It’s all very serious, this Rings of Power business. Occasional dwarf banter aside, everyone’s brow seems pretty well set to permafurrow. Granted, it’s a show about the whole world and its control by forces of either good or evil, but guys, come on. Lighten up a touch.
A good concept-heavy piece of fantasy doesn’t have to have gags, of course. The Dune films are getting by very well without them, but they ask a lot less of their audience. They go light on the lore, keeping the proper nouns and tortured explanations that Marvel et al have bludgeoned us with in recent years to a minimum, and making the stakes easily graspable.
Rings of Power doesn’t go down this route. It asks its audience to remember a list of names and places and power dynamics that make even the Dune books look like light reading, and it doesn’t give us an awful lot in return in terms of action, excitement and laughs. We’re allowed a little of each every now and then, often towards the end of an episode, but across the series they’re being rationed like butter during wartime.
The most recent episode introduced a character with the capacity to change all this. His name is Tom Bombadil. Who is he? What is he? Neither of these questions have straightforward answers. Tolkien characterized him as a vaguely magical figure chilling out in the woods, who’s been around longer than pretty much anyone else we meet in Middle Earth.
He’s completely inessential to the plot, appearing in the Lord of the Rings books only as a friendly host for the hobbits to hang with for a while early on their journey to Mordor. This is the explanation Peter Jackson offered for cutting him from the films, and Tolkien freely admitted it too, explaining that Bombadil instead “represents something that I feel important… a delight in things for themselves.” He dances and sings songs with his name in the lyrics, he tends to nature, he wears funny clothes. He’s content doing just that and nothing more. If he lived today it would probably be as a mushroom enthusiast living somewhere between Stonehenge and Glastonbury.
When reliably-excellent Rory Kinnear’s eyes peer out through a scraggly topiary of ginger hair at the start of the second season’s fourth episode, it’s obvious that this is a character unburdened by the cloying intensity almost every other in the show seems condemned to wade through. The dwarves are to be thanked and admired for their humor, but they don’t quite have the wit, the mysterious guile and spectral absurdity of Bombadil. When the Stranger asks if he’s alone out there in the desert and Bombadil responds “Well, you’re here… at least I think you are, are you?”, it’s clear he represents a much-needed dose of weirdness and levity.
Not only is he that, but he’s levity with authority. He’s sort of stumbled upon by the Stranger (the character we’re supposed to pretend isn’t Young Gandalf), whom he saves from being swallowed by a hungry tree with his apparent knowledge of (and possible friendship with) said tree. He fields questions about his origins in the third-person, explaining that “Tom was there before the river and the trees. Tom remembers the first rain drop and the first acorn.” In a very old world indeed, being possibly the oldest person there is a flex that immediately imbues this guy with some aura points.
Everything that’s happened in Rings of Power so far has been in (somewhat subdued, trudging) service of plot—except for the one bit of the show that pretty much everyone agrees is exceptional: the scenery. It’s stunning and it’s beautiful and completely unnecessary. We can’t say the exact same is true of Tom, but he adds a life and joy in ways that aren’t strictly necessary but feel lacking elsewhere. With his contented rambling around in the woods, he’s an inessential testament to the value of inessential things.
He may be made a little more essential for the show—he’s seemingly going to be put to work teaching the not-Gandalf Stranger how to magic up some magic. And that’s fine, that’s the way of the TV world. But his very existence in the first place is testament to what Rings of Power needs a little more of.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
