy from the actors' POV, not least because there were virtually no women on set for all of that time. At one point the Uruk Hai (or whatever) who were played by mostly Maori extras, had been standing in the cold for hours while the set was made ready. To keep their spirits up, they started singing Maori songs, which I'm sure was recorded because it was so weird seeing a bunch of orc monsters singing Pokarekare Ana.
In the movie, was he using one of the daggers they got from Galadriel? I suspect his sexual needs were being met by his live-in hippie girlfriend.
Yeah, it was definitely the Noldor dagger that Galadriel gave him. At least that pays some lip service to the idea of an enchanted blade, though not specifically the Arnorian swords meant to harm the Witch King.