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Re: Of Bombadillos and Balrogs
A writer can quite easily create a mysterious stranger, and keep him as a mysterious stranger, even mysterious to himself. Many have.
Another example: JRRT certainly didn't know the history of the Ring Bilbo found when he wrote The Hobbit, and if the people at Allen & Unwin and pressed him for a sequel staring Beorn instead of more hobbits, he might never have tried to work out its earlier history and what else it might be (and we would now be talking about a work named The Lord of the Bears).
Writing is somewhat like dreaming, the characters come alive and seem to act on their own, new ones appear that you never consciously decided to create, and often you don't know who they are or what they are, just the short part they play in the tale you see.
Consider the two "other" wizards. They apparently continued to remain vague to Tolkien. He invented some material about them to go into the Appendices and Index to The Lord of the Rings, though in the event the material was never used. Then in The Peoples of Middle-earth (HoME 12) in chapter XIII, "Last Writings", indicating "A note made on their names and functions seems now lost ..." he re-invented many of the details, but they still remain vague.
Reading that material I don't get the impression that JRRT knew anything more about these wizards than the very short notes he put down, and even that was rather tentative and not truly a clear view.
In the same way he seems not to really have known anything much more about Amroth or Celebrimbor than appears in The Lord of the Rings when they appeared suddenly entered his tale when he was in the heat of inspiration. Later expansions on these characters in Unfinished Tales and "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" are minimal, contradictory, and suggest a great lack of solidity about anything connected with them except the parts afforded them in LR.
If JRRT did continue to consider Tom Bombadil an enigma, in his own mind, desiring he remain so as part of his literary effect, then any explanation given, no matter how plausible, cannot be right, if by "right" we mean the explanation that JRRT himself would have given.
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