Big if true: Tom Bombadil to appear in The Rings of Power season 2?

"Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!"

That’s part of the hit single “Tom Bombadil’s Song” from J.R.R Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. If you’ve never read The Lord of the Rings books but only watched the movies, Tom Bombadil is a yellow-booted magical rando who shows up early in the story after the Hobbits leave the Shire but before they meet up with Aragorn in the town of Bree. He’s usually cut out of Lord of the Rings adaptations because, all these decades later, no one seems to know what his deal is or why he’s here. His part of the book doesn’t really move the story forward; it mostly seems to exist so Tolkien can write bangers like the one above.

But old Tom may finally get to shine onscreen. According to TheOneRing.net, the rumor mill is abuzz with reports that there’s an actor playing Tom Bombadil on the set of the second season of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel show The Rings of Power. This is unconfirmed, but reportedly, multiple sources have heard actors say the name “Tom” in dialogue. The skinny is that the name “Errol Pram” in the script is code for “Tom Bombadillo.”

Who the hell is Tom Bombadil?

I don’t know. The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954 and literally no one has figured it out. What chance do I have?

We know he’s a powerful, seemingly immortal being, even if he acts like some singing jackass traipsing through the woods pulling tiny strangers out of root systems. At the council of Elrond, when everyone is deciding what to do with the One Ring, the idea of giving it to Tom Bombadil for safekeeping is floated. But that’s shot down, because everyone thinks he’ll just forget about it and leave it somewhere. That’s how powerful Tom Bombadil is: to him, the One Ring is just some bauble to be absentmindedly misplaced.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Tom lives in the Old Forest east of the Shire. He doesn’t like to leave his home, although Gandalf implies that this wasn’t always so. The Rings of Power is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Fellowship. Maybe Tom is wandering around at this time? Perhaps one of our characters will run into him? Nori and the Stranger seem like good candidates.

The Rings of Power season 2 will likely premiere in 2024. Ring a dong.

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