A mystery within a mystery, involving Tom Bombadil.

[ninlaith]

I believe the significance of Tom Bombadil is to show character. I believe Tolkien wanted to have someone who could resist the ring and not be affected by it while others were being taken by the darkness. Amist all the chaos and despair there can always be one person who is not affected by change but does not have to be a key part of the adventure. Much like Sir Tolkien himself. Growing up during the industrial revolution was hard on him. However, Tolkien never really met up with the turn of the times eye to eye and always enjoyed peace and quiet and good tilled earth.

[Earendilyon]

Tolkien wrote himself on the importance of Tom Bombadil in Letter 144:

And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).
(....)
Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a 'comment'. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.

[Mithalwen]

$300? Was that a first edition? Or written in Ithildin....