Tom Bombadil Is In Rings Of Power, Will Everyone Stop Complaining Now?

If you’re not familiar with the dancing windbag of jolliness that is Tom Bombadil, let me take you back to The Fellowship of the Ring.

If you’re familiar with the film, then you may recall the four Hobbits—Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin—narrowly escaping the Ringwraiths thanks to the Bucklebury Ferry. After the ferry, we next see the Shire’s own Fantastic Four soaked and outside the gates of Bree.

Well, in the source material there are whole chapters between the trip across the river and the hobbits’ arrival at Bree, including a strange and pointless stay at the house of Tom Bombadil.

The Hobbits cut through a forest they shouldn’t try to cut through, and as a consequence, the trees try to eat them.

Thankfully, Tom Bombadil is there to skip happily through the forest and sing to the trees. As you might’ve guessed depending how much you’ve been drinking, if you want trees to regurgitate Hobbits, singing is exactly the thing you want to do, and the little guys are saved.

Of course, Tom Bombadil doesn’t want to be rude so he brings the Hobbits to his place, feeds them, lets them chill, answers every question as if he’s never been asked questions, and lets them meet his girlfriend whose name I forget and don’t want to bother looking up.

He says some mysterious stuff that’s intentionally mysterious, he plays with the One Ring as if it’s absolutely nothing—including some David Blaine-y magic tricks—and gives them little horses.

The Hobbits go on their way but are soon waylaid by some undead barrow wights. Thankfully they’re saved because one of them remembers to sing or whistle or something to Tom Bombadil. And if there’s one thing that saves you from never-ending living death it’s, you know. Singing.

Tom Bombadil shows up immediately and saves them. Probably with singing.

Why, oh why, did Peter Jackson cut Tom Bombadil from his adaptations?

My psychic powers have been on the decline, but I’ll hazard a guess—he wanted The Fellowship of the Ring to work.

From the moment Frodo and Sam leave Bag End to a wounded Frodo waking up in Elrond’s house in Rivendell, Jackson wanted his audience to feel like there was no safe haven, no oasis. No face could be trusted, and no shadow was free of enemies. He wanted unbroken tension and suspense.

How do you keep that suspense alive when the heroes—whom the entire world is supposed to be turning against—have a pleasant little stay at a bed and breakfast run by a happy fat man who sings to trees?

Of all the things that changed between book and film, I cannot imagine an easier absence in Jackson’s adaptations to explain and accept than that of Tom Bombadil.

Plot-wise, without the meat-eating trees or the barrow wights, he serves no purpose. And while it’s fine on the written page, in a film his singing voice and his Potter-esque name drive a flaming sword right into the heart of the suspenseful chase between the Shire and Rivendell.

But somehow I cannot get through a single conversation about the movies without someone inserting some weepy regret about the absence of Tom Bombadil.

Why? Go visit a mall Santa. Buy some lawn gnomes. Program an AI chatbot to give you nonsensical but vaguely superior answers to perfectly reasonable questions. Edit a slasher flick and a musical together to pretend the heroes were saved with the power of song.

Same diff. With the added benefit that you won’t be complaining, decades after the fact, about not getting to see Jerry Garcia sing “Hello, Dolly!” to all the local bushes.

I’m not saying your love for the glorious clothed hedgehog named Tom Bombadil is wrong. I’m just saying it’s been over twenty years, and now you’ve got your screen Bombadil.

Keep up with the memes. Keep telling everyone who will listen about how Viggo Mortensen broke his toe kicking that helmet. Keep asking where second breakfast went.

But you’ve got your Tom Bombadil. And he’ll probably even do more than give people little horses. So shush. He didn’t make sense in the movie, and you know it.