This is more of a literature survey than an outline, but you seem to be on the right track.
You need to begin with a thesis statement and then tell me how you intend to develop your topic. Lydia Fish October 30, 2008, at 12:32 PM
My research paper is on Tom Bombadil. I picked up the last of my sources that I requested through Inter-Library Loan yesterday, so I’m still in the process of reading through all of those. Right now my ideas are very fragmented. I’m not sure of my main idea yet. I could just keep it as the very broad topic of Tom Bombadil, but I’ve found a lot of information on him and I don’t want my paper to be too general. As soon as I finish reading through all of my sources I will have a better idea of how I want to set up my paper.
I’m going to go back to The Lord of the Rings and reread the parts of the text where Tom Bombadil is present or mentioned by other characters because I don’t have time to read the whole work again. This would be more difficult if it weren’t for the index located conveniently at the end of Return of the King. Hopefully by reading those parts of the text closer I’ll be able to discover more things about Tom.
I found another work of Tolkien’s entitled The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Versus from the Red Book. This is a book of children’s poetry in which Tom is a central character. I have to look at the dates when this was first published as well as when The Lord of the Rings was first published to determine which came first. More specifically I’ll have to look at when Tolkien wrote each of them, because they could’ve been finished but just not published. It’ll be interesting to compare Tom’s representation in the book of poetry to The Lord of the Rings, and whether or not Tom was invented before.
I have several articles that try to classify Tom. None of them really come to any conclusions about what he is, but they rule out just about everything he is not. A lot of the terms these papers use are unfamiliar to me, so I have to do some additional research to figure out what they mean as well. I don’t think I’ll be able to find the answer to what Tom is, because I don’t really think anybody knows for sure, but exploring what he is not and why certain classifications don’t work is an interesting topic.
I borrowed a book called The Return of the Shadow. In this book there is information about the old forest, the river in the forest, Tom Bombadil, and Tom and Gandalf. I’ve only skimmed these chapters but from what I’ve seen they all have a lot of useable information. Tom’s relationship with the forest figures prominently in the text so that’s another interesting topic I could explore. I also found it interesting that Tom and Gandalf seem to know each other, yet they are never presented together in the text.
I received a book through the interlibrary loan from one of the Tolkien Society Workshops. It has Shippey’s name on it, so I figured there would be some insightful ideas in it. I’m not sure if it’s something I could really cite though, because some of the text is just recorded parts of conversation between different Tolkien scholars. It does, however, present a lot of interesting ideas I could look for in other sources. So I could use it as a source I reference but don’t quote from. One of the interesting claims made is that Tom Bombadil was the name of a doll owned by Michael Tolkien. I have no clue if this is true or who Michael Tolkien is, but it’s worth researching further.
One of the articles I am looking at is The Cosmic Couple. It deals with Tom’s relationship with Goldberry. This relationship is present in The Lord of the Rings although it is not very developed. Tom and Goldberry are both present in The Red Book as well, so this could be another interesting comparison between the two. In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth the author of one of the articles explores possible connections between Tom and the Kalevala. I haven’t finished reading this article yet, but it seems that there are similarities between Treebeard and Tom that are worth researching further as well.
I have three or four addition articles that are pretty lengthy and deal with Tom as their main subject that I haven’t looked at yet. My outline is basically what I’ve found out so far from what I have read of my sources. My subject is pretty broad and there are a lot of different ways I could continue with it. I hope to have a more definitive idea of what I want to write about once I finish sifting through all the information I’ve gathered.
