Who is Tom Bombadil? Rings of Power’s Lord of the Rings legend explained

Tom Bombadil, one of the best characters from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, just arrived as a mysterious guide for the Stranger in Rings of Power Season 2.

Bombadil is a merry fellow, bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None has ever caught him yet… until Rings of Power.

In Season 2 Episode 4, the Stranger follows a goat to the feet of a crouched man. “There’s what you’re searching for and what you find, isn’t there,” he tells our friendly neighborhood wizard.

He reveals his name, but every other detail is as confounding as the last – which is exactly why Bombadil is such a beloved, but divisive figure in Lord of the Rings.

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If you’re confused by Tom Bombadil, join the club. He’s one of the most baffling and fascinating characters Tolkien ever wrote, and Rings of Power doesn’t give us any clear answers.

From the show’s perspective, here’s all we know right now: he’s really old, he’s got wide-ranging abilities and control over wind, trees, and fire, and he’s going to help the Stranger (who’s clearly Gandalf) discover his purpose. Think of him like Hagrid… if he was a (or the) God.

After his first appearance in a short 1920 story, he showed up again in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a poem published in 1934, which references characters like Goldberry (more on her below), Old Man Willow (a nasty tree spirit), and Barrow-wights, the skeletal monsters also introduced in Season 2 Episode 4.

In Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, Bombadil comes to the Hobbits’ aid when Merry and Pippin get trapped in the Old Forest. He sings Old Man Willow to sleep, and they spend some time with Bombadil in his house.

“There was another burst of song, and then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band,” a passage from the book reads.

“With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink.

“He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter.”

Bombadil was inspired by a dutch doll Tolkien’s children played with. However, the author insisted he wasn’t “an important person to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a comment… he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely.”

According to Tolkien Gateway, “Bombadil as a direct contrast to the artistry and (sub)creative force of the Elves; whereas they seek to create, devise, alter and control, Bombadil only observes and contemplates the world outside him and takes joy in it.”

How old is Bombadil?

Tom Bombadil says he’s the “eldest” being in Middle-earth (if not all of Arda), he’s at least 7,100 years old in Rings of Power.

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“Old… eldest, that’s what I am,” he tells the Stranger.

“Eldest… mark my words, friend. Tom was there before the river and the trees. Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless. This whole place used to be green. Now, it’s all sand. I had to come see for myself to believe it.”

Before the First, Second, and Third Ages, there were the Valian Years with the Days Before Days and Years of the Trees. This period lasted 5,000 years, and given we’re believed to be around 1,500 years into the Second Age (and the First Age lasted 590 years), 7,100 seems like a sensible bet.

He’s probably much older, though. In the books, it’s suggested he may have existed before the coming of the Valar and he was the first living thing to inhabit the planet. Best to stick to his answer, I think: eldest, indeed.

What is he?

By Tolkien’s admission, Tom Bombadil is an “enigma.” He could be described as one of the Forest Folk, but he’ll never be fully understood (unless Rings of Power gives him backstory… a sobering prospect).

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He’s not a Wizard, although he does have magical abilities beyond that of an Istar. He’s not an Elf, but he’s definitely immortal. And he’s not a Dwarf, because… well, look at him. Frodo asks what he is, but he’s simply told, “He is.”

Is he God, or an even higher, omniscient force beyond the Valar? That’s one interpretation, but Tolkien actively denied it. “I really do think you are being too serious, besides missing the point,” he wrote in one letter, after the theory was put forward by a reader.

He also said, “There is no embodiment of the One, of God, who indeed remains remote, outside the World.”

It’s possible he’s one of the Ainur, an angelic being created by Eru Ilúvatar (the supreme deity within Tolkien’s source material) to shape the Earth. Or, as suggested by Robert Foster’s The Complete Guide to Middle-earth, he’s a Maia “gone native.”

There’s other theories, but Bombadil is best enjoyed with the Tenet philosophy: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

Tom Bombadil powers explained

Tom Bombadil may be the most powerful character in all of Arda – not that he’d ever wish to wield it to support such a claim.

“Tom’s a wanderer, not a warrior,” he tells the Stranger in Rings of Power. But he clearly has extraordinary abilities, which I’ve listed below:

Immortality

This one is obvious, but Tom Bombadil is clearly immortal. He’s been around since “Before the river and trees”, and he doesn’t die in any of Tolkien’s writing.

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In fact, after the War of the Ring, Gandalf spent some time with Bombadil. Despite the warfare and chaos surrounding the Fellowship’s journey, he was “quite untroubled” and “not much interested in anything that we have done and seen,” Gandalf told Frodo.

While Frodo and Gandalf sail to Valinor at the start of the Fourth Age, Bombadil stays in Middle-earth. In 1958, Tolkien estimated Middle-earth would now be in its Sixth or Seventh Age, and I’m betting Bombadil was still alive.

In Tolkien’s original ending for The Silmarillion, Arda faced its own apocalypse with the Dagor Dagorath. Bombadil foresaw this as the moment the “world would be mended.” In other words, he’s probably unkillable.

Control over the elements

In Rings of Power, the Stranger observes that he’s able to “wield power over trees, over wind and fire. You wield it as if it belongs to you.”

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Bombadil has also been described as the “master of wood, water, and hill.” The extent of these powers is clearly vast; he starts a fire with a single yawn, and he turns a piece of paper into bread, like it’s nothing.

Notably, in Fellowship of the Ring, he says: “Out east my knowledge fails. Tom is not master of Riders from the Black Land far beyond his country.”

However, he seems pretty powerful in Rings of Power, exercising control over his surroundings and the tree that captures the Stranger. He may be at his strongest when he’s in his home in the Withywindle, but it’s hardly a downgrade in the TV show.

Immunity to the One Ring

This is the most interesting ability: Bombadil is completely immune to the One Ring.

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When Frodo stayed in Tom’s home, he told him about the ring and allowed him to take a look at it. He put it in – and, amazingly, nothing happened. He didn’t vanish, nor did it have any sort of effect on him. He even tossed it in the air and made it disappear, proving how much control he had over his realm.

Here’s the thing: according to Gandalf, it’s not that Bombadil has power over the ring, it’s that the ring doesn’t hold any power over Tom.

“He is his own master. But he cannot alter the Ring itself, nor break its power over others,” Gandalf explains to the Council of Elrond.

It’s his indifference to the ring that made him an unsuitable guardian. “He would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away,” Gandalf.

The question is, does this make him stronger than Sauron? Not quite, at least in Gandalf’s eyes. “Could that power be defied by Bombadil alone? I think not. I think that in the end, if all else is conquered, Bombadil will fall, Last as he was First; and then Night will come,” he said.

“Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself. And yet we see that Sauron can torture and destroy the very hills.”

Who is Goldberry?

Tom Bombadil has a wife named Goldberry, also known as the River-daughter. He says her name in Rings of Power, but when the Stranger asks him who he was singing with, he acts like there’s nobody else there.

Similar to her husband, Goldberry is a bit of a mystery other than her being a river-spirit of the river Withywindle and one of the Forest Folk.

According to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Goldberry mischievously pulled his beard when they first met. The next day, he asked her to marry him. Tolkien said she represents the “actual seasonal changes” of the river lands, but – and you shouldn’t be surprised by this – he didn’t provide any other details.

The ‘Old Tom Bombadil’ song even references her. “Reads by the shady pool, lilies on the water. Old Tom Bombadil, and the River-daughter,” he sings.

It’s unclear if she’ll ever appear in Rings of Power (if you’re asking me, I doubt it – at least for this season).

Why he wasn’t in the Lord of the Rings movies

Peter Jackson didn’t include Tom Bombadil in his Lord of the Rings movies because he didn’t progress the story.

As part of the Fellowship of the Ring’s DVD appendices, the director explained: “In the plot of The Lord of the Rings, in our movie, in its most simple form, is Frodo carrying the Ring. Eventually, he has to go to Mordor and destroy the Ring.

“So, you know, what does Old Man Willow contribute to the story of Frodo carrying the Ring? What does Tom Bombadil ultimately really have to do with the Ring? I know there’s Ring stuff in the Bombadil episode, but it’s not really advancing our story. It’s not really telling us things we need to know.”

Christopher Lee, who played Saruman, agreed and suggested Bombadil’s omission allowed more screen time with him and Gandalf; specifically, their fight and his capture.

Jackson considered including an Easter egg: “A feathered cap [that would] come darting through the trees, to hear the sound of Tom Bombadil’s voice and song and have the Hobbits turn and run away as fast as they could.”

“We thought [that] would acknowledge Tom Bombadil in an affectionate joke kind of way. We didn’t have time to do it,” he said.

Who plays Bombadil in Rings of Power?

Tom Bombadil is played by Rory Kinnear in Rings of Power, who you may recognize from Black Mirror (he’s the Prime Minister forced to have sex with a pig), his role as Bill Tanner in Daniel Craig’s James Bond movies, and Penny Dreadful, among other performances.

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Kinnear wasn’t aware of Bombadil’s character when he got the part – but his partner was, and when she reacted excitingly, he “sort of knew instantly that it had a cultural heft to it that I was going to have to be sensitive to.”

“The big thing was, how’s he going to talk? There are lots of different dialects and accents going on throughout the show, and I wanted him to be somewhat distinct from those,” he told Vanity Fair.

“But I also wanted to choose an accent that felt old – that was British, but felt like the oldest part of Britain.”

JD Payne and Patrick McKay described Bombadil as “sort of an anti-dramatic character… he observes drama, but largely doesn’t participate in it.”

In this adaptation, things will be a little different. “When he finally crosses paths with the Stranger, you could say he has a desire to try to keep the destruction that has happened there from spreading to his beloved lands in the West,” they explained.

“He nudges the Stranger along his journey, which he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about. So I’d say our Tom Bombadil is slightly more interventionist than you see in the books, but only by 5% or 10%.”

Make sure you’re up to date with our recaps of Rings of Power Season 2 Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3, and find out when you can watch Episode 5. Read our predictions for the Dark Wizard’s identity, and check out our guides on Círdan, Forodwaith, and if Rings of Power is considered canon in Lord of the Rings.