[Child of the 7th Age]

Thorondil,

You are right that Tom is an embodiment of the world, but not the whole world, only that part of the world. Tolkien says in Letter 19:

..Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside...

To tell the truth, I've read and used this quote myself to make as similar point. Only there's one problem. The letter above was written on December 16, 1937. On December 19, 1937, Tolkien also says this:

I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits --'A long expected party'

That means the Bombadil tale in Chaper VII had't even been written yet. According to HoMe, JRRT didn't do the Bombadil sections of LotR until the end of August 1938, which was long after the letter you quote.

So what was JRRT referring to here in Letter 19? It was not the Tom B of LotR. Instead, he was referring to a poem about Bombadil that was written very early, and published in The Oxford Magazine in 1934. This same poem was later reprinted in The Adventures of Tom Bambadil, which came out after the LotR.

The Tom B of the poems and the Tom B of the LotR were not exactly the same thing. In 1962, when he was getting the Tom B book ready for publication, Tolkien made reference in several letters (237, 241)that the early Tom B. had to be changed in certain ways to fit with the LotR Tom B. Since JRRT was speaking with the illustrator Pauyline Baynes, the changes referred to were minor physical ones such as the type of feather Tom wore. He did not go into any more detail than this.

Yet, knowing the way Tolkien drastically revised things time and again, I have to think that there were more changes than this between the Tom of the 1934 poem and the Tom of the book. When you read the 1934 poem and the later chapter on Tom in LotR, you get the sense that Tom has grown considerably.

Did Tom start out as the spirit of the Oxford and Berkshire countryside? Absolutely. Did he grow to become greater or more than this, as he came into contact with the Legendarium? Quite possibly.

Just look at the hobbits themselves, how they grow and change. The hobbit and Gandalf of The Hobbit are "smaller" in many respects than the same characters in LotR. That's even more so if you compare the Gandalf of The Hobbit with the one mentioned in the Silm. I would argue that a similar process also took place with Tom B., and he became much more than the spirit of a particular locale in England.

sharon, the 7th age hobbit