Not My Tom Bombadil

Spoilers follow for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two, through the finale episode that premiered on Thursday, October 3. 

In The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a good-evil binary consumes everyone and drives every conversation; Sauron would have every right to ask, in Charlie Vickers’s self-satisfied sneer, “Why are you so obsessed with me?” And in one of its most irritating adaptation choices this season, TROP places Tom Bombadil under its light-or-shadow umbrella, too, reshaping J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved and enigmatic woodman character into little more than a Yoda knockoff sagely leading Gandalf in song and toward an obvious destiny.

The problem with so many prequels is the need to overexplain — to justify the series we’re watching by linking it with something we’ve already watched. Obi-Wan Kenobi dreamt up a whole pre–A New Hope relationship between the Jedi master and Princess Leia. In House of the Dragon, Daemon Targaryen unexpectedly decides to support his niece-wife Rhaenyra’s bid for the crown after he learns about Game of Thrones’s song of ice and fire prophecy. TROP falls victim to this particular prequel flaw, too, refusing to deviate from the familiar forms of The Lord of the Rings by lifting direct dialogue from the novel and mimicking frames and moments from Peter Jackson’s films. In season one, the character the series refused to identify as Gandalf said “always follow your nose,” as Ian McKellen’s version of the wizard did in The Fellowship of the Ring. In season two, the scene when Adar introduces his gigantic Uruk army to a shocked, teary-eyed Galadriel is shot like Saruman showing Wormtongue his own white-hand-bearing legions in The Two Towers. Durin and Elrond’s unlikely friendship evokes Gimli and Legolas’s bantering bond, down to jokes about the elves’ self-obsession and the dwarves’ height. And if you somehow missed that halflings Nori and Poppy are Frodo- and Sam-coded, Poppy’s big, hopeful speech to Nori at the end of the season-two finale, “Shadow and Flame,” about how “all anybody can do is try and build something new” in response to a broken world, is another spin on Gamgee’s “There’s some good in this world … and it’s worth fighting for” monologue.

All of this is to say that when it wants to, TROP knows how to echo the rhythms of Tolkien’s plotting and the personalities of his most famous characters for predictable comfort in its own television world. And in Tom Bombadil — who neither Jackson nor Ralph Bakshi included in their cinematic versions of LOTR — TROP had an opportunity to interpret the character in a way that honored Tolkien’s intentions and filled an adaptation gap. Instead, TROP pursued prequel myopia, changing Bombadil to fit the series’ needs in such a way that he entirely loses his established DGAF flavor.

The most faithful thing TROP does for the character is transfer some of his dialogue from Tolkien’s novel, when he saves Merry from being trapped inside Old Man Willow, to the series when he rescues not-yet-Gandalf from Old Man Ironwood. In both, Bombadil says to the tree in question, “You should not be waking. Eat earth. Dig deep. Drink water … Go to sleep.” Otherwise, gone is the wife-guy so into his partner Goldberry that he hurries home for dinner and nearly loses Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippen in the process. Also absent is the storyteller who tells the hobbits about all the change he’s seen outside Sauron’s influence — all the war, all the loss, and all the regrowth, cyclical stories that reflect his own immemorial age. And no aspect of Bombadil in TROP feels aligned with the written character unmoved by the growing darkness, untempted by the One Ring, and disinterested both in power and in the turmoil caused by the pursuit of power.

In LOTR, Bombadil is a character made complicated by his simplicity. The best way to understand him is as a manifestation of the natural world, the flora and fauna that have their own agendas, memories, histories, and cultures, and whose lives and deaths have nothing to do with Sauron. There’s one corner of Middle-earth that remains untouched by this gigantic, all-enveloping war, and Tolkien presents Bombadil’s resistance to getting drawn into conflict with purposeful inscrutability. How we react to Bombadil being unaffected by the Ring — whether we think he’s resilient or morally defective — is irrelevant. Bombadil stands outside of all this, and because of that, offers the hobbits hospitality with no doubt or hesitation; he saves them with no worry for his own safety. Unbeholden to the established rules of good and evil in Middle-earth, and unsullied by what goes on outside his lands, Bombadil is entirely his own creation and responsible only for his own actions. He is, as Goldberry explains to Frodo, “the Master of wood, water, and hill,” but “the trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves.” Gandalf says something similar later to the council that has gathered to decide what to do with the One Ring: “He is his own master … If he were given the Ring, he would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away. Such things have no hold on his mind.”

Bombadil isn’t bad; he saves the hobbits when they’re in danger from a wight, and escorts them out of his lands. But he also isn’t necessarily benevolent. When the hobbits first enter his domain, they initially describe “stumbling through an ominous dream that led to no awakening,” and Frodo is later unnerved by the vastness of time and lived experience Tom seems to exude. All of these contradictions are what make Bombadil such a rich character, simultaneously a roguish scamp who converses with trees, birds, and badgers and worships his probably river-spirit wife, and an ancient whose ability to discern the era’s most dangerous object while being unbothered by it suggests that there is a path forward where the ring doesn’t matter at all. TROP making him a spirit guide who speaks in corny riddles and gets an Avengers-assemble-style zoom in on his face when he puts on a pointy wizard’s hat not unlike the one Gandalf will wear in The Fellowship of the Ring is to expunge Tolkien’s most captivating outlier in favor of a personality sapped babysitter.

Take this as the insult it’s meant to be. Tom Bombadil shouldn’t be cute, and yet that’s about the extent of his TROP characterization. Rory Kinnear gives him a lilting accent that makes Bombadil sound like a Cornish Forrest Gump. He does what are basically magic tricks, like turning a map into a piece of bread and using one match to light all his cottage’s candles at once. He changes Tolkien’s “the trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves,” a comment about nature’s disregard for interference, into an eye-rolling call for not-yet-Gandalf’s self-actualization with, “All things belong each to themselves. Just as you belong to yourself.” And TROP practically winks at the viewer when Bombadil calls the lamb who lives with him “Iarwain” (in LOTR, “Iarwain Ben-adar” is revealed as Bombadil’s previous name), then says to not-yet-Gandalf one of the wizard’s most famous Fellowship of the Rings lines: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?” This Bombadil has no unfathomability, no sinister edge. He’s like if the phrase “aw shucks” became sentient.

The pair’s whole vibe in the season’s concluding moments is Yoda and Luke Skywalker, a smiling-yet-stern mentor guiding an innocent-but-powerful youngster toward his destiny. To position Bombadil in that way is to entirely miss that the character’s most intriguing quality is his indifference to the larger Middle-earth outside of his borders. Putting him in a role like this makes Bombadil generic and Gandalf derivative; both characters are less interesting when TROP ties them together and insists that Gandalf’s identity is less his own invention and more the effect of a mysterious teacher who previously failed a promising student and won’t make the same mistake twice. (In this comparison, yes, the “Dark Wizard” heavily implied to be Saruman is Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.)

While TROP’s recycling of LOTR moments or themes can be intriguing when they’re given a new spin — like how Elrond and Durin’s relationship is complicated by Durin failing to join Elrond in defending Eregion — the series deviating so much from Tolkien’s version of Bombadil suggests a lack of curiosity about characters who don’t easily slot into its organizing principle of light versus dark. The series is so narrow in its understanding of Tolkien’s world that it has mishandled one of its most unique creations. Bombadil is, as one of his many songs go, “jolly,” but he’s also indifferent, a combination that Tolkien intentionally made difficult to parse. This season of TROP ending with the suggestions that Bombadil and Gandalf are a team-up for the ages, a dynamic duo that’s going to eat honey by the fire, sing, and eventually take on evil wizards together, is the series’ most unimaginative choice yet.