Rumor: Prime Video’s ‘The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power’ To Introduce Tom Bombadil In Season 2
John F. Trent
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A new rumor claims that Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will introduce Tom Bombadil in the show’s second season.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien
This rumor comes from TheOneRing.net’s source named “Green Dragon Gossip.” During a livestream on TheOneRing’s YouTube channel Justin Sewell claims Green Dragon Gossip informed him that the show has cast and is filming scenes with Tom Bombadil.
Sewell states, “Spotted on set is an actor who in the dialogue is being called Tom.” The show’s host Cliff “Quickbeam” Broadway then questions, “Do you think that’s a possible Tom Bombadil coming to visit the show?”
Sewell answers, “It’s 100% Tom Bombadil. That’s what they are saying. Tom Bombadil has been cast and will show up in Season 2.”
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien
For those unfamiliar with Tom Bombadil, Tolkien introduces him in The Fellowship of the Ring after Merry and Pippin get caught in a willow tree. Bombadil is able to free both of them and then proceeds to invite them to his home where his wife, Goldberry has prepared a table “laden with yellow cream, honeycomb, and white bread and butter.”
When asked by Frodo who is Tom Bombadil, Goldberry tells Frodo, “He is.” She then explained, “He is, as you have seen him. He is the Master of wood, water, and hill.”
However, the land does not belong to him, Goldberry tells the Hobbits when asked, “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 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Frodo would also posit the question of who Tom Bombadil is to him. Tom replied, “Eh, what? Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer. Tell me, who are you, alone, yourself and nameless? But you are yound and I am old. Edlest, that’s what I am.”
He continued, “Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from the Outside.”
Daniel Weyman as The Stranger in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Bombadil was described by Tolkien in Letter 144 to Naomi Mitchison as an intentional enigma. “Many readers have, for instance, rather stuck at the Council of Elrond. And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally),” Tolkien wrote.
That enigma comes from the fact that when Bombadil puts on the One Ring he does not turn invisible. He’s also able to see Frodo when Frodo puts the Ring on as a test to confirm that it is indeed the One Ring after Bombadil returned it to him.
Daniel Weyman as The Stranger in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Furthermore Tolkien also described Bombadil’s importance as a “comment.” He told Mitchison, “Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I supposed 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.”
“I might put it this way,” Tolkien explained. “The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, 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 where there is a war.”
Tolkien continued, “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 the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”
J.R.R. Tolkien via Sidh Aniron YouTube
In Letter 153 to Peter Hastings, Tolkien further laid out his intentions behind the character, “In historical fact I put [Tom Bombadil] in because I had already ‘invented’ him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magainze) and wanted an ‘adventure’ on the way.”
He further detailed, “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 have given him so 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. Even the Elves hardly show this: they are primarily artists”
Photograph of J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1920s on leaving Leeds University Photo Credit: Unknown photo studio commissioned by Tolkien’s students 1925/6 (private communication from Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien Archivist, Bodleian Library), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“Also T.B. exhibits another point in his attitude to the Ring, and its failure to affect him,” Tolkien wrote. “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,” he relayed.
The Council of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition (2002), Warner Bros. Pictures
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