J.R.R. Tolkien published The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962. The collection contains sixteen poems, including the title poem and “The Stone Troll,” and presents verse connected with the mythology of Middle-earth.
The book was published several years after The Lord of the Rings. Some poems are framed as works translated from the Red Book of Westmarch, allowing Tolkien to present them as texts preserved within his fictional history rather than simply as modern poems about invented characters.
Tom Bombadil himself appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, where he helps the hobbits after they leave the Shire. The 1962 poetry collection should not be confused with The Tolkien Reader, a later American compilation published in 1966, or with The Silmarillion, which was published posthumously in 1977.