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Notes -
And funny enough, this actually helps the Tom Bombadil portion of book 1 make more thematic sense to me. On first read it sticks out like a sore thumb for how 'unneeded' it is.
But the existence of Tom, his carefree attitude and isolation from the rest of the world, and the raw power he displays in an entirely flippant manner is, if I recall, the first and biggest hint the reader gets that this world used to be full of powerful entities who were capable of casual acts of both creation and destruction. And it turns out they still exist in certain pockets of the world, but they're so rare that they have faded mostly into mythic status.
So he plugs into the greater story as a simple example of the what the world used to be like, where entities like Tom or the Balrog or, I guess Shelob counts, were commonly encountered and together created a much richer, more dynamic world than the one we find them in, where they're hemmed in to their little corner having very little influence on the course of events. Doesn't make the Bombadil chapters any less weird, but you can see what Tolkein was trying to get across to the readers early on.
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