Sitting in an empty classroom, I took out my lunch. Brown bread, tomatoes, a tin of sardines and an apple. (There is something oddly reassuring in peeling back the lid of the sardine tin and eating the fish with a fork).

A student put his head around the door, ‘hello, sir’.  He hovered in the doorway.

Sensing he wanted to talk, I invited him to come in and to take a seat.

The conversation wandered around and settled on The Lord of the Rings.

We agreed that elements of the book are hard to understand. We concurred that the most enigmatic element of all is the character of Tom Bombadil, a man unmoved by the malevolent power of the ring:

‘Show me the precious Ring!’ he said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom.

It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing!

Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air – and it vanished with a flash. Frodo gave a cry – and Tom leaned forward and handed it back to him with a smile.

The place of Tom Bombadil in the story is not clear. The films based on the book excluded him altogether, perhaps because he would perhaps have seemed too baffling. Tom Bombadil defines himself as a timeless one:

Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the Little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside.

In his correspondence, Tolkien suggests that Bombadil is a personification of the countryside, the English shires with which he was familiar; a countryside unmoved by the evil of the world around. Bombadil is generous, hospitable, protective, joyous, delighting in beauty. But Bombadil seems something more than a metaphor, his incorruptibility and his detachment from the arrogance and pettiness of the world seem very attractive.

Perhaps only an old cynic like myself would appreciate Tom Bombadil as a radical political figure. I did not attempt to explain such thoughts to the student.