The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne confirmed that they are including the enigmatic Tom Bombadil in the second season of the show, but they will also be significantly altering him.
Dylan Smith as Largo Brandyfoot, Markella Kavenagh as Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot, and Megan Richards Poppy Proudfellow in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022), Prime Video
Speaking with Vanity Fair about the upcoming second season, the showrunners confirmed the character will appear and he will be played by Rory Kinnear. As for his role in the second season, he will be part of the Hobbit and the Stranger storyline.
Payne shared, “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. Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings.”
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien
Payne goes on to confirm he will interact with the Stranger, Nori, and Poppy, “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. He nudges the Stranger along his journey, which he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about.”
He then declared that the show is significantly altering the character, “So I’d say our Tom Bombadil is slightly more interventionist than you see in the books, but only by 5% or 10%.”
A scene from The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 trailer (2024), Amazon MGM Studios
As for Bombadil’s role in the larger season, Payne relayed, “Season one set the pieces on the chessboard, and in season two the pieces are in motion and it’s really about the villains. You’ve got Sauron, who is not cloaked behind the guise of [the human refugee] Halbrand anymore. The audience knows he’s Sauron, so now we’re watching him maneuver as he’s manipulating [the burn-scar covered dark elf] Adar, who’s another big villain of the season.…”
Speaking specifically to Bombadil, he added, “Really, Tom is sort of a curiosity within that structure because while it is darker, Tom Bombadil is singing and saying lines that could be nursery rhymes from children’s poems. 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.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 poster
Tom Bombadil first appears in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, after Frodo’s companions Merry and Pippin are captured by Old Man Willow. He’s able to rescue them both by singing a song to the tree and then smiting it with a branch he breaks off from it. After rescuing the Hobbits he invites them back to his house, where his wife, Goldberry, has prepared a bountiful supper.
Upon arriving at Bombadil’s Frodo questions Goldberry as to who he is. Goldberry explains, “He is, as you have seen him. … He is the Master of wood, water, and hill.”
When asked if the land belongs to him, Goldberry retorts, “No indeed! That would indeed be a burden. The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master. No one has ever caught old Tom walking in the forest, wading in the water, leaping on the hill-tops under light and shadow. He has no fear. Tom Bombadil is master.”
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien
As far as Tolkien’s view on the character. He’s made it abundantly clear in a number of letters. In Letter 119 to Stanley Unwin, he describes him as the “spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside.”
In Letter 144 to Noami Mitchison, Tolkien also made it abundantly clear he left Tom Bombadil as an intentional enigma. He said, “And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).”
J.R.R. Tolkien via Sidh Aniron YouTube
As far as Tom Bombadil’s place in the narrative, Tolkien also informed Mitchison in Letter 144, “Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”
Tolkien elaborated, “I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kinship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”
Furthermore Tolkien shared, “He has no connexion in my mind with the Entwives. What had happened to them is not resolved in this book. He is in a way the answer to them in the sense that he is almost the opposite, being say, Botany and Zoology (as sciences) and Poetry as opposed to Cattle-breeding and Agriculture and practicality.”
Daniel Weyman as The Stranger in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022), Prime Video
In Letter 153 to Peter Hastings, Tolkien wrote, “In historical fact I put him in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an ‘adventure’ on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. I do not mean him to be an allegory – or I should not have given him to particular, individual, and ridiculous a name – but ‘allegory’ is the only mode of exhibiting certain functions: he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture.”
Tolkien added, “Even the Elves hardly show this : they are primarily artists. Also T.B. exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him. You must concentrate on some pan, probably relatively small, of the World (Universe), whether to tell a tale, however long, or to learn anything however fundamental – and therefore much will from that ‘point of view’ be left out, distorted on the circumference, or seem a discordant oddity. The power of the Ring over all concerned, even the Wizards or Emissaries, is not a delusion – but it is not the whole picture, even of the then state and content of that pan of the Universe.”
A scene from The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 trailer (2024), Amazon MGM Studios
Of note, Bombadil’s confirmation might indicate other rumors regarding the second season are true. TheOneRing.net previously indicated Bombadil would appear in the show with the outlet’s Justine Sewell noting on a livestream, “Spotted on set is an actor who in the dialogue is being called Tom.”
When asked if this was in reference to Tom Bombadil, Sewell answered, “It’s 100% Tom Bombadil. That’s what they are saying. Tom Bombadil has been cast and will show up in Season 2.”
The outlet’s Cliff Broadway would later report that one of their sources informed him that there would be an episode focused on the romance between Bombadil and Goldberry.
However, the source also revealed, “Tom Bombadil and Goldberry are in an episode. They are played by the same actor and actress as Melkor/Morgoth and Ungoliant. The show will confirm the long-held fan theory that Tom and Goldberry are Melkor and Ungoliant serving out their punishment bestowed on them by Mandos.”
Shelob in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the Kings Extended Version (2004), New Line Cinema
What do you make of Tom Bombadil showing up in The Rings of Power Season 2?
I just don’t even know what to say anymore when these stories come out. It’s mind-boggling how the idiots on that show justify any of this garbage.
Patrick McKay and JD Payne both should have been fired.
More glorified fan-fiction; the only connection this show has to Tolkien is some character names– “anyone else we have the rights to? Let’s do…Bombadil!!”