What Tolkien Wrote to Naomi Mitchison About Tom Bombadil

And then it seemed to Frodo that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back...

In a letter to Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien wrote about Tom Bombadil:

He is “not an important person – to the narrative”, even if “he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”

Tolkien himself didn’t consciously…