Tom Bombadil: The Rings of Power vs. The Lord of the Rings

Tom Bombadil is Tolkien's Holy Spirit in Middle-earth, the Secret Fire, the Flame Imperishable, the grace of God incarnate.

In the House of Tom Bombadil: Rory Kinnear as the enigmatic Tolkien character, conversing with the Daniel Weyman’s Stranger [the Blue Wizard or Gandalf] in The Rings of Power. Source: Vanity Fair, 29 May 2024. Photograph: Ross Ferguson / Prime Video.

Tolkien's enigma

On 29 May 2024 it was announced in the American entertainment magazine Vanity Fair that Tom Bombadil would feature in the second season of Amazon's The Rings of Power, based on the Middle-earth legendarium created by English author J.R.R. Tolkien as revealed in books such as The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This confirmed rumours which had been circulating The enigmatic Bombadil was famously excluded from Peter Jackson's cinematic trilogy, and fans of the character have seethed ever since. Why was he left out of this and other presentations of Tolkien's classic work? In the view of the present writer, this took place, and takes place, because Bombadil is too complex a character for those who seek to present and adapt Tolkien's work. He just does not seem to fit the simple narratives they seek to bring to the big or small screen, stage, or game. Neither does his partner Goldberry. They play an important role in the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings and in preparing Frodo Baggins and his colleagues for the journey ahead. The complexity of the character as created by Tolkien is pronounced. Yet even that author planted the seeds for his exclusion from adaptations because of his fear that Tom would be revealed as an allegory of the One - an aspect of the character that Tolkien himself admitted was present. The Catholic Tolkien embedded the Christian God within his legendarium as the One. In turn, Bombadil was that part of the Blessed Trinity (three persons in one God) known as the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit, whose role was to assist humanity in their journey through life, and to be the best they can be, without subverting their free will. In the context of The Lord of the Rings, Bombadil and Goldberry empower the hobbits - Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry - preparing them for their quest to destroy Sauron's One Ring of power. As such, Bombadil is vital to their success, though few recognise the significance of the role given him within the book and the greater legendarium. Without that early intervention by Tom, assisted by Goldberry, they would have failed. That is why he is an important character, and that is why Tolkien put him in the book and refused to exclude him. Hopefully The Rings of Power can reflect some of that depth and complexity of characterisation by the original author - a depth and complexity which has left many subsequent readers, playwrights, script doctors, fans, YouTubers, show runners and actors scratching their heads.

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The Vanity Fair article

Anthony Breznican, Tom Bombadil finally steps forth in The Rings of Power - an exclusive first look, Vanity Fair, 29 May 2024. Transcript:

Tom Bombadil has finally been invited on one of the long and winding road trips through Middle-earth. The mystical character is one of the more offbeat figures in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings saga, a woodland-dwelling man with an ethereal presence and a penchant for nonsense songs and brightly colored clothes, who helps rescue the hobbits from peril early in the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring. As much as he stands apart, his name would likely draw a blank from anyone who hasn’t read the novels since the two primary film retellings - Ralph Bakshi’s animated 1978 opus and Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning live-action trilogy - both cut the him from the narrative completely. Now Old Tom, as the books refer to him, is finally getting his moment in the sun. The Rings of Power, the Amazon Prime Video series based on Tolkien’s ancient history of his fantasy realm, will break that tradition of exclusion and finally feature Tom Bombadil - along with his jolly songs and his flamboyant wardrobe - when its second season begins August 29.

Bombadil was described in Tolkien’s books as “older than the old,” a benevolent entity who began life around the time all life began, so his existence in this earlier era, thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, fits within the canon established by the author. In a 1937 letter to his publisher, mulling a possible sequel to The Hobbit, Tolkien described Bombadil as “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside.” The author bristled at the notion that he wrote in allegory, but it’s clear he saw Bombadil as nature personified - right up to the character’s ambivalence about interfering in the larger world around him. That left show runners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay to figure out exactly how he might turn up in their show - and why.

“There’s a reason why he hasn’t been in prior adaptations, because in some ways he’s sort of an anti-dramatic character,” Payne tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look. “He’s not a character who has a particularly strong agenda. He observes drama, but largely doesn’t participate in it. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the characters kind of just go there and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.” Adds McKay: “Knowledge that’s not particularly relevant to anything that they’re doing or about to do.”

The High Hat: Rory Kinnear's distinctive head wear and outfit in The Rings of Power, created by costume designer Luca Mosca, were inspired directly from J.R.R. Tolkien's descriptions of Tom Bombadil. Photograph: Ross Ferguson / Prime Video.

Bombadil first turns up when the hobbits run afoul of Old Man Willow, an angry tree in the Old Forest who swallows Merry and Pippin in the folds of his bark. Bombadil sings a song that soothes the savage sprout, causing it to release the halflings. After a brief stay with him and his wife, Goldberry, the little ones depart. Later, they’re rescued again by Bombadil when they are captured by malevolent spirits known as Barrow-wights, who seize them in an ancient cemetery. (“Barrow” is an Old English word for burial mound, and “wight” is a kind of a ghost.)

“He can be a force for good, but he is challenging to integrate dramatically in that he doesn't have an agenda. He’s not driving forward and pushing people to arrive at any particular end,” Payne says.

Tolkien himself was hazy about the character’s purpose, and said he kept Bombadil in the story even though he didn’t have a clear purpose plot wise. “Tom Bombadil is not an important person - to the narrative,” Tolkien wrote in a 1954 letter to his proofreader for The Lord of the Rings. “I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that.… He represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely.”

One reader of the books suggested that Tom Bombadil was a stand-in for God himself, prompting Tolkien to reply in another 1954 letter: “I really do think you are being too serious, besides missing the point.” Above all, Tolkien was determined not to overthink Old Tom.

The mystery and passivity of the character made him all the more intriguing to the show runners, turning him into a narrative riddle to solve. “He has no clear dramatic function that would justify his inclusion in a really great movie adaptation. He’s whimsical and magical, and almost verging on silly. But 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 tale,” McKay says. “So weirdly, he’s kind of the most The Lord of the Rings thing in The 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 offered a few clues in the 1954 letter to his proofreader, explaining why Bombadil chooses to break his neutrality and help the hobbits. “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,” Tolkien wrote. To someone like Bombadil, he said, “the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless.”

“Kristian Milstead, our production designer, had the idea of incorporating a star map on his ceiling to connect Tom with the larger universe, and indicate that he has been watching the constellations for signs—and for the Stranger’s arrival,” showrunner Patrick McKay says. Photograph: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video.

Tolkien described Bombadil as “a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.” But also, he believed the character would tip the scale of fate in favor of the hobbits and their fellowship as they stood against the forces of evil rising in the eastern portion of Middle-earth. “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 wrote.

This was the key for The Rings of Power show runners. “We started thinking, What does he care about? And how can that be a doorway to drama?” Payne says. “We know he cares about the natural world. And we know he is a helper. He’s not going to push you, but he will help you. And so, traditionally, he lives in this place called the Withywindle, which is this sort of almost enchanted forest.”

For the series, Payne and McKay took the liberty of giving Bombadil a second home, on the outskirts of a region called Rhûn. “In our story, he has gone out to the lands of Rhûn, which we learn used to be sort of Edenic and green and beautiful, but now is sort of a dead wasteland,” Payne says. “Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings.”

Middle-earth. Source: The Lord of the Rings Wiki.

That’s the same place where the second season of The Rings of Power finds the halflings Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards) as they escort the amnesiac wizard known as the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) toward discovering his purpose. At the end of the first season, the Stranger gave off some major Gandalf signifiers, using terminology that is particular to the wise old sorcerer played by Ian McKellen in the Jackson films. Expect Tom Bombadil to offer the Stranger some rare compassion in this otherwise merciless place. As Payne explains: “When he finally crosses paths with the Stranger, you could say he has a desire to try to keep the destruction that has happened there from spreading to his beloved lands in the West. He nudges the Stranger along his journey, which he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about. So I’d say our Tom Bombadil is slightly more interventionist than you see in the books, but only by 5% or 10%.”

Tom Bombadil is played on The Rings of Power by Rory Kinnear - perhaps best known as M’s chief of staff in the last four James Bond movies, Frankenstein’s creature in Penny Dreadful, and the British prime minister who commits an unspeakable act for a noble cause in the very first episode of Black Mirror. Most actors who take on a well-known genre character claim to be experts in that character. Kinnear, in his first interview about playing Bombadil, admits that he…did not. In fact, he was a The Lord of the Rings novice before signing on to The Rings of Power. “There are people who knew it from the books, people who knew it from the films, and there are those who had managed to get to 46 without knowing that much about it at all,” the actor says. When Kinnear was offered the part, he says, “I was honest - I hadn’t read it. I said, ‘I’ll go away and read it and get back to you.’ And I went downstairs to my partner, who did know the books, and does know the films, and I said, ‘I’ve been offered this part. Apparently it’s in the books. A guy called Tom Bombadil.’ She was like, ‘No way! You’re not playing Tom Bombadil!’ So I sort of knew instantly then that it had a cultural heft to it that I was going to have to be sensitive to.” Kinnear makes clear that his partner, fellow Penny Dreadful actor Pandora Colin, was simply surprised to hear that the show would feature Tom Bombadil - she wasn’t disputing his casting. “No, she was excited. That was her excited face,” Kinnear says. “She was like, ‘I can’t believe that.’ Her words were, ‘He’s my favorite character in all of the books.’”

As perplexing as Bombadil may be, even to his creator, this quirk is also part of his charm. Readers of The Lord of the Rings have been pining for a Bombadil screen appearance for years, prompting Jackson to explain that he left the character out precisely because he interrupts the story’s central quest. “What we did contemplate, and it was really for the fans, was to have the hobbits walking through the Old Forest and to see a feathered cap come darting through the trees, to hear the sound of Tom Bombadil’s voice and song and then have the hobbits turn and run away as fast as they could!” Jackson said in a December 2001 issue of Cinefantastique. “We thought [that] would acknowledge Tom Bombadil in an affectionate-joke kind of way. We didn’t have time to do it." Absence has only made the heart of The Lord of the Rings fandom grow fonder for Old Tom.

In addition to his prominent role in the new season of The Rings of Power, HarperCollins is publishing a new edition of Tolkien’s 1962 book The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, featuring his poems about the ethereal figure - some of which date back to long before his epic trilogy. The book, set to hit shelves August 20, is aimed at the enduring fascination Tolkien readers have for this enigmatic fantasy figure. Even Tolkien himself was transfixed.

“He has his origins in the name of a wooden doll that lived in the Tolkien family, and like many of the toys owned by the children, such as the teddy bears who appeared in Mr. Bliss, or the metal dog that inspired the hero of Roverandom, Tom Bombadil was drawn into Tolkien’s invented world,” Chris Smith, the publishing director for the company’s Tolkien titles, tells Vanity Fair. “His first known appearance was in the 1920s, in a story entitled ‘Tom Bombadil,’ and even in this fragment - which is included in the new edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil - he is described as one of ‘the oldest inhabitants in the kingdom,’ suggesting that from the outset Tolkien viewed Tom as primordial. Later, in the early 1930s, Tolkien put him into a poem.”

Tenerife, one of Spain's Canary Islands, was used as the location for Tom Bombadil's vibrant homestead. “Kristian and our director Louise Hooper also had the idea that his ‘summer cottage’ should be an oasis of life in the middle of the desert - dotted with orange and lemon trees, and busy with goats, lambs, and bees,” McKay says. Photograph: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video.

That early poem was the beginning of a long fascination with the character. Tolkien’s full verse for “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” was published in 1934 in The Oxford Magazine, and led him to wonder if this woodland being might be a good protagonist for future stories. Ultimately, Bombadil would remain a supporting player for The Lord of the Rings saga, with Tolkien determined not to explore his full nature too thoroughly. “Having lived for millennia, he has learned and understood its deeper mysteries and perhaps this is why he has now become ‘Master,’ as he is called by himself and his wife, Goldberry, and why he is free from any control by the outside world,” Smith says. “His is a pure and unaffected joy in the living things of the world, very much removed from the oppressive menace of the overarching tale of the quest of the Ring. Perhaps Tolkien intended Tom to remain forever a light in the darkness of troubled times? But ultimately, he must remain a delightful enigma.”

Those sentiments were not much help to Kinnear, who had to bring humanity to this walking and talking symbol of harmony with nature. Much of that responsibility fell to Payne and McKay’s new scenes, in which Tom Bombadil offers playful guidance to the otherwise heavy and ominous Stranger. “I was really interested to see how they were then going to process the character through the prism of their eyes and the way that they see the show developing,” Kinnear says. “There’s this sense of huge experience, huge openness, huge empathy, and having gone through so much that he knows it’s the small things that are important. That felt actually quite domestic, felt quite reachable in terms of my understanding of who he was.”

Tolkien himself laid out the look of the character, writing in chapter six of The Lord of the Rings: “Suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and long blue feather stuck in the band. With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through the grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink. He had a blue coat and 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.”

“His boots are yellow, the jacket is blue, and he’s got a feather in his hat, so all the main beats were hit,” Kinnear says, comparing Bombadil’s flamboyant style to the way a child dresses. “My daughter is 10, and for a year and a half she wore a sheep hat throughout the school day and through the hottest, hottest summer. It was just the face of a sheep with big, long woolly straps around the side. I mean - absolutely ridiculous. Too small for her as well. But I could not get it off her. There you are. She didn’t care. We can take something from that attitude, I think, as adults.”

The other major inspiration for his Tom Bombadil came not from the freshness of childhood but from the permanence of extreme age - more geological than biological. “The big thing was, how’s he going to talk? There are lots of different dialects and accents going on throughout the show, and I wanted him to be somewhat distinct from those,” Kinnear says. “But I also wanted to choose an accent that felt old - that was British, but felt like the oldest part of Britain.” The notion hit him while swimming off the coast of Cornwall in the westernmost tip of southern England. “The rock in Cornwall just sort of erupts out of the sea, and you can see all the layers of accretion. I was looking at it and just thinking, God, this has been here for so long. It’s a bit like standing on Table Mountain [overlooking Cape Town in South Africa] and you think, This mountain has seen everything, has seen this silly little city develop from this tiny little speck. It must feel so young to this mountain, this tiny little city, now a fantastic city,” Kinnear says. “I remember looking up at these rocks and thinking, The things that it’s seen, the sailors that have passed by. When I was thinking of the oldest part of Britain, that was where I naturally found myself being led. So I worked with Leith [McPherson], the dialect coach, on getting a Cornish accent together. Those were the big building blocks of the character.”

As season two of The Rings of Power gets underway, Tom Bombadil offers aid and comfort not just to the Stranger, but also to the audience. “Season one set the pieces on the chessboard, and in season two the pieces are in motion and it’s really about the villains,” Payne says. “You’ve got Sauron, who is not cloaked behind the guise of [the human refugee] Halbrand anymore. The audience knows he’s Sauron, so now we’re watching him maneuver as he’s manipulating [the burn-scar covered dark elf] Adar, who’s another big villain of the season.… Really, Tom is sort of a curiosity within that structure because while it is darker, Tom Bombadil is singing and saying lines that could be nursery rhymes from children’s poems. So he sort of defies the tonal shift of the rest of the season and is a real point of light amidst an otherwise sea of darkness.” Tom Bombadil brings this levity while remaining somewhat in the shadows himself. Payne and McKay have decided not to answer any questions about the character that Tolkien himself left deliberately unresolved. As Smith puts it: “Perhaps the only answer to the enigma that is Tom Bombadil is simply to accept that, as Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings, ‘He is.’”

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Reactions

The following YouTube reactions appeared within a day of the release of the Vanity Fair article:

Tom Bombadil revealed for Rings of Power Season 2!, Nerd of the Rings, 12.44 minutes. Give a straightforward outline of the character as most people know him.
Just making shit up, Mr H. Reviews, 10.15 minutes. Says that there is "not much" to talk about as there is "not much" to the character. Reads through the Vanity Fair article. This site had presented a discussion a year previous - as had many others - when the story first surfaced: Desperation! Rings of Power to introduce Tom Bombadil, Mr H Reviews - Live Archives, 10.54 minutes.
Tom Bombadil in The Rings of Power Confirmed - Abhorrent, European Lore, 12.22 minutes.
Breaking - Tom Bombadil officially revealed for the Rings of Power, Fellowship of the Fans, 60.56 minutes.
Tom Bombadil Revealed!, Middle-earth Daily, 1.26 minutes.
All about Tom Bombadil. First Look. Rings of Power Season 2, For Frodo, 8.14 minutes; Tom Bombadil, 2.24 minutes.
Tom Bombadil?, Ms. Martin Muses, 102.11 minutes. A live presentation which canvassed a wide variety of view concerning Tom, including the Catholic aspects and chat commentary by the present writer.
First look at Roy Kinnear as Tom Bombadil, Tea with Tolkien, 9.59 minutes.
Rings of Power burns Tom Bombadil at the Alter of Progress, Disparu, 17.02 minutes.
Bomb-Badil, The One Ring, 23.17 minutes.
Tom Bombadil reveal for Season 2, Renfall, 15.08 minutes.
Tom Bombadil in Rings of Power .... Why? My Thoughts, Men of the West, 10.07 minutes.
Tom Bombadil confirmed for Lord of the Rings Season 2, The Broken Sword, 14.52 minutes.
Rings of Powers casts GOD TIER character for Season 2!, @TheCharacterSheet, 30 seconds.
Everyone Hates This, Ryan Kinel, 4.44 minutes.
Tom Bombadil in Rings of Power (S2), Happy Hobbit, 8.09 minutes.
Tom Bombadil, rings of Power - What does it mean for the show?, Universal News Network, 3.02 minutes.
First Look: Tom Bombadil in The Rings of Power, Tea with Tolkien, 9.59 minutes.
Rings of Power - Corrupting Bombadil, Knight's Watch, 17.13 minutes.

Is Tom Bombadil God Incarnate' in The Lord of the Rings?, Barrel Aged Faith, 31 May 2024, YouTube, duration: 37.07 minutes. Tom and Goldberry as Adam and Eve.....

Almost all of these commentators stated the widely held belief that Tom Bombadil was a largely insignificant character in regard to the basic story, or narrative direction, of The Lord of the Rings, and who had added nothing of import to add to any wide presentation. It was therefore ultimately a waste of time to include him, or Goldberry, in The Rings of Power. They all revealed a near complete lack of understanding of Tom's true significance, the fact that if not for him the hobbits would have died at the hand of Old Man Willow and the Barrow-wights. Also, they would have been ill-prepared for the task ahead of them in seeking to destroy the One Ring - the Ring of Power. The YouTubers did not understand that during his extended lifetime Tom had visited many regions on Middle-earth and was known to have done so by Elves such as Elrond. They failed to understand or acknowledge his many powers, including that over the One Ring. They failed to see the connection between the Music of the Ainur which was an element of Eru's construction of the universe, and the melodic and rhythmic vocalisations by Tom - vocalisations which contained within them power. This list could go on. In fact, the present writer was amazed at the general ignorance surrounding the characters of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, even by those who were identified as so-called Tolkien experts. With such ignorance about, it can only be hoped that the writers of The Rings of Power are able to tap into Tolkien's truth concerning Tom and Goldberry and present some of that on the screen. He is more than simply a jolly fool who dresses in bright colours and sings a lot.

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References

Breznican, Anthony, Tom Bombadil finally steps forth in The Rings of Power - an exclusive first look, Vanity Fair, 29 May 2024.

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Last updated: 27 June 2024

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Tom Bombadil: The Rings of Power vs. The Lord of the Rings

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