What If Tom Bombadil Took the One Ring? | Lord of the Rings

The Council of Elrond discussed it. Gandalf refused to consider it. And yet the question remains — what would have happened if the One Ring had gone to the one being in Middle-earth that Sauron could never touch? Tom Bombadil picked it up. Looked through it. Put it in his coat pocket. And went outside to check on a clearing. What followed was not a war. There was no battle, no heroic sacrifice, no moment where the fate of the world hung on a single decision. There was only a man in yellow boots walking east through the Old Forest, humming to himself — and the slow, total, unstoppable unravelling of everything Sauron had spent three Ages building. The Witch-king came. He searched for the Ring with every instrument of a Ringwraith's perception. He heard a song about a lily. The roads became moss. The swords rooted into the walls. Barad-dûr fell — not in fire, not in battle — but sideways, slowly, into the soil of Gorgoroth, which had been waiting three thousand years to become a forest. Tom Bombadil did not save the world. He remembered it. And what the world remembered, it became again. This is the complete alternate history. The full story of what happens when the most dangerous object in Middle-earth spends a season in the pocket of the one being it cannot corrupt. What If Tom Bombadil Took the One Ring? | Lord of the Rings