Every film or audio retelling leaves out Tom which means that the adaptors don’t understand the story and remove what they think is irrelevant.

Tom Bombadill is crucial to the telling. He is impervious to the power of the ring. He represents Nature and identifies how the old world is fading and the new with its attention to material possessions is in the ascendancy.

It is the attracion to the magpie sparkle that gives the Dark Lord his power and has a correlation with C21st.

If you don’t get Tom Bombardill, you don’t get Lord of the Rings.

@Geoffrey51 Reading LOTR without the Bombadil chapter (and the following one) is exactly the same. I just skip from the Old Forest to Bree, and pretend that the intervening was a dream brought on by too much pipe-weed.

Tolkien himself, I seem to have read somewhere, once wrote that Bombadil should have been edited out and didn't make much sense once the whole series was put together. Since the novels were originally written to his son a chapter at a time, and assembled much later for publication, I can see his point.

@Paul4747 Then I shall let it rest there.

I received it as a gift.

I went looking through Tolkien's stuff and only found the one mention of Tom B. outside the brief LOTR sequence in The Adventures Of Tom Bombadil . I always thought the Tom Bombadil character had great potential and fit very well with what I always thought I understood of Tolkien's worldview. Not only do I wish other adaptations had at least included what Tolkien had written about Tom B., I wish Tolkien had done more with Bombadil himself.

The one I saw was The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book . I enjoyed it very much.