Come back with your shield or on it, Stephen.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Tom Bombadil was my favorite character in LOTR. I know Colbert is a fan too, I hope they will do him justice .
What is Tom anyway? Is he a God?
in universe, unknown (deliberately so). his wife has nature goddess vibes, except that nothing else in LOTR really fits in with that.
in the real world, he's a character tolkien invented long before he wrote LOTR (he appears in some poems, alongside farmer maggot). when tolkien was writing LOTR, he didnt initially have a very good idea what the plot would end up being (all he knew is, he was writing the hobbit 2), so he included a tom bombadil adventure just so the hobbits would have something to do.
and then he just never took the episode out during the subsequent 18283281 waves of revisions he did to LOTR during the writing process.
He's mine too! If only Brian Blessed wasn't nearly 90