Stories of Arda

The world of J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Tolkien Enterprises and/or New Line Cinema. No money is made from these stories. The stories are the intellectual property of the author(s) and should not be reproduced without their permission.

Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. … He is just an invention and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. 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, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were taken a ‘vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind where there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. 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.
Letter 144, The Letters of JRR Tolkien Letters

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Stories

5,380 stories in the archive