Tom Bombadil

I read the part last night where the hobbits encounter Tom Bombadil in the Fellowship of the Rings. Awesome.

And it got me to wondering the age old question that has plagued philosophers for centuries: why wasn’t Tom Bombadil affected by the Ring?

I found various theories:

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/103559/did-the-ring-in-fact-affect-tom-bombadil

http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Theories_about_Tom_Bombadil

http://tolkien.cro.net/rings/tombom.html

And none of them really satisfied.

I think the thing that’s great about reading Tolkien is that the intuition of why gives flight to it making sense in the story and feeling right in that moment. To hear other people try to put it into words or frame it into some weird theory just makes it sound cheap.

Better to live with the mystery of knowing.