Tom Bombadil will have a "different" role in The Rings of Power than in The Lord of the Rings

Tom Bombadil is the most enduring mystery from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. A jolly forest dweller, Frodo and his Hobbit friends first encounter Tom near the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, just after they leave the Shire. Tom apparently possesses great powers, but he's not at all involved in the wider goings-on in Middle-earth. This immortal being just likes to hang out in the forest singing songs and spending time with his wife Goldberry.

The section with Tom Bombadil is kind of its own little isolated piece of the story, and most adaptations of The Lord of the Rings leave it out. However, Tom will appear in the upcoming second season of The Rings of Power, Prime Video's Lord of the Rings prequel series set thousands of years before the story most of us know. He'll be played by Rory Kinnear, who appeared in Penny Dreadful, a few James Bond movies, and much more.

"Well, I guess with the other adaptations, I think Peter Jackson said it, it doesn't necessarily drive the story on, particularly in the narrative of it," Kinnear told GamesRadar. "But in the pages and in people's imaginations, he is this incredible character that has so much knowledge and so much sense of fun and so much life about him, as well as the whole of humanity and history and the earth. This is sort of representative of all that Earth is, and Middle-earth."

"Obviously over multi-season episodic TV, you’ve got more time to investigate those stories. In the way that [showrunners] J.D. [Payne] and Patrick [McKay] are telling the story, they're able to create a role for him that isn't necessarily the one that he has in the books. So whilst they're using that character, they are using him in a different way to how Tolkien did."

We don't know exactly how The Rings of Power will use Tom Bombadil, but we know he'll encounter the Stranger, a wizard character who may or may not be Gandalf; stay tuned. In one of the trailers, Tom tells the Stranger that "every soul in Middle-earth is in peril" and asks whether the Stranger will "abandon them to their doom." That's not a very Tom Bombadil-esque thing to say, at least based on Tolkien's book, where Tom approaches everything with light-hearted disinterest. So yes, this version will definitely be "different."

Daniel Weyman, who plays the Stranger, weighed in on how the show will bring in this strange character: "Even though he might not be present in all the scenes in the books, actually, he's always sort of there because he's so extraordinary," the actor said. "He's sort of keeping you company on your journey through the books and I think that's a great thing about Tom on this journey for The Stranger. His presence is so extraordinary that even when you're not with him, he's sort of in your mind because of how he's interacted with you."

Again, that's pretty different from how Tom is depicted in The Fellowship of the Ring, where his journey more or less lifts right out; I know I didn't think much about Tom reading the rest of the story, but I'm keeping an open mind. "And how Tolkien writes him – he’s so open-ended and opaque in some ways that people are able to project so much onto him," Kinnear added. "I think again, that's his power, both in terms of a reader's imagination, but also the potential in the interactions with The Stranger, and his role going through The Rings of Power as well."

Tom Bombadil first appeared in J.R.R. Tolkien's poem "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil," which was actually published a few years before The Hobbit, which was the first time most people got to visit Middle-earth. Personally, I think Tolkien just liked Tom and decided to include him in The Lord of the Rings for fun, and I'm a little nervous about The Rings of Power trying to make him a more important character. But we'll see how things go when the show returns with new episodes this Thursday, August 29. The first three episodes of season 2 will drop all at once.

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