The Unsolved Riddle of Tom Bombadil
The nature of the jolly, blue-coated, feather-crowned figure remains an enigma in Tolkien’s grand fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings
When Frodo meets Tom Bombadil, he’s desperately afraid.
A willow tree has imprisoned his friends Merry and Pippin inside its trunk and won’t let them go-faced with the threat of fire, the tree promises to squeeze the captured hobbits to death. Alone and lost, Frodo runs along a path in the Old Forest, shouting for help.
Enter Tom Bombadil. Preceded by his merry singing voice, he bounds into view with yellow boots and a blue coat, bright blue eyes and a jolly face, ‘red as a ripe apple, but creased with a hundred wrinkles of laughter’.
Singing ‘Old Man Willow’ to sleep, he saves Merry and Pippin, inviting all four of them to the home he shares with his wife, the river maiden Goldberry. Everything we have seen so far from him-going from his nonsense rhymes to the lily-flowers he carries make Bombadil appear like a benevolent host and forest warden. Kind and funny but not remarkable.
Until the tight-knit group tells him about the aim of the quest and Bombadil asks for the Ring.
