Tom Bombadil, cut from Lord of the Rings movies, to step out in Rings of Power
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is doing what no Lord of the Rings adaptation has done before: putting Tom Bombadil in the thing.
Rory Kinnear (Black Mirror) will play the puissant and pacifistic character in season 2 of the Prime Video series, Vanity Fair revealed on Wednesday. With a few months ahead of its Aug. 29 premiere date, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay were ready to explain how and why they brought the oft-overlooked Tolkien character to the screen.
To fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil is divisive out of proportion to his prominence. The linchpin of a three-chapter digression early in the pages of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tom rescues Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin from an intelligent and malicious tree known as Old Man Willow and takes them back to his house to meet his wife. But also, he’s apparently so powerful that the One Ring has no effect on him.
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Tom is neither hobbit nor human, nor dwarven, nor elven. He says that he’s older than the existence of rivers, and trees, and paths. Though he has Gandalf’s deep respect, he’s not a wizard, and aside from saving the hobbits’ lives a couple times, he has no interest in weighing in on the Ring Quest. But also he’s cheerful, has a big bushy beard, wears a funny hat, and he constantly spouts almost nonsensical rhyming couplets.
It’s that mystery and dichotomy that made Payne and McKay interested in bringing him into The Rings of Power, despite his canonical appearances being limited to those few chapters in The Fellowship of the Ring.
“Tom Bombadil is singing and saying lines that could be nursery rhymes from children’s poems,” Payne told Vanity Fair. “So he sort of defies the tonal shift of the rest of the season and is a real point of light amidst an otherwise sea of darkness.”
Payne and McKay’s Bombadil is concerned with the fate of natural life on Middle-earth: “In our story, he has gone out to the lands of
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