Tom Bombadil

Who he is

Tom Bombadil is one of the true mysteries of the histories, and the histories are content to leave him so. He appears as a short, stout man with a brown beard and a face creased with laughter, in a blue coat, yellow boots and a battered hat with a blue feather, singing nonsense as he walks. The Elves called him Iarwain Ben-adar, the oldest and the fatherless; the Dwarves Forn and the Men of the North Orald, all names meaning that he was ancient. He told the Hobbits that he had been in the world before the river and the trees, before the first acorn, before the Elves passed westward, and before the Dark Lord came from Outside; he remembers the first raindrop. Elrond had almost forgotten him, and Gandalf treated him with a respect he gave to few. Goldberry, when Frodo asked who he was, answered only that he was the Master.

He is not one of the Valar or Maiar in any recorded list, and the texts never say what he is; the atlas places him among the spirits and enigmas for that reason. Within his own country he has complete authority over living things, over the trees of the Old Forest, the waters of the Withywindle and the Barrow-downs, but he has never sought to extend it, and this refusal of mastery is the heart of his character. He does not own the land; he is simply its master, as the eldest.

Household

Tom lives in a house on the eastern edge of the Old Forest, under the hill where the Withywindle rises, with Goldberry, the River-daughter, whom he found among the water-lilies of the river and took to wife. His house is a place of lamplight, plain food and deep sleep, where evil cannot come, and travellers who reach it are safe. He keeps a pony called Fatty Lumpkin, who befriended the Hobbits' ponies when they were lost. He knows every creature of his country and their histories, and he talks with badgers, birds and the trees themselves, though the trees he governs by song rather than by friendship.

The Hobbits

On 26 September T.A. 3018, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, lost in the Old Forest, were seized by Old Man Willow. Tom came along the river bank to gather lilies for Goldberry, heard their cries, and sang the tree into releasing them. He took them home, fed them, and kept them two days while the rain fell. He told them the history of the forest and of the Barrow-downs, and when he asked to see the Ring, Frodo gave it to him. Tom put it on and did not vanish; he spun it and made it disappear instead, then handed it back, and Frodo, slipping it on to test him, found that Tom could see him perfectly well. The Ring had no hold on him at all.

On 28 September the Hobbits, riding over the Downs, were caught in fog and taken by a Barrow-wight. Frodo, remembering a rhyme Tom had taught them, sang for him, and Tom came at once, broke the barrow open, drove the wight out with a song, and roused the others. From the treasure of the mound he chose for each Hobbit a long dagger of the ancient work of Arnor, forged long ago in the wars against Angmar; it was Merry's blade from that barrow that later broke the spell on the Witch-king at the Pelennor Fields. Tom set the Hobbits on the road to Bree and would not pass the bounds of his own country.

The Council of Elrond

At Rivendell Erestor asked whether the Ring might be sent to Bombadil, since it had no power over him. Gandalf answered that he would not care to keep it and would likely lose it, since such things had no hold on his mind; and Glorfindel added that if all else fell, Tom would fall last. The Council did not send it. Tom's mastery, they judged, lay in his refusal to want anything, and that could not be made a weapon against Sauron.

Afterwards

On his way north after the war Gandalf left the Hobbits and turned aside to have a long talk with Bombadil, saying that he had never had the leisure before and that Tom was a moss-gatherer while he had been a stone doomed to rolling. What passed between them is not told. Tom Bombadil presumably lives still by the Withywindle, in his own country, unchanged by the passing of the Age.

Legacy

Tom Bombadil is the one figure in the War of the Ring whom the Ring could not touch, and the histories present him without explanation as a kind of limit: a being for whom power is simply uninteresting. The Hobbits of Buckland remembered him afterward in their songs and rhymes.

Tom Bombadil remains in his own country by the Withywindle, unchanged by the end of the Third Age.