While this seems to demonstrate that he has unique and mysterious power over the Ring, the idea of giving him the Ring for safekeeping is rejected within Book Two's second chapter, "The Council of Elrond." Gandalf says, rather, that "the Ring has no power over him", and believes that Tom would not find the Ring to be very important and so might simply misplace it.

There have been many debates about just having the eagles take the ring in Lord of the Rings, but the simplest answer to that is that Sauron would have expected that and even though the eagles were tough as nails, they never would have made it if Sauron's entire army was shooting at them plus all 9 Nazgul flying after them.

But if Sauron didn't know anything about Tom, then wouldn't Tom be a much better choice to carry the ring than Frodo? The whole idea of Frodo taking the ring was that Sauron never thought twice about a little Hobbit, but if he didn't know anything about Tom, he wouldn't have expected him in any way either. Or at the very least, why didn't Tom go with the rest of them to protect the group?

WB PLANS LIMITED RELEASE OF HIGH-FRAME-RATE 'HOBBIT'; MAY NOT INCLUDE ALL MAJOR CITIES

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros. is convinced that high-frame-rate movies are the next big thing — but they’re keeping the first HFR release fairly small, Variety's David Cohen reports. According to source familiar with Warner’s release plans for Peter Jackson’s first HOBBIT, the HFR version will go out to only select locations, perhaps not even into all major cities. People who have seen much of the film in 48 frames-per-second 3D tell Variety the picture now looks vastly better than the test footage shown this April at CinemaCon, which had not yet undergone post-production polishing and got a mixed reception from exhibitors. But the studio still wants to protect the format by going into a limited release for the HFR version, hoping to test the marketplace and expand the HFR release for the second and third installments — provided auds are enthusiastic. As of now, there are still no theaters ready for HFR projection, though some require only a software upgrade that will be ready in September.

In response to a letter from one of his readers, Tolkien described Tom's role in The Lord of the Rings:

"Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a 'comment.' I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and 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 did go on to analyse the character's role further:

"I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless …

"It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war … the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron."

Tolkien even seems to justify Tom Bombadil's presence:

"And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)."