Tom Bombadil

[Legolas]

I think you really nailed it there, leapofberen. Especially with your assessment of Bombadil's power, much the way Tolkien put in the letter quoted below.

To use your word - refreshing - he is a refreshing departure from all else going on in Middle-earth with his total indifference to things outside his occupation with the forest. I love Gandalf's comments about Tom and his odd nature:

...if he were given the Ring, he would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away. Such things have no hold on his mind.

I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time. He is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another.

They halted and Frodo looked south wistfully. 'I should dearly like to see the old fellow again,' he said. 'I wonder how he is getting on?'
'As well as ever, you may be sure,' said Gandalf. 'Quite untroubled; and I should guess, not much interested in anything that we have done or seen, unless perhaps in our visits to the Ents.'

I wish we could've listened in on Gandalf's later conversation with Tom!

When I read Tolkien's similar assessment, I thought it really articulated the sort of character I received him as, and why I was so glad he had a place in the books.

...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 arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view in 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. (Letter 144)