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Newly Deceased
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<img src="http://www.barrowdowns.com/images/posticons/bluepal.jpg" align=absmiddle> Motifs of Myth
Tom Bombadil has always struck me as a version of Pan, from Greek/Roman mythology. OK, he's lost the goat horns, hoofs, and fur. But he's still a powerful supernatural being with great concern for Nature and to a lesser extent, for friendly, harmless people who venture out into the wilderness. (In "The Wind in the Willows," in the chapter "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," Kenneth Grahame shows Pan rescuing a young animal, but then singing a song to wipe the witnesses' memory of his presence.)
Like Tom, Pan is faintly comical-looking and acting, belying strong powers over living creatures. He seems to be equal to the Olympian gods, but is not part of their family tree, and shows up in mythology with some vague explanation of having "just been here all the time." (In later classical times some esoteric philosophies considered Pan the Universal God, symbolic of the chaotic universe, because his name sounds like the Greek word for "all."
Pan is a wilderness god, uninterested in technology even in the Bronze Age forms practiced by the Olympian gods (e.g. forging metal, weaving, pottery, house-building, horse-taming, growing grain and olives). Tom seems to set the barrier higher, around the Renaissance -- yes to farming, pottery, metal implements, tidy houses with clean sheets on the beds, and trained ponies, but no to clockwork, gunpowder, mills, towns, artificial light, etc.
The main difference between Pan and Tom seems to be the sedate bourgeois lifestyle. Instead of chasing nymphs through the woods all night, Tom hurries home to dinner with the wife. (Goldberry herself seems to be half Rhinemaiden and half classical demigoddess -- almost as unusual in the Middle-Earth cast of characters as Tom is. But even she has to do her autumn-cleaning!)
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