30 Facts About Tom Bombadil

Tom Bombadil is a character in JR R Tolkien's legendarium.

Tom Bombadil first appeared in print in a 1934 poem called "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", which included The Lord of the Rings characters Goldberry, Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wight, from whom Tom rescues the hobbits.

Tom Bombadil is mentioned, but not seen, near the end of The Return of the King, with Gandalf planning to pay him a long visit.

Tom Bombadil has been omitted in radio adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, the 1978 animated film, and Peter Jackson's film trilogy, as non-essential to the story.

Old Tom Bombadil was a merry fellow; bright blue his jacket was and his boots were yellow, green were his girdle and his breeches all of leather; he wore in his tall hat a swan-wing feather.

Tom Bombadil lived up under Hill, where the Withywindle ran from a grassy well down into the dingle.

The original version of Tolkien's poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" was published in 1934 in The Oxford Magazine.

Tom Bombadil makes it clear that he found Goldberry in the Withywindle river, calling her "River-woman's daughter".

The later poem "Tom Bombadil Goes Boating" anchors Tom Bombadil in Middle-earth, featuring a journey down the Withywindle to the Brandywine river, where hobbits live at Hays-end.

Tom Bombadil is challenged by various river-residents on his journey, including birds, otters and hobbits, but charms them all with his voice, ending his journey at the farm of Farmer Maggot, where he drinks ale and dances with the family.

Tom Bombadil had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter.

Tom Bombadil first appears when Merry and Pippin are trapped in the Old Forest by Old Man Willow, and Frodo and Sam cry for help.

Tom Bombadil suggests that Tom would not find the Ring to be very important, and so might simply misplace it.

Tom Bombadil refuses to pass the borders of his own land, but he directs them to The Prancing Pony Inn at Bree.

Towards the end of The Return of the King, when Gandalf leaves the hobbits, he mentions that he wants to have a long talk with Tom Bombadil, calling him a "moss-gatherer".

When Frodo asks Goldberry just who Tom Bombadil is, she responds simply by saying "He is".

Gay suggests with a detailed comparison that Tom Bombadil was directly modelled on the poem's central character, the demigod Vainamoinen.

The Christian scholar W Christopher Stewart sees Bombadil as embodying the pursuit of knowledge purely for its own sake, driven only by his sense of wonder.

Jane Beal, in the Journal of Tolkien Research, writes that Tom Bombadil can be considered using "the four levels of meaning found in medieval scriptural exegesis and literary interpretation".

O'Neill finds Tom Bombadil to be the manifestation of the Self archetype and a vision of man's beginning and destiny:.

The Tolkien scholar and philosopher Gene Hargrove argued in Mythlore in 1986 that Tolkien understood who Tom Bombadil is, but purposefully made him enigmatic.

Nevertheless, Tolkien left clues that Tom Bombadil is a Vala, a god of Middle-Earth, specifically Aule, the archangelic demigod who created the dwarves.

Robert Foster suggested in 1978 that Tom Bombadil is one of the Maiar, angelic beings sent from Valinor.

Tom Bombadil is absent from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy; Jackson explained that this was because he and his co-writers felt that the character does little to advance the story, and including him would make the film unnecessarily long.

Tom Bombadil was portrayed by Esko Hukkanen in the 1993 Finnish miniseries Hobitit.

Tom Bombadil appeared, too, in the 1979 Mind's Eye recordings, where he was played by Bernard Mayes, who voiced Gandalf.

Tom Bombadil was included, along with Goldberry and the Barrow-wight, in the 1991 Russian adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, Khraniteli.

Tom Bombadil is an NPC in the MMORPG game The Lord of the Rings Online, serving as a main character in Book 1 of the epic quests.

Tom Bombadil appears as a playable character in the LEGO The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit video games.

Tom Bombadil has no impact in the main story for either game, as the games are direct adaptations of the Peter Jackson films rather than the original novels, but he later appears as an unlockable character in the Middle Earth hub world and can be used in free-play mode.