We’re getting a bit outside the scope of the thread here, but I’m curious to know what leads you to think that Bombadil is a riddle with a discoverable solution. I don’t mean that question in a flip or aggressive way – I’m genuinely interested. I can understand debating, say, Balrog wings. I think if you could ask the Professor point blank whether or not Balrogs had wings, he could answer you without hesitation. It’s just an accident of grammar that has left us in the lurch, but there assuredly is an answer.
Don’t get me wrong – I also understand the impetus that drives Bombadil inquiries. People want to integrate him fully into the mythos whether Tolkien bothered to or not. I would be more inclined to sympathize with such inquiries if it weren’t for a number of factors which argue against a “secret solution” to the mystery. The most obvious of these is Tolkien’s own dismissive response to over-analysis of The Master. I think the explanations he gives in the two cited letters are about as definitive an explanation of what Tom is and what he’s doing in the story as there is. I don’t think he’s being intentionally mysterious, at least in the sense that he’s hiding the solution to a riddle.
The second is that Bombadil pre-dates LotR, and the character and many events and details of his scenes are lifted whole cloth from the original poem and transplanted into LotR. Tom had nothing to do with the mythology, and was only retrofitted in later. If anything, the deliberate air of mystery surrounding Tom is used to screen his somewhat clunky integration into Middle-earth.
Thirdly, traces of Bombadil are nowhere to be found in the vast writings of The Silmarillion in all its various drafts and incarnations, at least that I am aware of. As the Old Man has pointed out, Tom’s absence from any of these writings tends to argue against the idea that Bombadil had any particular hold on Tolkien’s imagination or great significance within the legendarium, or that the professor used him to pose one last grand (but solvable) riddle to his readership.
If you plumb back through volumes Volumes VI and VII of HoME, you can trace Bombadil’s evolution (what little there is of it) in fair detail. Without going into a lot of particulars, you’ll find that the prof hit a six month dry spell in the early drafting of LotR, and that Bombadil, Old Man Willow, and the Barrow-Wight, characters and scenes that he already had on hand, were used to break the block. The subsequent development of Tom does not suggest any especially crafty subtext on Tolkien’s part as far as I can see.
I do get that people are fascinated by the topic and are interested in advancing and debating theories about who or what Tom “really is”. Everyone is welcome to their pet Bombadil theory, and equating him with some sort of amorphous “nature spirit” is about as close as you can come to fitting him in. This specific incarnation of the debate (Tom is Eä) doesn’t stand up to textual analysis. Eä is. Tom is. “I can say 'he is' of Winston Churchill as well as of Tom Bombadil, surely?” (Tolkien) But that doesn’t make Winnie the earth or the universe or God or anything else.
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