First, he represented all the small pockets of unknown magic that could exist in Middle Earth. I would stare at the map of Middle Earth in the front of the book and wonder about the parts not covered in either The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. What strange things might be there? Tom heightened my sense of wonder about the world.
But second, Tom showed up just as the hobbits seemed to have met their darkest hour. You can dismiss this as deus ex machina on the part of the author, but it was a needed break from the stress and anxiety that had been building to a crescendo at that point. And I thought perhaps Tolkien was suggesting that sometimes you have to trust in the benevolence of strangers — or that some higher power is watching over the most vulnerable.
But he is definitely one of the most interesting characters and one of the best ways the story shows it is taking place in a big world with a lot of different things going on.
Certainly that he's more than meets the eye (that seems plain) but the conclusions here seem less common...
I think it's interesting to contrast the speculation in this article with the depiction of elves in The Hobbit (book) - much less obviously a benign force than as portrayed in LoTR.
The author's assumption - accepted as given at the outset - is that the "evil" within the Old Forest is genuine, rather than a representation of a certain perspective. The thesis is then that Bombadil must be guilty by association.
This initial assumption seems simplistic to me. A common trait of mystical (especially nature-connected) beings in northern European mythology (at least!) is a duality of intent - being a perhaps-positive yet untrustworthy force. This seems reflected in a lot of Tolkien's world; while Sauron / the Ring / others do have a more directly corrupt "evil" attributed to them, there's much more ambiguity elsewhere - it says of Old Man Willow that "his heart was rotten, but his strength was green": rotten != evil and in the context of nature has positive connotations (alcoholic fermentation) elsewhere in his writings. Green isn't necessarily positive either, but the usage here is notable.
In the Old Forest, there were certainly dangers, including some lethal ones, but loosely organized and operating independently. More druidic.
Whereas Sauron / Morgoth were far more hierarchical in structuring their domains, exerted dominion over their forces, and attempted to implement a master plan.
I always assumed a component of the forest was a way to keep Hobbits at home and home with the Hobbits.
Folks who had read the books would know what had happened, folks who hadn't would just have to accept it as a magical incident/rescue w/o explanation.
Fwiw I would've cast Tom Waits. And had musical scenes.
Why? He doesn't actually do anything except drone on and on about the color of his boots. He doesn't advance the story in any way (which is why it is so easy to omit him in adaptations).
OK, that's fair enough. But to my mind, this is just a setup that cries out for an explanation that never comes. It's a major flaw in the dramatic structure of the narrative, a bug not a feature.
But I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.
One of Tolkien's goals was to create something which resembled history rather than literature. Or if not history, then mythology that plausibly belongs to a real place, rather than a neatly-constructed story. So, some of the things that he does are "janky" from a purely dramatic perspective, but fulfill that purpose.
A common example from Lord of the Rings is having many related characters with the same or similar name. The convention in literature is to make characters distinguishable for practical reasons, but in "real" history naming conventions are messy and people aren't always distinguishable. There are even real debates among historians about whether a name refers to multiple people or not!
Tom Bombadil is a similar thing. He serves no dramatic purpose. But a history, or a mythology, doesn't always have events that fit together in a neat way. Sometimes stuff just happens, or there are things that are only tangentially related. And it's difficult to draw a circle around events and say inside the circle is our story, and outside the circle not our story. There are other stories, intersecting.
As a kid first reading it, I feared the barrow wights as much if not more than the Nazgul.
The whole aside was to show that the hobbits had truly "left the Shire" and that perils lay along the road in any direction they might turn. But, again, there were allies or, at least, guides all along that road as well.
Bombadil and Old Man Willow are a foreshadowing of the Ents to come.
OK, but Tom doesn't strike me as particularly perilous. He just seems weird.
As others have also stated, Tom is one of my favorite characters purely because he is left so unexplained. Tolkien sought to create a world. In order to create a world [0], it doesn't make sense for the whole of that world to be defined by a singular story or set of events. Least of all a world created by an author who so dearly loved folklore and mythology.
[0] an interesting one, anyway.
You could go on to explain that fact or similar, but I think driving home that point any more than Tolkien did just muddies it and makes it more clumsy.
Does that answer your question?
Ha! Yeah. At least you're consistent :-)
Lynch fills his works with characters and scenes that are—at best—plot-adjacent, whimsical/incongruous/uncanny, and full of often-unexplained and apparently-metaphysical mystery or magic. He's as likely to let mood or theme drive the content of and editorial-decision-to-include a scene or a shot or an entire character(!), as plot. It makes sense you'd dislike his stuff if you don't like the Bombadil section of LOTR.
(this is not intended as some kind of judgement, to be clear, I was just curious if works with similar qualities had the same effect for you, or it was something specific to that kind of element being in LOTR in particular, maybe because of the context or something)
LOTR is mostly like that. Most of the events make sense in the context of the overall arc of the narrative. If you ask, "Why is this scene here?" there is usually an answer.
Except Tom. He appears, puts on the ring, fails to disappear -- which is quite extraordinary! --- and that's it. The end. Toodle-oo. Vanishes entirely from the story without so much as a by-your-leave. Why was he introduced? To this day I have no idea. And that is why Tom bothers me particularly. With Lynch you know what you're getting. Tom seems like a bit of a bait-and-switch.
He is the only character in the middle earth that can do that actually. The ring, and its immense power, has control over everyone else incl. Gandalf, Galadriel, and Sauron.
Just in case it wasn't a typo, you certainly meant 'entomologist'.
It's like making a movie based on the Bible but omitting the Resurrection of Jesus.
The scene at Mount Doom where the Ring is finally destroyed is analogous to the Resurrection, not Tom Bombadil.
Incongruent facts are always interesting. IMO.
He advances the world and builds context for many elements in the later story. Fangorn has many parallels to the Old Forest, and much of the storyline involving Ents & Huorns benefits from the context given by the earlier encounters with Tom's neighbouring spirits (and his enchantment of them).
Perhaps it was the age when I first read the books (~12 or so years old) – but I loved the contrasts between the cozy world of the hobbits and the more savage, epic nature of the rest of Middle-earth.
For me, Tom Bombadil never fit well into either of these categories. There was a while where I heard about Tom Bombadil potentially being Eru Ilúvatar, but that theory has been found pretty lacking in various aspects, as well as having been debunked by Tolkien himself.