JRR Tolkien’s little-known gem from 1962 may seem like a children’s book, but it’s anything but. High fantasy pioneer JRR Tolkien is known for writing 1937 The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ringspublished in three parts between 1954 and 1955. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogies adapted these novels, bringing Tolkien’s work to a much wider audience. But there are two more Lord of the Rings books that Tolkien actually published during his lifetime. One is a songbook and the other is the 1962 poetry collection, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
Being a poetry anthology, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil did not receive a direct adaptation in the same way as The Hobbit and LOTRso it is still relatively unknown. That said, Amazon Prime Video The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV show adapted the LOTR character Tom Bombadil and gave him lines that appear in both LOTR and the 1962 anthology. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is illustrated by Tolkien’s friend Pauline Baynes. Although it may be a picture book, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is full of enough adult moments to rival Morgoth’s Ring.
Tom Bombadil’s adventures are as tragic and raw as the Lord of the Rings
JRR Tolkien’s 1962 book of poetry is for people of all ages
Baynes’ images, approved by Tolkien, illustrate fairy-tale poetry that speaks to both children and adults, in the tradition of ancient folklore. The poems are happy with tragic momentsincluding the harrowing “The Sea-bell”. The speaker of this poem travels to a fairy island, where he hears voices that are always out of reach and never respond, and when he gets home he discovers that no one talks to him any more than they do on the fairy island. This manic-depressive adventure makes more sense when understood as “Frodo’s Dreme”.
Frodo was never the same after the War of the Ring, reflecting Tolkien’s own war experiences. In-universe, the poem is a creation of the Hobbit with “Frodo’s Dremes” scrawled on the side, but it was developed from a poem originally titled “Looney.” It’s probably the best poem in the book, but it may be telling that Tolkien once called it the worst (The Letters of JRR Tolkien). Another rather earthly adventure follows Tom Bombadil and Goldberry to bed after Tom”captured [Goldberry]held her quickly,“dictation”Forget your mother in…her pool: you won’t find a lover there.“
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Shed More Light on The Lord of the Rings Than You Might Think
JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings poems are Hobbit stories
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is the entire Hobbit lore, shedding light on the habits and literary legends of the Hobbits. The vast majority of Tolkien’s legendarium received an in-universe explanation for existing and being created, which certainly applies to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Later editions of the book clarified in a preface that the poems were a translation of the Red Book of Hesperia. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will be aware of this as the book started by Bilbo Baggins and finished by Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee and other Hobbits in the future.
There is frequent discussion about what constitutes canon in JRR Tolkien’s work. The Lord of the Rings world, but an appeal from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is that it is undeniably canonicalwhoever you ask. Written, edited, and published by Tolkien in his lifetime, this anthology of poetry is fully approved by Tolkien and is liberated by its format to tell symbolic stories without details that contradict anything else in the legendarium. The abstraction of the book’s poetic format allows some of the legend’s more mature stories to flourish, revealing the life of the Hobbit and much more. The Lord of the Rings.