[karmakaze]

I don't recall him having any impact on the story. The movie didn't lose anything by omitting the detour. To me it's like hedonistic gods in Buddhism--all powerful but not practically consequential to humans.

I thought it was going say Samwise.

[codeduck]

> I don't recall him having any impact on the story.

Well, he did rescue the hobbits from the Barrow Downs, and gave Merry Brandybuck one of the swords of Westernesse with which Merry ultimately wounded the Lord of the Nazgûl and thus permitted Eowyn to slay him in the battle of the Pelennor Fields...

[falsemyrmidon]

The barrow wights and old man willow are kind of cool.

[lanstin]

And Bombadil’s old forest, with a testy but not ultimately evil Willow tree is the heart of Tolkien’s vision of English wilderness - not tamed but not horrific either. The movie does a bit of violence to the complexities of the world - reducing the snow in Caradhras from an independent agent hostile to human affairs to Saruman, and removing the non-Sauron hostility of Old Man Willow. In Tolkien’s world, humans are not the sole or primary story, it involves ancient entities with differing interests woven into the fabric of existence, which we participate in but the story is larger than us.

[junior44660]

> To me it's like hedonistic gods in Buddhism--all powerful but not practically consequential to humans.

I thought Buddhist dieties are adapted Indo-Aryan / Vedic (and some post-IA) dieties which indeed have an effect on real world.

[irishcoffee]

Sam is the unsung hero. Tom however did hook them up with weapons iirc.