title: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
author:  J R R Tolkien 
description: <P>John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on the 3rd January, 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but at the age of four he and his brother were taken back to England by their mother. After his father's death the family moved to Sarehole, on the south-eastern edge of Birmingham. Tolkien spent a happy childhood in the countryside and his sensibility to the rural landscape can clearly be seen in his writing and his pictures.His mother died when he was only twelve and both he and his brother were made wards of the local priest and sent to King Edward's School, Birmingham, where Tolkien shone in his classical work. After completing a First in English Language and Literature at Oxford, Tolkien married Edith Bratt. He was also commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers and fought in the battle of the Somme. After the war, he obtained a post on the New English Dictionary and began to write the mythological and legendary cycle which he originally called The Book of Lost Tales but which eventually became known as The Silmarillion.In 1920 Tolkien was appointed Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds which was the beginning of a distinguished academic career culminating with his election as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Meanwhile Tolkien wrote for his children and told them the story of The Hobbit. It was his publisher, Stanley Unwin, who asked for a sequel to The Hobbit and gradually Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, a huge story that took twelve years to complete and which was not published until Tolkien was approaching retirement. After retirement Tolkien and his wife lived near Oxford, but then moved to Bournemouth. Tolkien returned to Oxford after his wife's death in 1971. He died on 2 September 1973 leaving The Silmarillion to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher.</P>
zlib_text: 1
  
    
  
  THE ADVENTURES OF TOM BOMBADIL
  
    
  
  Old Tom Bombadil was a merry felow;
  
  bright blue his jacket was and his bloots were yellow,
  
  green were his girdle and his breeches all of leather;
  
  he wore in his tall hat a swan-wing feather.
  
  He lived up under Hill, where the Withywindle
  
  ran from a grassy well down into the dingle.
  
    
  
  Old Tom in summertime walked about the meadows
  
  gathering the buttercups, running after shadows,
  
  tickling the bumblebees that buzzed among the flowers,
  
  sitting by the waterside for hours upon hours.
  
    
  
  There his beard dangled long down into the water:
  
  up came Goldberry, the River-woman's daughter;
  
  pulled Tom's hanging hair. In he went a-wallowing
  
  under the water-lilies, bubbling and a-swallowing.
  
    
  
  'Hey, Tom Bombadil! Whither are you going?'
  
  said fair Goldberry. 'Bubbles you are blowing,
  
  frightening the finny fish and the brown water-rat,
  
  startling the dabchicks, and drowning your feather-hat!'
  
    
  
  'You bring it back again, there's a pretty ma