Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

I feel like a modern author would have had Bombadil be like Poochy, where he gets mentioned repeatedly and shows up to save the day because the author was in love with his weird character.

As is, he's just this strange forest spirit guy who I think got retooled into Treebeard but wasn't also eliminated from the story. He's an appendix, if a neat one who implies by existence that there's powerful magical beings in the world who don't really give a poo poo about Sauron.