This paper explores Tolkien's use of 'animism(s)' across the compositional layers of the Legendarium. I examine what 'animism' appears to have meant to Tolkien, how and where he encountered it, and how this informed his evolving mythopoeic strategies, tracing a shift from an early, more explicitly 'Tylorian' cosmology populated by named nature spirits to the more immanent and integral expressions of environmental agency found in The Lord of the Rings. The paper focuses on two key sites: the increasingly marginalised eco-daemonological spirits of the early Legendarium, and the Old Forest affair, where a decisive shift occurs in Tolkien's representation of animacy. As Old Man Willow transforms from an arboreal prison for an "earth-bound spirit" into an embodied person with a 'spirit' of his own, we see Tolkien move away from transcendent personification toward a more immanentist and relational model that closely approaches a neo-animist ontology. I then turn to Tom Bombadil, whose intrusion into the narrative at this juncture is of critical importance. As Tolkien's most explicit and mature "exemplar" of an animistic ethos, Bombadil functions as a conduit of ecocentric "recovery" for both hobbits and the reader, guiding us across the threshold from the familiarity of The Shire into the perilous more-than-human world.