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 plotwise. “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 showrunners, 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 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 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.”
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 showrunners. “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.”