April 24, 2002

On the Absence of Tom Bombadil
Graham

I know that there are quite a few readers loyal to the books who were rather upset about the complete omission of any reference to Tom Bombadil in the first movie. I suppose this is really more of a quick point than anything substantial, but here goes: Tolkien wrote a synopsis of FOTR and placed it in the beginning of the "authorized edition" of The Two Towers; I would assume that he did this for readers who were about to read the second book, having not yet read the first, and the events included in this synopsis are (once again only by my assumption), those that he considered to be most important in the first book. Tolkien does not mention Tom Bombadil in his synopsis. If you read this synopsis, you will see that the movie does a very admirable job of including everthing within it and little else, and I would say that by this measure, Tolkien would approve of the lack of Tom in the movie.