Warning: This feature contains spoilers for The Rings of Power season 2 episode 4.
Tom Bombadil has long been considered one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most unadaptable characters. The whimsical, singing dweller of the Withywindle who once helped the Hobbits escape danger in The Fellowship of the Ring has been mostly left out of any adaptations.
For good reason too, as Peter Jackson once explained about omitting him from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies. Speaking on the DVD appendices, the director noted that they cut him from the story because his inclusion "is not really advancing our story and not really telling us things we need to know".
It’s a fair point, as the early chapter in Fellowship dedicated to him is mostly a step away from the action. After Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin find themselves facing Old Man Willow, they’re rescued by Bombadil, who brings them to his home, feeds them, and lets them rest in one of the cozier asides of Tolkien’s book.
Trying to bring that to the screen is tricky, and it doesn’t help too that Bombadil is a tough character to define – and one Tolkien seems reluctant to give any answers about. Instead, we simply know he is older than time itself and a nature-protecting, fanciful character who just might be one the most powerful beings in Middle-earth (the One Ring doesn’t affect him, after all).
Therefore, ever since the showrunners of Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, announced they were bringing him into live-action, there has been a hefty amount of curiosity about just how they will adapt one of the franchise’s most abstract characters.
Well, as we find out in the latest episode of season 2, it seems the answer is simple: by maintaining Bombadil’s mystery. The version we meet, played by Rory Kinnear, feels like he’s been pulled straight from Tolkien’s pages as a singing, genial introduction who remains entirely intangible.
Wanderer, not a warrior
In The Rings of Power season 2, we first meet Bombadil when he rescues The Stranger from the depths of Old Man Iron Wood, before telling him his name. "Back in the Withywindle folks used to call me Bombadil," he introduces himself in a broad West Country accent before taking the wizard to his home to rest and recuperate.
Complete with a broad shaggy beard and a beaming smile, Kinnear brings warmth and whimsy to the character as we hear him singing through the walls, alongside a female voice who may very well be Goldberry even though he denies all knowledge of another person being there. There’s all the coziness of the sequence you might expect, with a toasty fire burning and a small lamb sleeping in the corner.
"You are young, and I am old, eldest, is what I am," Bombadil tells him at one point, pulling lines directly from Tolkien. In another, he explains he is older than the rivers and the trees, paraphrasing yet more details from the poems dedicated to him.
It’s all enough to feel very familiar for fans of Tolkien’s works, while crucially adapting the one thing essential to the character: how little we really know about him. While it may have been tempting to flesh him out a bit more in the ambitious, world-building show, Payne and McKay thankfully resist the urge.
Instead, he says he is but a "wanderer, not a warrior," as he assures The Stranger the only way he knows how to define himself is by his name. It’s a different tact than the expansions taken with Galadriel, Elrond, and even Sauron, but it’s what suits the character.
As Jackson puts it, Bombadil is not supposed to be the one driving the story or the one revealing all the answers. Instead, he’s there to just invoke the more playful and fanciful part of Tolkien, and that’s exactly what he does here.
In fact, The Rings of Power’s positioning of Bombadil is actually very similar to that Fellowship chapter. After rescuing The Stranger, he lets him rest and recuperate, before imparting some crucial kernels of knowledge, and setting him on his way, none the wiser to what exactly just happened.
Familiar but evolved
Although, while at no point do we learn any more about Bombadil than explored in Tolkien’s pages, that isn’t to say that he’s just a pastiche. This version of Bombadil does whistle, rhyme, and sing, but is not as bellowing as Tolkien’s version, and he also contains a more serious, somber edge to him, especially as he warns of the darkness and danger ahead.
Instead, what The Rings of Power has managed to do with Bombadil is bring life into an overshadowed part of the Tolkien canon, without making him feel incongruous. There is a place for whimsy and fun, but they also give context to the darkness rising in Middle-earth, which is something no doubt troubling to a being like Bombadil.
"If these two flames combine into one, there will be no end to burning, until all Middle-earth is ashes," he warns of the rise of Sauron and the Dark Wizard at one point. At the end of their conversation too, he sets The Stranger on a path towards both Dark Lords, calling it his destiny.
The actor himself recently summed up this approach neatly to 12DOVE. "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 notes. "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." Familiar but evolved – and isn’t that what the best adaptations are all about?
For more check out our guide to The Rings of Power season 2 release schedule so you never miss an episode and our The Rings of Power season 2 review.
