the thread has been re-published thanks to the new plaza - its author and his (worshipful) admins; also a Word document made by @Troelsfo from a version of the old plaza thread. behind this cast of credits, however, is the unfazed and unhurried work of @Saranna, the last of the old lore team to keep alight halfir's candle. for some years, Saranna ran a Fb group, which included several members of the old lore team, with an aim that most other members of the group seemed to regard as quixotic, namely to make a publication of halfir's plaza writings in memorium.
my own engagement with halfir's old plaza writings has never extended far beyond 'Peeling the Onion.' He was dead when I first read his monumental post, though I only came to understand this as I read its last pages. on the very last page of the waybackmachine thread, Troelsfo and Lord of the Rings speak their mind to Saranna's (subsequent) question and say what she refused to hear: halfir's argument was too all-over-the-place, ultimately incoherent. These two plaza loremasters of old, and maybe all but one of the others, gave up on this thread. They knew it contained gold, but their efforts revealed no scarlet thread.
Troelsfo and Lord of the Rings were correct. Yet one might turn the tables: what failed halfir was his audience, who he invited to put him right, yet took their time in so doing! In the event, only five years after the thread began was the right comment delivered.
What is most excellent in 'Peeling the Onion' is the first phase of the endeavour, articulated as a preliminary but necessary step, a surveying of *all* the textual evidence implicated in the genesis of Tom Bombadil. halfir here sets out the building blocks of *any* attempt to understand Tom Bombadil. Unfortunately, he fails - spectacularly, in my opinion - to understand the evidence he has assembled: *everything* that follows this introductory survey is wonky in one way or another.
As a reader's guide: if you open one of the two versions of this thread, then gaze with awe upon the opening wonderful textual exegesis - long and laborious, pregnant, and then skim the various lunatic fringe speculations that circle different versions of the original list of wild and crazy Bombadil theories with which halfir began.
halfir was posting this initial good stuff in 2005 and 2006; and the comments we can read on the internet archive (nb. no new plaza archive of this version has yet been made!) are respectful and intelligent enough. but it takes until 2010 for geordie to give his digested reflection on halfir's analysis of the original Bombadil texts. on my introduction on the new plaza archive i wrote:
geordie has been making interesting comments from the beginning. now, however, he pulls an amazing move: he sets the 1934 Bombadil material in the context of the archeological dig at Lydney Park, that drew the attention of Tolkien and the archeologist R. Collingwood. Suddenly, the second of the germ poems that halfir has shown us looks different - Bombadil who is not caught (by tree or badger or wight) - echoes the godling of Lydney Park, whose name, Nodens, means (explains Tolkien) *the Catcher.*#609 - on 8 May 2010, 'plaza source guru' geordie alerts his friend to an overlooked source
Suddenly, we have a context in which to make sense of Bombadil - a wild, very ancient realm, where Nodens of Lydney Park gazed east over the water to Sulis, goddess of the hot springs. geordie reads what halfir presented, and casts a net of gold - catching a salmon.
but it took him five years. halfir was still alive in 2010. indeed, he comments immediately, revealing - imo - a refusal to hear anything that his friend was saying. i guess he was too tired, burned out by his own post, and maybe already ill? in any case, *this* is where this thread got to, imo - and it is no mean feat to have got so far, we are talking Tom Bombadil here after all!
I suggest we can look at all this as a failure of communication or, simply, celebrate its success - albeit with the humbling realization that it takes a very long time to make sense of things.
for my own understanding of 'the Tom Bombadil question,' i would like to thank geordie for indicating what Troelsfo, Lord of the Rings, and even (especially!) halfir himself could not quite see, namely that Tom Bombadil as we know him arose in a poem of 1934 when Tolkien adopted this character (long named and dressed) to the role of a domestic spirit who could not be caught, echoing imagined stories of a sinister godling to the west, who was once known in those parts as 'the Catcher.' What Tolkien was doing when he wrote the 'Adventures of Tom Bombadil' was exploring something he had found in the air, and in the ground, and in the stones of Lydney Park.
