8 Mysteries of Middle-earth: Who is Tom Bombadil and where did the Entwives go?

You might have read The Lord of the Rings there and back again, know the movie dialogues by heart, and navigate the family trees of The Silmarillion better than your own. Yet, there are corners of Middle-earth that even the light of Eärendil’s star cannot reach. Tolkien's world is so fascinating precisely because it doesn't feel like a stage set, but like real history – and history is full of lost books, obscure legends, and half-truths. The author intentionally built an illusion of depth by leaving some doors closed.

The author's son, Christopher Tolkien, did a massive amount of work filling in these gaps. He dedicated his life to the meticulous work of a literary archaeologist, assembling monumental works like Unfinished Tales or The Children of Húrin from his father's chaotic notes, sketches on envelopes, and drafts. But even he couldn't answer everything. He often encountered three different versions of the same story or a note that ended mid-sentence. And perhaps that's for the best. It is precisely these blank spaces that allow us to dream, speculate, and imagine what remained unsaid. Come take a look at the biggest ones with us.

Tom Bombadil: The Oldest and Unclassifiable

When Frodo and his companions encounter the merry fellow in the blue jacket in the Old Forest, they have no idea they have met the greatest anomaly of Tolkien's entire world. Tom Bombadil is the only known being in the history of Middle-earth on whom the Ruling Ring has absolutely no influence. When he puts it on, he doesn't disappear, and Sauron's lure leaves him completely cold. It's not because he is more powerful than Sauron, but because he exists entirely outside the concept of power and dominion. To him, the Ring is just a meaningless trinket that he would probably lose soon because he simply doesn't care about it.

He claims to be "The Oldest," remembering the first raindrop and the arrival of the Dark Lord. This immunity to the laws of the world and his vague origin lead to theories that he is not a wizard or an elf, but the spirit of nature itself or the embodiment of Middle-earth as such.

Palantíri: Treacherous stones that see too much

Palantíri, or Seeing Stones, are not just magic orbs for fortune-telling, but ancient artifacts created by Fëanor himself in the glory days of Valinor. The exiles from Númenor brought seven of them to Middle-earth to connect their realms. However, these stones are not passive tools; they have weight and require immense willpower from the user. Their greatest betrayal is not that they lie, but that they show a selective truth. This is exactly what cost the Steward Denethor and the wizard Saruman – both looked through the stones where Sauron (who owned one stone) wanted them to, and they saw only ruin and the enemy's invincible power, which drove them to madness and despair.

The fate of the lost stones remains a mystery. While Sauron's was likely destroyed during the fall of Barad-dûr and the stone from Minas Tirith survived, the others vanished into the mists of history. Two of them lie deep at the bottom of the icy Bay of Forochel, where the last king of Arnor drowned, and are thus lost to the world of men forever. Another, the so-called Elendil Stone, is housed in the towers in the West, but it is useless for espionage – it only looks across the Sea to the Undying Lands.

The Istari and the lost Blue Wizards

The Order of the Istari sent by the Valar to help against Sauron numbered five members. While Gandalf led the free peoples, Saruman fell to the desire for power, and Radagast got lost in his love for nature, the fate of the remaining two – Alatar and Pallando – is shrouded in impenetrable fog. These two, known as the Ithryn Luin (Blue Wizards), arrived in Middle-earth clad in sea-blue and immediately headed East with Saruman, to the lands of Rhûn and Khand. However, Saruman returned from this expedition alone. The Blue Wizards vanished from the map and from history, and they are barely mentioned in the main story of the War of the Ring.

Not even Tolkien himself knew for sure what happened to them in the unexplored regions, and he radically changed his mind about their fate over the years. In earlier texts, he pessimistically claimed they failed in their mission; they apparently fell to power and founded secret magic cults in the East that survived even the fall of Sauron. Toward the end of his life, however, he rehabilitated their role. According to this newer version, they incited uprisings in the East and sowed confusion behind enemy lines, preventing Sauron from throwing the full force of his eastern armies against the West.

The vanished Entwives: A tragedy with no solution

While other mysteries of Middle-earth are terrifying, the story of the Entwives is primarily heartbreakingly sad. Ents, the tree-herds, are a slow and dying race because they lost their wives. The separation occurred long before the War of the Ring due to differing natures: while Ents loved wild forests and untamed nature, the Entwives longed for order, gardens, and cultivation. They left for the east across the river Anduin to an area called the Brown Lands, where they created blooming orchards. However, when the Ents went looking for their mates after some time, they found only a scorched wasteland. The gardens were destroyed by Sauron's scorched-earth tactics during the war with the Last Alliance, and not a trace of the Entwives remained.

The question "where are the Entwives?" remains one of the most emotional in the entire story. Treebeard still hopes they are just lost and asks the hobbits to let him know if they see them in the fertile Shire. The reality, however, is likely cruel. Tolkien himself admitted in his letters that the Entwives probably did not survive, or were dragged into slavery and their lineage died out.

Nameless Things and the Watcher in the Water

Deep below the deepest tunnels of the dwarves in Moria, where not even the Balrog dared to go, live creatures for which even the wisest have no name. Upon his return, Gandalf spoke chilling words about them: "Far, far below the deepest delvings of the dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he." These entities represent a touch of pure, Lovecraftian horror; ancient forces gnawing at the roots of the world, indifferent to the fates of men and elves. We can only speculate about their appearance, but there is a strong theory that the Fellowship met one of them face to face.

It is the Watcher in the Water, a multi-tentacled monster that guarded the West Gate of Moria. Even Gandalf hinted that this creature crawled (or was driven) from those dark depths beneath the mountains closer to the surface. The biggest mystery of this encounter, however, is not the monster's origin, but its behavior. While the nameless things are considered blind and chaotic, the Watcher showed terrifying intelligence when it specifically targeted Frodo from the whole group. Does this mean that even these ancient horrors from the depths feel the lure of the Ring? Or is their awakening a harbinger that Sauron's darkness has seeped deeper than anyone thought?

The origin of Hobbits: A people who emerged from the mist

Hobbits are a paradox of Tolkien's world. Although they are the ones who decide the fate of Middle-earth, their own history is one big unknown. Unlike the High Elves or the proud Men of the West, hobbits have no recorded legends about their creation or origin. In the chronicles and maps of the "Great Histories," they appear suddenly deep in the Third Age, as if they had been invisible to the world until then. Even the elven scholars, who carefully recorded every event, only noticed them when hobbits began migrating across the Misty Mountains toward the west, fleeing the growing shadow in Mirkwood.

In the introduction to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien suggests that hobbits are most likely related to men – apparently a split, forgotten branch of the human race that evolved in isolation and became smaller (or rather, did not grow as large as other men). Their tracks lead back to the Anduin river valley, where they once lived in the neighborhood of the ancestors of the Rohirrim (which explains the similarity of many words in Hobbitish and Rohirric). Yet it remains a mystery how exactly they separated from men and why they fell into such perfect oblivion that even they themselves forgot where they actually came from.

Stone Giants: Reality or just a raging storm?

Stone giants are one of the strangest and most discussed additions in the book The Hobbit. During the dangerous crossing of the Misty Mountains, Bilbo Baggins describes a scene from another world: huge figures throwing pieces of rock at each other like balls in a raging storm, until the mountains shake to their foundations. This passage was portrayed literally as living mountains in Peter Jackson's film adaptation, which created a spectacular sight. In the book canon, however, their existence is much more questionable, and in the later Lord of the Rings, these titans, who could theoretically crush armies with a single step, never appear directly again, as if they had vanished into the earth.

Were they real, or was it just Bilbo's flowery metaphor for thunder and falling rocks that he wrote in his diary? Most clues suggest it is not just a poetic turn of phrase. Even Gandalf later mentions in passing that he would need to find "some decent giant" to block the damaged door to Moria. Personally, I lean more toward the theory that stone giants are more of a flowery description of a classic storm.

The origin of Orcs: The author's greatest dilemma

Most fans, influenced by The Silmarillion and the film trilogy, consider the origin of orcs a settled matter: they are elves whom the Dark Lord Morgoth captured in ancient ages and twisted into those repulsive creatures through cruel torture. This theory makes sense in the context of Tolkien's rule that "Evil cannot create, it can only corrupt what Good has created." But this version was actually a source of lifelong torment for Tolkien himself, and he never finalized it. The reason was the theology of his world: elves have immortal souls. If orcs are originally elves, would that mean they have souls, can be redeemed, and go to the Halls of Mandos after death? The idea that Morgoth had the power to so permanently violate and destroy the Creator's purest work was ultimately unacceptable to the author.

Tolkien therefore spent the last years of his life rewriting notes and desperately searching for another solution. He considered that orcs were actually soulless animals, a kind of biological machine taught to speak (which, however, did not fit their obvious intelligence and ability to hatch their own plans), or that they were corrupted men (who, however, appeared too late in the history of the world). He even flirted with the idea that the most powerful orcs were fallen Maiar (lesser angels) in physical bodies. The true origin of orcs thus remains the biggest "black hole" in the logic of Middle-earth, an unresolved conflict between the author's desire for a perfect myth and his deep moral and philosophical convictions.

Conclusion: The magic of the unsaid

Middle-earth is not fascinating only because of what we know about it, but primarily because of what we do not know. J. R. R. Tolkien was a master at creating the illusion of depth. He knew well that for a fictional world to feel like real history, it cannot be perfectly mapped. Just as in our history there are lost books, forgotten civilizations, and undeciphered inscriptions, Middle-earth must also have its blank spots on the map. It is precisely these gaps – whether it is the mysterious smile of Tom Bombadil, the sadness over the vanished Entwives, or the dread of the things beneath Moria – that give the reader the feeling that this world is much larger and older than the story they are currently reading.

author Karel Krajča