Here's a breakdown of the 9 different types, and why they say when they appear:
"Be not afraid"...
"Angel" (from the Greek "angelos") just means messenger. We think of God's messengers as winged humanoids, but encounters in the Bible get far more interesting than that...
Theologians have spent centuries making sense of their various descriptions.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite identified 9 distinct types of angel, from the mostly-humanoid to the much more abstract.
Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious character in The Lord of the Rings.
He's the oldest being in Middle-earth and completely immune to the Ring's power — but why?
Bombadil is the key to the underlying ethics of the entire story, and to resisting evil yourself… 🧵
Tom Bombadil is an enigmatic, merry hermit of the countryside, known as "oldest and fatherless" by the Elves. He is truly ancient, and claims he was "here before the river and the trees."
He's so confounding that Peter Jackson left him out of the films entirely...
This is understandable, since he's unimportant to the development of the plot.
Tolkien, however, saw fit to include him anyway, because Tom reveals a lot about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth, and how to shield yourself from evil.