Reddit reviews The Adventures of Tom Bombadil

You could always read The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but honestly, it's a long poem that has little to do with the character in LOTR. There isn't much information about him; Tolkien himself was (purposely or not) extremely vague on the topic. There are any number of internet fora where you can find discussion and Wild Mass Guessing, but here's what the man himself had to say about the matter:


"Frodo has asked not 'what is Tom Bombadil' but 'Who is he'. We and he no doubt often laxly confuse the questions. Goldberry gives what I think is the correct answer. We need not go into the sublimities of 'I am that am' - which is quite different from he is. She adds as a concession a statement of part of the 'what'. He is master in a peculiar way: he has no fear, and no desire of possession or domination at all. He merely knows and understands about such things as concern him in his natural little realm. He hardly even judges, and as far as can be seen makes no effort to reform or remove even the Willow. I don't think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already 'invented' him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an 'adventure' on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. I do not mean him to be an allegory - or I should not have given him so particular, individual, and ridiculous a name - but 'allegory' is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an 'allegory', or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are 'other' and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with 'doing' anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture . Even the Elves hardly show this: they are primarily artists. Also T.B. exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him. You must concentrate on some part, probably relatively small, of the World (Universe), whether to tell a tale, however long, or to learn anything however fundamental - and therefore much will from that 'point of view' be left out, distorted on the circumference, or seem a discordant oddity. The power of the Ring over all concerned, even the Wizards or Emissaries, is not a delusion - but it is not the whole picture, even of the then state and content of that part of the Universe."

-- J. R. R. Tolkien, draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, from The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter, 2000, Houghton Mifflin, pg 192.

That probably doesn't help much. It isn't supposed to. One is obviously not intended to inquire too deeply into exactly what Bombadil is -- and it doesn't matter anyway. The Silmarillion and most of the rest of the Middle-earth corpus is intended as a history of the Elves, and anything else that enters it is generally coincidental and of only passing interest to Tolkien himself. The fact that LOTR involves hobbits and men is only to show that the world of the Eldar is ending; it closes the history begun in The Silmarillion. In that history, Bombadil plays little part, and anything said of him must be regarded as speculation. Here's a 1986 essay on Tom by Gene Hargrove that may be interesting.

Yeah, Tolkien's poetry is usually overlooked but there's a lot of great stuff he wrote. "Cat" was from a collection called "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" and it's definitely worth a look if you want to get into some of his easier poetry...

You forgot the book of poems! The Adventures of Tom Bombadil were published during his lifetime and therefore are canon!