The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 2 is Finally Bringing Tom Bombadil to Screen

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is finally bringing the franchise’s strangest character to the screen – Tom Bombadil. On Wednesday, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay shared the big news in an interview with Vanity Fair. They revealed that Rory Kinnear will take on this ineffable role when Season 2 premieres on Aug. 29 on Prime Video.

Tom Bombadil is a strange fixture in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, and many fans didn’t blame Peter Jackson for leaving him out of his film adaptations two decades ago. However, since then Bombadil has become something of a meme – especially among younger fans who saw the movies before reading the books – and a matter of great speculation as well. He appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, interrupting Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin in a narrative cul-de-sac that doesn’t really go anywhere, but which calls the magical rules of the whole series into question. That’s because Tom seems to be some kind of immortal magical being, yet the One Ring does not tempt him or corrupt him – even when he holds it in his hand.

For those that need a refresher, Tom Bombadil skips into the story singing songs about himself sprinkled with made-up words. He rescues the hobbits from danger twice, and displays magic to rival that of Gandalf in the process. He is able to hold the Ring, but Gandalf refuses to leave it with Tom, saying that it’s not that he has power of the Ring, but simply “the Ring has no power over him.” Tom lives in a small house with his equally magical wife, and refuses to leave the borders of “his land,” even to help protect the world from destruction.

While Tom seems incongruous to some readers, McKay and Payne appreciated the weird element he brought to the Lord of the Rings novels. Payne said: “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.” Since their show is set thousands of years before the movies, they can move Tom around and potentially make him more active.

“In our story, he has gone out to the lands of Rhûn,” Payne explained, “which we learn used to be sort of Edenic and green and beautiful, but now is sort of a dead wasteland. 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 percent or 10 percent.”

“The Stranger” is the name given to the wizard character in The Rings of Power, played by Daniel Weyman. He falls from the sky as a meteor and befriends the Harfoots, starting with Nori (Markella Kavenagh) in Season 1. The Stranger is one of the Istari – the immortal wizards in Tolkien’s mythology, including Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast, as seen in the movies. These beings are comparable to angels, and are known to change names and identities throughout the ages. That means The Stranger could turn out to be an earlier form of Gandalf or another character we’ve already met – or perhaps someone new.

The Rings of Power Season 2 premieres on Thursday, Aug. 29 on Prime Video. Season 1 is streaming now. Tolkien’s books are available in print, digital and audiobook formats.