"Tom Bombadil is not an important person - to the narrative"

His boots are yellow.

There's a fascinating structural moment in Lord of the Rings, where JRR Tolkien breaks a very fundamental rule of narrative construction: he stops the plot cold to explore something that has no ultimate bearing on the story.

The plot Tolkien has established at this point is relatively straightforward.  Frodo has inherited the Ring, and Gandalf has discovered that it is an evil and powerful object.  Now, Frodo and his hobbit friends must carry the Ring to Rivendell, and the Black Riders are in hot pursuit.  

Here, Tolkien takes a digression for several chapters in the home of Tom Bombadil, a whimsical, singing character who dwells in the forest with Goldberry, his river-spirit bride.  Bombadil is indifferent to the Ring; the object has no power over him, even though it can tempt and corrupt other powerful figures like Gandalf and Galadriel.  Similarly, Tom isn't especially concerned with the conflict that threatens to engulf Middle Earth.  

The hobbits spend a couple of chapters in his house.  Then they move on with their quest, passing through the Barrow Downs where they almost get eaten by zombies.  Frodo invoke's Bombadil's name, and Bombadil appears to smite the monsters.  However, Bombadil refuses to accompany the hobbits beyond his woods; he is unwilling to serve as their guide or protector.   

Later on, when Elrond's council at Rivendell is trying to figure out a solution to the story's central problem of keeping the Ring out of the clutches of evil, they consider giving it to Bombadil.  Bombadil is incorruptible, and Sauron's armies aren't strong enough to take the Ring from him.  

But the Elves can't make Bombadil care about the wars of men and elves and orcs, about the fate of the world, or about much of anything.  Gandalf believes Bombadil is incapable of understanding how important the Ring is to the mortal races, because it isn't important to him. If they entrust the most important object in the world to Tom Bombadil, he might get bored and lose it.


Bombadil doesn't appear again in Lord of the Rings after this.  He plays no significant role in the plot.

So what's the point of stopping at Bombadil's house?  Arguably, there isn't one.  Peter Jackson cut Bombadil out of the film adaptation, precisely because he stops the story.  Further, Bombadil's indifference to the Ring undercuts the central idea that the Ring is enormously powerful, and influences and corrupts everyone who encounters it.

Tolkien fans have been vexed for decades by the question of what Bombadil is, and what his presence means in Lord of the Rings.  In Tolkien's encyclopedic cosmology of Middle Earth, there is no explanation for Bombadil.  This omission is clearly intentional.  Tolkien said:  "I don't think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it."  When Frodo asks Goldberry what Tom is, she says "He is."  Tom describes himself as the "Eldest" and "The Master," and says he remembers the first raindrop on the first acorn.


Some readers postulate that he may be a Maiar, a wizard, like Gandalf, or some kind of nature spirit.  But the only interpretation that makes sense to me is that Bombadil represents the role of God in a global conflict between nations of good and evil mortals.

Whether or not Bombadil can be read into the Tolkien cosmology as an angelic Vala or as a manifestation of Eru-Illuvatar, the creator-god of Tolkien's fictional universe, his purpose in Lord of the Rings is to explore the question of where God fits into the events of the narrative.  Middle-Earth is not an allegory like C.S. Lewis's Narnia, but it nonetheless draws themes from Tolkien's experience, and from his beliefs.  Lord of the Rings was written during the 1940's when Nazism and fascism threatened to overrun Europe; Tolkien's England was besieged by the Nazis just like Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith were besieged by the forces of Isengard and Mordor.  

The reader isn't likely to wonder why Illuvatar doesn't intervene to destroy the Ring or break Sauron; that's not the way readers relate to stories.  But Tolkien likely struggled to reconcile his belief in a benevolent, omnipotent God with the horrors of World War 2, and the apparent silence from the heavens in the face of the monumental wrongs of that age.  Lewis imagines his Aslan as a benevolent protector who is in control of the situation even when He seems, from the characters' viewpoint, to be absent.  Aslan always arrives to deliver His assistance when the heroes truly need it.  Lewis might have seen the Allied victory as proof of a Divine plan, working invisibly but inexorably on the side of the good guys.

But Frodo must succeed or fail on his own.  Bombadil, as a stand-in for God in Middle-Earth, is benevolent, but aloof and indifferent to the waxing and waning fortunes of Men and Elves and Hobbits.  What's important to the characters is not important to him.  Even as darkness threatens to swallow the world, he cannot be persuaded to care; he predates light.  

But this isn't a theme of Lord of the Rings, it's a digression.   Tom is an appealing character and the chapters about him are beautiful to read.  But he doesn't belong in the story.  Tolkien set Middle-Earth outside the world and outside of his own faith; Middle-Earth is not a place where people invoke deities and expect intervention.  On the contrary, it's about the waning of mythic powers and about magic things giving way to the age of men.  So, the exploration of divine indifference isn't organic to this story.  Whatever Tom Bombadil is, he is not what Lord of the Rings is about, and that's what Peter Jackson realized when he cut Tom out of the films. Tolkien's letters on the subject essentially admit that Bombadil has no place in the structure; his inclusion is pure authorial self-indulgence.  Perhaps Tolkien's deliberate refusal to assign Bombadil a place within the cosmology can be read as an admission that the character doesn't belong in the story.   

For writers, the lesson is this:  Tolkien gets away with it, because he is Tolkien.  He can stop the plot because he can hold onto the reader until the story resumes.  But even Tolkien can't make this work.  Tom Bombadil is a loose end, left untied at the story's resolution.  He confuses readers.  They search for ways to tie the digression into the plot and into the theme, and they draw wrong conclusions.  They get distracted from the real point.  

If you're a lesser author than Tolkien (and you are, I promise), you will lose your reader in a digression like Frodo's visit with Tom Bombadil, especially if that reader is an agent or an editor.  Learn from the mistakes of great authors; don't use them as excuses to build flaws into your own stories.