Lord of the Rings' Most Polarizing Character Is Finally on Screen ...
Tom Bombadil may be the most argued-about character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, although fans who only know the film versions of the trilogy have likely never heard of him. There’s a reason Tom got cut from those films (although he has appeared in some foreign-language adaptations of Tolkien’s work). Apart from rescuing the hobbits from some malevolent entities in The Fellowship of the Ring, Tom does not advance the main storyline: the quest to destroy the One Ring. Amazon Studios’ The Rings of Power, now in its second season, is the first major English-language Tolkien adaptation to depict the merry fellow with his bright blue jacket and his boots of yellow. Sadly, it’s a portrayal that completely misses the essence of Tom.
In The Rings of Power, the Stranger (Daniel Weyman)—a character we now have every reason to believe to be Gandalf—encounters Tom while wandering with his Harfoot friends Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards) in Rhûn. Because the Stranger arrived in Middle-earth on a meteor with his memory wiped, he pursues a handful of clues and hazy inklings to discover his mission. The series depicts Rhûn, a little-known land in Tolkien’s fiction, as a desert roamed by masked soldiers in bedouin-style garb serving a “dark wizard,” who may or may not be Saruman. (No one can accuse the showrunners of failing to capitalize on viewers’ eagerness to revisit familiar Tolkien characters. Speculation that the Stranger or Halbrand might be Sauron drove many discussions of Season 1.)
In Rhûn, the Stranger encounters Tom (Rory Kinnear) after following a star map. Tom saves the Stranger from a devouring tree, gives him a hot bath, and makes an assortment of unhelpfully cryptic statements. When the Stranger asks Tom who he is, the response comes almost verbatim out of The Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo poses the same question. His name, Tom says, is the only answer. He is the world’s oldest creature. “Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.” He’s away from his customary digs by the Withywindle River, not far from the Shire—a highly unusual circumstance—because the desert they stand in used to be “green. Now it’s all sand.” Tom, a great lover of plants, has come east to see it for himself.
This is all very well, but soon the Stranger asks Tom to show him how to wield magic power over trees and wind and fire, and Tom issues such statements as “a wizard’s staff is like a name. It’s yours to wield already, if you prove yourself worthy of it. You showed today that you’re not, yet. Whether you can become so we shall soon discover.” Tom explains that the dark wizard in the desert must not be allowed to join forces with Sauron and that it is the Stranger’s task to “face them both.” He’s no longer Tom Bombadil, but a version of Yoda—in other words, the archetypal sensei, a mentor character appearing in far too many screenwriters’ riffs on Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.
Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil is no mentor. The character is named after a Dutch doll that once belonged to the writer’s children, and Tolkien wrote about his adventures perhaps as early as the 1920s. When Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings, the book was at first conceived as a sequel to the successful The Hobbit. Tom does feel a bit like a character from a children’s book, retrofitted for an adult novel, and just there for the fun of it. Tolkien himself admitted to a correspondent that Tom is “not an important person—to the narrative,” but then, crucially, he added that Tom does represent “something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”
Tolkien resisted explaining Tom, although he did once write to his publisher that Bombadil is the spirit of the beloved and imperiled English countryside of his boyhood. This has led to much theorizing about the character’s nature. Could he be one of the Ainur or Valar—archangel-like beings who serve Eru Ilúvatar, the supreme deity presiding over Tolkien’s invented cosmology? Or a Maia, like Gandalf himself, an immortal spirit positioned lower in the angelic hierarchy, but still powerful? Perhaps he’s a manifestation of Eru Ilúvatar himself, who created the universe by teaching the Ainur how to sing it into existence. It has even been suggested that Tom Bombadil is an aspect of that song, the Music of the Ainur, a theory that makes a certain amount of sense given how much singing Tom does in The Fellowship of the Ring. Then again, the singing could be due to his origins as a subject of Tolkien’s poetry. A large portion of Tom’s spoken dialogue rhymes and is written in iambic pentameter.
Tom’s penchant for breaking into song like a character in a musical brings up another subject for debate. Not every Tolkien fan loves Tom Bombadil. “When I would sit around with my friends talking about The Lord of Rings in my teens and 20s,” a friend told me, “we all hated Bombadil. It was a Gen X thing, because he was basically a hippie living the woods with his old lady, and we were against hippies. My kids, on the other hand, adore him.” Some readers find the hobbits’ encounter with Tom in the woods to be a tedious sidetrack from the main story.Others simply have an understandable aversion to people who go around saying things like “Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! my darling!”
The most important moment in the hobbits’ stay with Tom comes when Frodo hands him the One Ring. Tom peers through it, tosses it in the air, slips it on his own finger. Unlike everyone else (except Sauron) who wears the ring, he doesn’t become invisible. When he hands it back to Frodo and the hobbit tries the ring on again himself, Tom is the only one who can still see him. Later, when Frodo relates this marvel to the Council of Elrond, Gandalf explains that the ring has no power over Tom. However, the ring couldn’t be entrusted to him, because instead of keeping it safe from Sauron, he would likely misplace or forget about it. This revelation comes a little too early in the book to make its full impact felt until later, when the reader has had a chance to appreciate just how mighty the corrupting influence of the ring can be.
For this reason, I’ve always favored the theory that Tom Bombadil embodies the natural world. He’s far more interested in the change of the seasons and collecting waterlilies for his wife, Goldberry, the river’s daughter, than in the worldly doings of men, elves, dwarves, and the other civilized denizens of Middle-earth. “I kept him in,” Tolkien once wrote of the Bombadil episode in The Fellowship of the Ring, “because he represents certain things otherwise left out.” One of those things is an order uninterested in power or control, that unfolds unruled by anything other than natural laws. The battle between good and evil that consumes the other characters in The Lord of the Rings simply isn’t meaningful to Tom, in the same way that, in our world, ducks and dragonflies have no part in the religious, ideological, and political struggles of mankind. Elrond does caution that should Sauron rule Middle-earth, even Tom himself would likely be oppressed or even driven out, but this is not apparently something Tom can anticipate. He may have been around for millennia, but he seems to live in a perpetual now.
Perhaps one reason why Tolkien preferred not to press his invention for its deeper meanings is the Roman Catholic belief system underpinning much of his conception of Arda, the greater world of which Middle-earth is a part. Tolkien’s commitment to Catholicism had a strong personal motivation: He equated it with loyalty to his beloved late mother, whom he felt had been stigmatized for her faith. Even so, he would have been aware that Christian theology holds that all of creation is a manifestation of God’s goodness, and therefore no part of it, including the natural world, could lie outside of or neutral to the conflict between good and evil. Cosmic morality allows for no conscientious objectors. Yet—like his close friend, the Anglican convert C.S. Lewis—Tolkien felt a powerful attraction to the pagan mythologies and motifs excluded by his Christian faith.
In a 1947 essay titled “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien quotes the old Scottish ballad “Thomas the Rhymer,” which describes three roads. The first two are familiar from the Christian iconography at the root of the expression “the straight and narrow.” They are the narrow road of righteousness, “beset with thorns and briars,” which few pursue, and the broad, winding, easy road to wickedness. But there is also a third and “bonny” road that leads to “fair Elfland,” the setting of all fairy tales. Tolkien wrote that “The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell.” Theologically speaking, we’re all headed to one or the other, but in the meantime, it’s delightful to tell ourselves stories that imagine an alternative destination. When Tolkien wrote that Tom Bombadil represented “something important” yet outside of the struggle over the One Ring, I believe he was expressing his own longing for escape from the relentless moral dichotomy of monotheism, as well as his deep love for nature. Tom walks a third road where good and evil have no meaning.
Tolkien must also have understood that much of the spell cast by The Lord of the Rings would come from the impression it gives of an abundantly realized world that’s far more than just the backdrop for the epic tale of the ring. Tolkien famously invented histories, languages, and cultures for Middle-earth that aren’t even mentioned in The Lord of the Rings but are felt all the same. Because Tom doesn’t participate in the main plotline of The Lord of the Rings, he provides an indispensable allusion to everything else going on in Middle-earth that has nothing to do with the coming War of the Ring. Every rabbit digging a burrow, every leaf falling in the woods, every bird’s egg hatching, as they have since time immemorial. Tom lends Middle-earth reality by virtue of being uninvolved in the hero’s journey of the main characters. The mistake that The Rings of Power makes is to drag Tom into the fray, investing him with the duty of thwarting the ascent of Sauron by educating Gandalf in wizardry.
Technically, this choice by showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay is understandable. They’ve set a panoramic stage with dozens of characters scattered across multiple locations and subplots. Of course they worry that viewers will lose track of what’s going on, what each character is after, and which obstacles they’re attempting to overcome. As a result, every person in the series has been reduced to a single quality or trait—with the exception of the dwarves Disa (Sophia Nomvete) and Durin IV (Owain Arthur), whose scenes are by far the most engaging. Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) is as single-minded as Inspector Javert. Elrond (Robert Aramayo) is the politic leader-in-training. Nori hankers after adventure. Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) is possessed by artistic ambition. And so on. These paper-doll figures inhabit a Potemkin Village of a world in which every element must be clearly signposted and explained, then underscored by an excruciatingly intrusive orchestral soundtrack to dictate exactly how you should feel about it. The one plot rules them all.
A character who doesn’t want anything and has no interest in furthering the central quest certainly doesn’t belong in a series like this. The Tom Bombadil of The Rings of Power feels like the product of some deadly meeting in which writers and studio executives sat around asking about motivation and how a particular scene will further the story. Tom is old, and he refuses to participate in an outright battle, so he must be put to use as a teacher. Suddenly, we know why he’s there, which is of course antithetical to Tom Bombadil. Tolkien’s Tom has no why. He has no mission any more than a lake or fern has a mission. He just is. He is an enigma, a little patch of mystery hinting at all the other unplumbed secrets and wonders in Middle-earth. His one great contribution is that he brings nothing but himself, whatever he is.
