Tom Bombadil - Concept and Creation

Concept and Creation

As with Roverandom, Tolkien's initial inspiration came from an incident with his children playing with toys. Tolkien invented Tom Bombadil in memory of a Dutch doll which had been flushed down a lavatory. These original poems far pre-date the writing of The Lord of the Rings, into which Tolkien introduced Tom Bombadil from the earliest drafts.

In response to a letter from one of his readers, Tolkien described Tom's role in The Lord of the Rings:

"Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a 'comment.' I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function."

Tolkien did go on to analyse the character's role further:

"I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless …

"It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war … the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron."

Tolkien even seems to justify Tom Bombadil's presence:

"And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)."

In a letter to Stanley Unwin Tolkien called Tom Bombadil the spirit of the vanishing landscapes of Oxfordshire and Berkshire.