At the house of Tom Bombadil,
well probably about time I added my ha'penny worth of speculation to the (surely ultimately unknowable) in-story origins of Tom and Goldberry.
Of Tom, I must say I've had him down as a junior Maiar, or similar spirit of lesser degree. He seems to have been in Middle Earth for a very long time. I wonder if he was one of the 'staff' of the Valar (perhaps an understudy of Yavanna) who worked on forming Arda, but never left? By the third age he has become so attached to his patch that he now fulfils a role similar to the 'Genius loci' of classical mythology, the anthropomorphisation of a particular place. Though JRRT seems to have little truck with classical mythology I think such an idea was popular with many ancient peoples, especially the Celts.
The Forest appears to be Nature presented as 'red in tooth and claw' to a certain degree, the hobbits are not in a tamed landscape but in an ancient, wild survivor of ancient times, with danger as well as beauty. Is Old Man Willow any more to be blamed for seeking some extra nourishment than a Venus flytrap swallowing unwary insects?
Now Goldberry seems again to have a classical aspect, namely the naiads, water spirits of streams and rivers. Their counterparts, the tree-spirit dryads have been changed way out of recognition in LoTR into the ents. Again the naiads became genii loci and many Roman shines were built at springs. This survives in some little way today, for who has never thrown a penny into a wishing-well? Therefore Goldberry again could be a Maiar-esque spirit much like Tom.
Well, so much for my wittering. Down to the more concrete!
Further to the farming aspect of T&G we have candles, probably beeswax, blankets, likely wool (and mention of flocks of sheep on the Downs in times gone by) and the stone construction of Tom's house itself. So they had access to wool (could have kept sheep or maybe collected wool from the hedgerows etc where sheep tend to luxuriate in a good scratch in the spring). Also Tom must either have had a quarry or recycled building stone from the ruined settlements of the Dunedain. Mention is made both of a vegetable garden (beans on poles) and a flower garden.
Meanwhile, on Barrow-bypassing, here's the link that Esty mentioned above -
http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=1852
Now a thought which has never struck me before, (doh!). Tom fails to become invisible when he puts on the ring. Sauron, as far as I can make out, was not invisible during his epic battle with Elendil, Isildur and Gil-Galad on Mount Doom, though he was wearing the ring. This seems to argue that Tom and Sauron are at least similar types of beings, be that Maiar or related spirits. Perhaps invsibility was one of the things implied by Gandalf when he said that the ring would give power according to the stature of the wearer, ie to elect whether to be invisible or not when wearing the ring?