The Tom Bombadil enigma: will Amazon’s Rings of Power solve Tolkien’s greatest mystery?
Early in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the author cuts loose and goes off script. Frodo and his hobbit pals have left the Shire, Sauron’s Ring in hand, the Black Riders on their heels. A grand adventure awaits. But then, in the ancient woodlands just beyond the borders of hobbit civilisation, Tolkien does something unexpected: he brings us the deeply mysterious Tom Bombadil.
“He had a blue coat and long brown beard,” is how Tolkien introduces Tom Bombadil in chapter six of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. “His eyes were blue and bright and his face was red as a ripe apple but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter.”
Bombadil is an agent of chaos chucked into Tolkien’s meticulously plotted fantasy masterpiece. The ruler of the Old Forest between the Shire and the town of Bree, he rescues the Hobbits – twice – and then is gone, never to intrude again on the story. Later, when asked about Bombadil, elf lord Elrond calls it as he sees it, saying simply, “he is a strange creature”.
Strange – but also enduringly enigmatic and elusive. Nobody has ever entirely got a handle on Bombadil or explained what, precisely, he is doing in The Lord of the Rings in the first place. Tolkien himself went back and forth about old Tom, with his yellow boots and blue jacket.
“Even in a mythical Age, there must be some enigmas, as there always are,” he would write. “Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).”
Given Tolkien’s own lack of clarity regarding Bombadil, it is no surprise adaptations of his work have stayed well clear. He is omitted from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nor is he featured in the BBC’s 1981 audio retelling of the novels (its script approved by Tolkien’s son, Christopher) or in Ralph Bakshi’s surrealist 1978 Lord of the Rings cartoon.
But – ring a dong dillo! (as Tom sings in the book) – Bombadil is now coming to the screen, courtesy of season two of Prime Video’s divisive Lord of the Rings prequel series, which has a reported $1 billion price-tag. “Tom Bombadil Finally Steps Forth in the Rings of Power,” runs a headline in Vanity Fair, which has published exclusive images of Rory Kinnear in Tom’s iconic blue coat and battered hat (the images are grainy, so it’s hard to tell if his boots are yellow, as per Tolkien’s instructions).
Describing Tom as “a woodland-dwelling man with an ethereal presence and a penchant for nonsense songs and brightly coloured clothes”, Vanity Fair said the showrunners of the Rings of Power, which returns in August, had approached the character as “a narrative riddle to solve”.
“He has no clear dramatic function that would justify his inclusion in a really great movie adaptation,” said Patrick McKay, one of the co-showrunners of Rings of Power. “He’s whimsical and magical, and almost verging on silly. But he also has the wisdom of the ages and the music of the spheres and deep emotional wells of ancient history and myth, and his conception and function are tied to Norse myths and have deep roots in European fairy tales.
“So weirdly, he’s kind of the most Lord of the Rings thing in Lord of the Rings, and also the first thing you would cut if you were adapting it as a film. But we have the advantage of a television show, and hence we are going to find a way to tap into that.”
Tolkien purists will obviously hope Amazon does justice to Tom. They may also fear the worst. Series one of the Rings of Power was widely ridiculed for its absurd take on Middle Earth, including the random appearance of the Dark Lord Sauron, on a raft, disguised as a rough and ready outlaw, and its itinerant proto-hobbits who spoke like crude 19th-century caricatures of Irish people (their rags and soiled faces seemingly inspired not by Tolkien but by images of the starving masses from the Great Famine).
Following up Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie was always going to be a challenge. Even still, Rings of Power was a thumping disappointment that deserved to be tossed into the nearest volcano. It had the surface sheen of a Marvel movie and was bedevilled by script that relied on coincidence to a ridiculous degree.
For instance, a fateful early meeting between elf queen Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and Sauron comes about only after Galadriel decides on impulse to jump overboard from her elf-ship and swim back to Middle Earth. En route, she is caught up in a storm – and rescued by a raft whose occupants include Sauron in disguise. Obviously Sauron is no fool – though he was easily enough outsmarted in The Lord of the Rings – but how could he have predicted Galadriel’s whereabout? Was he using fantasy GPS?
Despite all the millions poured into the production, Rings of Power also looked shoddy and cheap – particularly when compared with Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, season one of which also aired at the same time (and, again, returns this summer). The difference between the two was epitomised by their contrasting depiction of female power. In Rings of Power, Galadriel demonstrates her toughness by beating up a group of soldiers in Númenor (by way of training them). In House of the Dragon, Alicent Hightower signals her split from her Targaryen inlaws by turning up at her stepdaughter’s wedding in a green dress – the historic battlefield colours of House Hightower. She is telling her bannermen to ready for war – a gesture of defiance that hits so much harder than “Girlboss” Galadriel biffing up some bros.
Two years later, with a second series of Rings of Powers fast approaching, Tolkien devotees are not optimistic about its potential depiction of Bombadil.
“If there is one thing they should not touch, it is Tom,” wrote one on internet discussion forum Reddit. “I even like that Jackson left him out of the movies, as it would have been really hard to try to impersonate the character without ridiculing him.”
Questions must surely also be asked about the casting of Rory Kinnear. He’s a talented actor but the privately-educated son of Roy Kinnear has generally excelled as chummy public schoolboy types – playing the Prime Minister in the notorious “pig” episode of Black Mirror, The National Anthem, and portraying David Cameron’s director of communications Craig Oliver in Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War. Does he have the makings of a whiskery man of the woods?
Lord of the Rings readers have always had strong feelings about Bombadil, despite his fleeting presence in the book. He pops up in the Old Forest chapter, just as the hobbits have been overwhelmed by Old Man Willow, a primordial woodland spirit who renders them drowsy and attempts to drag them beneath the earth.
Vanquishing the wicked willow tree, Tom brings Frodo and chums to his house in the woods, where they meet his wife, the “River-Daughter” Goldberry. Here, they are surprised to discover Tom is immune to the effects of the One Ring. He can still see Frodo when he puts on the accursed band of gold, which supposedly renders the wearer invisible, and when Tom wields the Ring he does not vanish. Later, as the hobbits are overwhelmed by zombie-like Barrow Wights, Tom rescues them again before sending them on their way to the village of Bree, where they are due to rendezvous with Gandalf.
Narratively, Tom is a distraction. He has no real part to play in the hobbits’ journey from the Shire to Elrond’s fortress at Rivendell. Nothing he says or does has any long-term impact on the story. Moreover, the chapters in which he features have a dreamy quality quite distinct in tone from the rest of the Lord of the Rings.
“Tom is certainly a fascinating character, but he’s also one of the most unusual, and sometimes even polarising, characters in the fandom. There are long-time fans of the books who confess they skip over his chapters – and, of course, there are nearly as many ‘fan theories’ about who he is as there are fans,” says Alan Sisto, a Tolkien expert and co-host of the Prancing Pony podcast.
“I think that it’s his uniqueness that makes such an impression on readers: he’s completely unaffected by the Ring which, at the time we meet him, is surprising but not entirely out of the realm of consideration. But when you finish the books and think back to Tom, you realise just how different that makes him.”
As Sisto says, not every reader is a fan. He arrives just as the Lord of the Rings is picking up pace. Gandalf is missing, the Ringwraiths have descended on the Shire, Frodo and the gang are leaving behind their cosy existence for a trip into the unknown. And then, suddenly, Tolkien pulls up and brings us a merry chap with yellow boots who communicates largely in song. And there is a lot of singing. For instance, when Tom tackles the evil willow tree that is devouring the hobbits, he does so via the medium of improvised warbling. “Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away!” he yodels. “Tom’s in a hurry now, Evening will follow day.” It’s Game of Thrones meets Glee!.
“His character – and particularly his being unaffected by the ring – is interesting, but the songs are completely superfluous to the story and just annoying,” observed one Tolkien aficionado on Reddit. Having listened to Andy Serkis (Gollum in the movies) read The Lord of the Rings audiobook, another went further regarding the Bombadil chapters. “I am about to jam a pencil into my ears! I’m having a hell of a time trying to get through his nonsense.”
Tom predates The Lord of the Rings by decades. He originally appeared in Tolkien’s 1934 poem, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil – where, foreshadowing lines delivered by Tom himself in The Fellowship of the Ring, he is described as “a merry fellow… bright blue his jacket was and his boots were yellow”.
When sitting down to write The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien decided Bombadil would have a starring role early in the book. “I don’t think Tom needs philosophising about and is not improved by it,” he would write. “But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact, I put him in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently and wanted an ‘adventure’ on the way [to Rivendell].”
He had initially wanted to pen a full-blown Tom Bombadil novel. After The Hobbit proved a surprise bestseller, his publishers had begged him for a sequel. He replied that he was fed up with hobbits. What about a tome about Tom? “I can’t think of any more stories about hobbits, suppose I write a book about Tom Bombadil instead?,” he wrote.
He was ultimately persuaded to stick with the little folk. But he brought Tom back anyway. In so doing, he introduced to The Lord of the Rings a note of mystery that has captivated readers ever since. Who is Tom, and what is he doing stomping about Middle Earth with his yellow boots?
There are many theories – though few hold up to much scrutiny. One is that Tom is a manifestation of Tolkien’s god figure, Eru. It’s a solid argument – Tom describes himself as “eldest” and says he remembers the “first raindrop” – but Tolkien explicitly ruled it out.
Others suspect that Tom is one of the Valar – archangel-like beings created by Eru, who intervene directly in the affairs of men and elves. Then there is the idea that he is an equal of the wizards Gandalf and Saruman – though this notion is undermined by the fact that, unlike them, he is unaffected by Sauron’s Ring. There is also a meta-theory that he symbolises Tolkien himself – skipping briefly through his own book and then leaving the stage.
Tolkien himself was never completely clear about what Tom was doing in the novel. The closest he came to explaining Tom was to suggest he was in The Lord of Rings in order to signpost the vastness and ancient nature of Middle Earth – a reminder there was more to the world than hobbits, Dark Lords, and angst over rings. That Middle Earth should be huge and mystifying was always one of Tolkien’s grand ambitions. He felt it important that his maps always have their edges unexplored.
“Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed,” he said.
Bombadil, to Tolkien, was an embodiment of that elusive quality of Middle Earth. “Tom Bombadil is just as he is,” he wrote. “Just an odd ‘fact’ of that world. He won’t be explained because as long as you are (as in this tale, you are meant to be) concentrated on the Ring, he is inexplicable. But he’s there – a reminder of the truth (as I see it) that the world is so large and manifold that if you take one facet and fix your mind and heart on it, there is always something that does not come into that story/argument/approach, and seems to belong to a larger story.”
He is a simple character with a lot of complexity, then. Can Amazon do Tom justice? Some experts have their doubts about putting him up in lights. “I was not at all surprised to see that Tom Bombadil was cut from Peter Jackson’s film,” said Corey Olsen, host of the Tolkien Professor podcast, in a 2009 episode devoted to Bombadil.
“I remember when I first heard that The Fellowship of the Ring movie was coming out… the very first thing that ran through my head was ‘well obviously he’s going to cut Tom Bombadil’. And of course he did. I can’t imagine how it couldn’t have been cut from the film. It would have been horrible for anyone to try to depict Tom Bombadil on film. Can you imagine what Tom Bombadil would look like if you actually cast, costumed and scripted somebody on screen exactly like Tolkien describes Tom Bombadil in the book? The guy would look like an idiot.”
Some might say that looking like an idiot would make Tom a perfect fit for the parody-Tolkien universe of Rings of Power. But many Lord of the Rings readers will feel that Tom Bombadil has been kept out of previous adaptations for good reason. He is unknowable and unfilmable – an anarchic force introduced into Middle Earth and allowed to wander where he may. To attempt to tie him down and turn him into bingewatch fodder would be one more insult from a series that has already laughed far too frequently in the faces of Tolkien fans.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns on Amazon Prime Video in August
