As the Season 2 premiere of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” draws closer, more details about the upcoming season are being released.
The latest? Vanity Fair confirmed that beloved “Lord of the Rings” character Tom Bombadil will make an appearance in Season 2. Here’s everything we know so far.
Tom Bombadil in ‘The Rings of Power’
Tom Bombadil — a powerful and enigmatic being who makes a handful of appearances in “The Lord of the Rings” — has been historically excluded from any adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work.
“There’s a reason why he hasn’t been in prior adaptations, because in some ways he’s sort of an anti-dramatic character,” “The Rings of Power” showrunner J.D. Payne told Vanity Fair. “He’s not a character who has a particularly strong agenda. He observes drama, but largely doesn’t participate in it. In ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ the characters kind of just go there and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.”
In “The Rings of Power” Season 2, Tom Bombadil (played by Rory Kinnear) is given a second home “on the outskirts of a region called Rhûn,” according to Vanity Fair.
“In our story, he has gone out to the lands of Rhûn, which we learn used to be sort of Edenic and green and beautiful, but now is sort of a dead wasteland,” Payne said. “Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings.”
It’s there that Tom will cross paths with the Stranger — who, at the end of Season 1, was joined by harfoots Nori and Poppy on a journey to discover his purpose.
“When he finally crosses paths with the Stranger, you could say he has a desire to try to keep the destruction that has happened there from spreading to his beloved lands in the West,” Payne told Vanity Fair. “He nudges the Stranger along his journey, which he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about. So I’d say our Tom Bombadil is slightly more interventionist than you see in the books, but only by 5% or 10%.”
Who is Tom Bombadil?
Tom Bombadil is a powerful, ethereal man who lives in the Old Forest with his wife, Goldberry.
He’s first introduced in “The Fellowship of the Rings” when, after Old Man Willow entraps Merry and Pippin, Frodo enlists Tom to help. He sings a song to the tree, making it release the two hobbits. They briefly stay with Tom and Goldberry, and are rescued by Tom later on when they’re ensnared by Barrow-wights.
Tom’s origin is unknown, but was described by Tolkien as “older than old.” He is known to have inhabited Middle-earth in the First Age, so, as Vanity Fair points out, “his existence in this earlier era, thousands of years before the events of ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ fits within the canon established by the author.”
Tom is a notoriously passive character, which likely accounts for his exclusion in Peter Jackson’s “The Fellowship of the Ring.” As ScreenRant points out, Tom is “frustratingly” uninterested in what’s going on in Middle-earth. The book describes Tom as living a “mostly unassuming life, simply existing and caring for the surrounding nature.”
As Payne told Vanity Fair, “He can be a force for good, but he is challenging to integrate dramatically in that he doesn’t have an agenda. He’s not driving forward and pushing people to arrive at any particular end.”
Perhaps Tom’s significance lies in not what he does in “The Lord of the Rings,” but what he represents. According to Vanity Fair, Tolkien interpreted Tom as “nature personified.”
“Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative,” Tolkien wrote in a letter in 1954, per Vanity Fair. “I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that. … He represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely.”
Is Tom Bombadil the most powerful?
Interestingly, despite Tom’s passiveness, he is an immensely powerful being. The One Ring has no effect on him.
According to ScreenRant, “Bombadil can wear the Ring without turning invisible, and even see Frodo when the latter dons the evil piece of jewelry.”
This implies that Tom is as powerful as he is old. But this might be why Tom is so uninterested in getting involved in the affairs of Middle-earth.
As Tolkien wrote in a 1954 letter to his proofreader, according to Vanity Fair, for someone as powerful as Tom, “the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless.”