Tom Bombadil, if you don't remember the name, is the character in The Fellowship of the Ring that many LOTR readers would just as soon forget. Some suggest that Bombadil doesn't fit in with the rest of Tolkien's Middle-earth. Some complain that his dialogue and characterization feel somehow strained. Some aver that Tom Bombadil is just distressingly goofy.
If you have no idea what TB is about then perhaps you've only seen the movies; TB, like the rather more lamented Glorfindel, has no place in the film. In the book, he occupies a significant portion of two chapters: a self-contained episode in the hobbits' journey just after they've left the borders of the Shire and before they reach Bree. Bombadil rescues the hobbits from a carnivorous Willow in the Old Forest, hosts them in his cozy bungalow, then (again) rescues them from carnivorous Wights in the ghostly graveyard of the Barrow-Downs. Almost the whole time, he is described as prancing and singing like some kind of manic overgrown garden gnome.
What *is* Tom Bombadil? He is not man, clearly, as he exhibits a magical mastery over even the most sinister ghosts and foliage. Neither is he a wizard like Gandalf or a wise and solemn elf from back in the day. He seems like nothing so much as a personification of Nature, a Green Man from European folk mythology or some sort of hippy Gaia spirit. He really feels like something imported from a Tolkien side-project about the English countryside and the bountiful joy to be found in a frolicsome relationship to green fields and springtime. He is a jarringly utopian intrusion of Pastoral into a narrative that is darker and more apocalyptic than that.
What most disconnects Bombadil from the main story of the LOTR, however, is that the One Ring has no effect on him. He can see Frodo when the latter slips it on. At one point, TB borrows the ring from Frodo and puts it on his own finger. Not only does he not disappear, but he experiences none of the angsty helpless lust for power that drives the entire trilogy's plot. To TB, the ring is just a band of gold with no powers of any sort. Tom Bombadil comes disturbingly close to undermining everything the novel has been building up about the ring and its history.
After the Barrow-Downs, the story moves on to Bree and the comfortably Quest-centric meeting with Strider and subsequent escape from the Ringwraiths. At this point, poor Tom Bombadil is effectively forgotten, at least for a time. Later, whenever he is mentioned again, it is only in the context of explaining that his great power and indifference to the ring are nevertheless of little help to the Free Peoples in their struggle against Sauron. He is described as being immune to Sauron's power and to the ravages of history so lovingly detailed by JRRT. You get the feeling that, if pressed, an exasperated Elrond might explain that nobody really knows what to make of Bombadil but that he is strongly suspected of belonging to some other story.
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