He first appeared in print in a 1934 poem called "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", which also included The Lord of the Rings characters Goldberry (his wife), Old Man Willow (an evil tree in his forest) and the barrow-wight, from whom he rescues the hobbits.

The idea for this meeting and the appearances of Old Man Willow and the barrow-wight can be found in some of Tolkien's earliest notes for a sequel to The Hobbit.

Old Tom Bombadil was a merry fellow; bright blue his jacket was and his boots were yellow, green were his girdle and his breeches all of leather; he wore in his tall hat a swan-wing feather.

[2] The poem depicts Bombadil as a "merry fellow" living in a small valley close to the Withywindle river, where he wanders and explores nature at his leisure.

Several of the valley's mysterious residents, including the "River-woman's daughter" Goldberry, the malevolent tree-spirit Old Man Willow, the Badger-folk and a barrow-wight, attempt to capture Bombadil for their own ends.

The poem includes a reference to the Norse lay of Ótr, when Bombadil threatens to give the hide of a disrespectful otter to the barrow-wights, who he says will cover it with gold apart from a single whisker.

The poem mentions Middle-earth locations including Hays-end, Bree, and the Tower Hills and speaks of "Tall Watchers by the Ford, Shadows on the Marches".

[T 2][6] There was another burst of song, and then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band.

At any rate he was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink.

[T 3][T 4][T 5] Tom and his wife, Goldberry, the "Daughter of the River", still live in their house by the source of the Withywindle, and some of the characters and situations from the original poem reappear.

[T 5] Towards the end of The Return of the King, when Gandalf leaves the Hobbits, he mentions that he wants to have a long talk with Bombadil, calling him a "moss-gatherer".

At the very end of The Lord of the Rings, as Frodo sails into the West and leaves Middle-earth forever, he has what seems to him the very experience that appeared to him in the house of Bombadil in his dream of the second night.

Specifically, Tolkien connected Tom in the letter to a renunciation of control, "a delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself," "Botany and Zoology (as sciences) and Poetry".

[T 8] In another letter, Tolkien writes that he does not think Tom is improved by philosophizing; he included the character "because I had already 'invented' him independently" (in The Oxford Magazine) "and wanted an 'adventure' on the way".

Gay suggests with a detailed comparison that Tom Bombadil was directly modelled on the Kalevala's central character, the demigod Väinämöinen.

[13] Jane Beal, in the Journal of Tolkien Research, writes that Bombadil can be considered using "the four levels of meaning found in medieval scriptural exegesis and literary interpretation".

[9] The psychologist, fiction author and camouflage expert Timothy R. O'Neill interpreted Bombadil from a Jungian perspective in The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien, and the Archetypes of Middle-Earth (1979).

"[16]The Tolkien scholar Patrick Grant notes that "Jung also talks of a common figure, the 'vegetation numen,' king of the forest, who is associated with wood and water in a manner that recalls Tom Bombadil.

Hargrove suggested that Tolkien left clues that Bombadil is one of the Valar, a god of Middle-Earth, specifically Aulë, the archangelic demigod who created the dwarves.

He was played by Norman Shelley in the 1955–1956 BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, a performance that Tolkien thought "dreadful"; in his view even worse was that Goldberry was announced as his daughter and Willowman "an ally of Mordor (!!)"

[36] The 1969 Harvard Lampoon novel Bored of the Rings parodies Tom Bombadil as "Tim Benzedrine", a stereotypical hippie married to "Hash-berry".