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What is Tom Bombadil?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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I can't answer what Bombadil is in the lore of LOTR, he seems to be unique in terms of entities we are shown. But I can tell you what he is at a meta level. You see, LOTR was first told as stories to Tolkiens kids, which you probably already knew, which you may not have known, is that Bombadil was a recurring character in previous stories he had told his children. So at a meta level, Bombadil is just a fun callback to a previous character for his kids to have enjoyed.
So, Hoid of a sort
Thank you for indirectly leading me to discover the book title "The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England". Even if I never work my way to finding out anything further about this corner of literature, that title certainly tickled me.
Title is great, but I didn’t read that one yet because there’s no Hoid in there. I want to complete the Cosmere reread first.
Except Hoid has/will have a story of his own.
A Proto-Hoid for children
This comes closest of the answers in this thread, imo. Tom Bombadil was a figurine/puppet Tolkien or his kids owned and he would devise stories around it. He included it in the main narrative as a sort of mental resting point, where both the reader and the hobbits come at peace for a brief moment. It's completely separate from the main narrative and it doesn't cleanly fit in the story. I think of it as Tom Bombadil, Goldberry and their house basically being in another dimension, which is why neither time nor the ring affect them.
If you are interested in it, Tolkien discussed the nature of Tom Bombadil in several letters and there are some decent youtube videos on the subject.