The Adventures of Tom Bombadil is a collection of poetry written by J. R. R. Tolkien and published in 1962. The book contains 16 poems, three of which deal with Tom Bombadil (two specifically about Tom, and he also appears in the poem; The Stone Troll), a character who is most famous for his encounter with Frodo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring (the first volume in Tolkien's best-selling The Lord of the Rings). The rest of the poems are an assortment of bestiary verse and fairy tale rhyme. Three of the poems appear in The Lord of the Rings as well. The book is part of Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium and the Middle-earth canon.
The volume includes what W. H. Auden considered Tolkien's best poem, The Sea-Bell, subtitled Frodos Dreme. It is a piece of great metrical and rhythmical complexity that recounts a journey to a strange land beyond the sea. Drawing on medieval 'dream vision' poetry and Irish 'immram' [citation needed] poems the piece is markedly melancholic and the final note is one of alienation and disillusion.
The book was originally illustrated by Pauline Baynes and later by Roger Garland. The book, like the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, is presented as if it is an actual translation from the Red Book of Westmarch, and contains some background information on the world of Middle-earthwhich is not found elsewhere: eg the name of the tower at Dol Amroth and the names of the Seven Rivers of Gondor. There is also some fictional 'background' information of those poems, linking them to the Hobbit folklore and literature as well as their actual writers (some of them were written bySamwise Gamgee).
The book is also notable because it uses the letter "K" instead of "C" for the / k / sound in Sindarin, a spelling variant Tolkien alternated many times in his writings.
