Vanity Fair have today revealed that one of Tolkien’s most beloved characters to ever hit the cutting room floor will finally make his on-screen debut, courtesy of Prime Video’s second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
The Age of Iarwain Ben-Adar, Oraid, and Forn is finally upon us!
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow! Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow! Now let his song begin! But what is he after? Fighting off some barrow-wights? Or a masked ring crafter?
Tom Bombadil in The Rings of Power played by Rory Kinnear
To this point, Jolly Tom’s fandom footprints have been largely limited to readers’ imaginations, audio book embellishments, an iconic Hildebrandt Brothers 1976 calendar (seen below), and an occasional illustration on collectible card games. He’s even made a Weta-crafted live action appearance that only made it as far as a long out-of-print Decipher CCG card.
All of that is about to change as Rory Kinnear steps into the role of Middle-earth’s Eldest and Master. An Olivier Award-winning English actor and playwright, Kinnear is perhaps best known for his roles in the Imitation Game, Penny Dreadful, the Daniel Craig era of James Bond movies, and most recently as Churchill in the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Vanity Fair’s article also includes an interview with the man about to fill these large yellow boots.
If you’re not at San Diego Comic-con – or even if you are – you’ll be excited to know that the cast of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are going to be doing a livestreamed Q&A. It’s coming up as we post this – 12.30pm PT today! You can tune in here:
It’s Comic-con without the crowds, from the comfort of your own home!
EW has shared an exclusive look at The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, featuring the characters Kemen, Miriel, Pharazon, Elendil, Eärien and Isildur.
These six characters were all featured in the posters of hands that were released a few weeks ago.
ElendilPharazonEarienMirielIsildurKemen
The EW article discusses the upcoming series with show runners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay and what was involved with bringing Númenor to life and how they hope to please the legion of Tolkien fans.
That devoted fandom is why Payne and McKay pondered every tiny detail on The Rings of Power — right down to each stone in Númenor. “It was one place that we were just laser-focused on saying, ‘We need to get this right,'” Payne explains. “It’s never been seen before. People have some ideas of what elves look like or what dwarves look like and what those kingdoms might look like. But Númenor was, in some ways, a blank canvas.”
(Coggan, 2022)
EW image of Ema Horvath as Earien
Director, Wayne Che Yip, describes walking onto the set of Númenor, stating that it was “just breathtaking”. How every week they were filming on this set he would discover something new, some detail he hadn’t seen before.
We are introduced to Elendil’s daughter, Eärien, who is played by Ema Horvath and Pharazon’s son, Kemen, played by Leon Wadham. Both are new characters, so it will be interesting to see how their stories unfold.
Further in the EW article Payne shares some personal insights into his own reactions to their portrayal of Middle-earth and how the reaction of some of the fans at a recent viewing affected him.
“If people come out of this feeling like they’ve gone to Middle-earth, that’s such a special thing,” Payne adds. “Middle-earth fills us with hope, and it inspires us. There’s a reason why people reach to Middle-earth when they’re going through hard times.”
(Coggan, 2022)
Amazon recently screened about 20 minutes of the show for a group of Tolkien superfans. As Payne and McKay hid in the back, they overheard one audience member say that the show “felt like Middle-earth.” “As he said that, I was surprised by my own reaction,” Payne says, laughing. “I spontaneously burst into tears. I was like, ‘That’s all I wanted to have happen!'”
Timed perfectly to coincide with Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which takes place in the Second Age of Middle-earth, Harper Collins have announced their next Tolkien publication. The Fall of Númenor, edited by Brian Sibley, brings together the key tales of the Second Age, in chronological order. Sure to be the perfect handbook for those who want to see exactly what Tolkien did write about this earlier period of his legendarium, it will not contain any previously unpublished text; but it does feature new art by beloved artist Alan Lee. It will be released in hardback and deluxe editions November 10th 2022, two months after the debut of The Rings of Power.
You can read comments Brian Sibley made exclusively to our friends at The Tolkien Society on their website. Further details can be found in the official press release from HarperCollins, below:
HarperCollins is proud to announce the publication in November 2022 of THE FALL OF NÚMENOR by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by writer and Tolkien expert, Brian Sibley, and illustrated by acclaimed artist, Alan Lee. The book will be published globally by HarperCollinsPublishers and in other languages by numerous Tolkien publishers worldwide.
Presenting for the first time in one volume the events of the Second Age as written by J.R.R. Tolkien and originally and masterfully edited for publication by Christopher Tolkien, this new volume will include pencil drawings and colour paintings by Alan Lee, who also illustrated The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and went on to win an Academy Award for his work on The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-earth as a ‘dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told’. And for many years readers would need to be content with the tantalizing glimpses of it found within the pages of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices.
It was not until Christopher Tolkien presented The Silmarillion for publication in 1977 that a fuller story could be told for, though much of its content concerned the First Age of Middle-earth, there were at its close two key works that revealed the tumultuous events concerning the rise and fall of the island-kingdom of Númenor, the Forging of the Rings of Power, the building of the Barad-dûr and the rise of Sauron, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.
Christopher Tolkien provided even greater insight into the Second Age in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth in 1980, and expanded upon this in his magisterial 12-volume History of Middle-earth, in which he presented and discussed a wealth of further tales written by his father, many in draft form.
Now, using ‘The Tale of Years’ in The Lord of the Rings as a starting point, Brian Sibley has assembled from the various published texts in a way that tells for the very first time in one volume the tale of the Second Age of Middle-earth, whose events would ultimately lead to the Third Age, and the War of the Ring, as told in The Lord of the Rings.
The Hobbit was first published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954–5. Each has since gone on to become a beloved classic of literature and an international bestseller translated into more than 70 languages, collectively selling more than 150,000,000 copies worldwide. Published in 1977, The Silmarillion sold more than one million copies in its first year of publication and has gone on to be translated into almost 40 languages.
Brian Sibley says: ‘Since the first publication of The Silmarillion forty-five years ago, I have passionately followed Christopher Tolkien’s meticulous curation and scholarship in publishing a formidable history of his father’s writings on Middle-earth. I am honoured to be adding to that authoritative library with The Fall of Númenor. I hope that, in drawing together many of the threads from the tales of the Second Age into a single work, readers will discover – or rediscover – the rich tapestry of characters and events that are a prelude to the drama of the War of the Ring as is told in The Lord of the Rings.
Alan Lee says: ‘It is a pleasure to be able to explore the Second Age in more detail, and learn more about those shadowy and ancient events, alliances and disasters that eventually led to the Third Age stories we are more familiar with. Wherever I had the opportunity when working on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, I tried to imbue pictures and designs with an appropriate antiquity, an overlayering of history and of echoes of those older stories, and The Fall of Númenor has proved a perfect opportunity to dig a little deeper into the rich history of Middle-earth.’
The Fall of Númenor will be published by HarperCollins with a simultaneous global publication date of November 2022, and subsequently in translation around the world.
Overnight, Amazon Prime Video Brasil used the final episode of the 2022 edition of Big Brother Brasil to show a high-concept teaser ad for their forthcoming series, The Rings of Power.
“The Big Discovery”.
Subverting expectations, the one-minute teaser eschewed most of the footage we’d already seen via the original teaser released on February 13 during Superbowl LVI. Instead, it deploys a number of highly credentialled Brazillian celebrities to set the scene.
Thanks to the efforts of our fine Discord folks, we have the following text translation of the audio.
Speaker 1 (Thiago Leifert, former-Big Brother host): A powerful force moves our protagonists… a search for a chance to rewrite their own story of being reborn without having to die.
Speaker 2 (Antônio Fagundes, renowned telenovela actor): They heard the call, saw the bars of their imaginary prisons, conquered their fears, and went out into the world.
Speaker 3 (Maria Bethânea, influential Brazillian musician and “Queen Bee of MPB”): But make no mistake, it doesn’t end here. A safe place is, each time, further and further away, and the line between good and evil blurs.
Speaker 4 (Seu Jorge, Samba singer and actor): The fools and the weak spirited are left behind along the way. Those who arrive find in the end a new beginning: redemption. Welcome to the new legend: Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
The choice of voice talent of this calibre has drawn excited approval from Portuguese-speaking fans, who see it as an indication that Amazon will invest resources to create a high-quality localised version. Some fans are already speculating that these four may also be dub actors for the series, but at this point we don’t know for sure one way or the other.
The ad concludes with an abbreviated version of the original teaser, including a Portuguese voiceover of the line from the young Harfoot character, Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot: Wonders exist in our world. I can feel them.
Prime Video Brasil teaser poster. “Welcome to a new legend: The Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power”
Additional visual easter eggs
The ad also features a number of visual easter eggs for close observers.
The Ring verse engraved above the fireplace.
Above the fireplace are two lines of text in Portuguese that, when translated, read:
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky.
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone.
The Ring verse carved into the bookshelf.
Carved into the bookshelf (which also features a copy of The Lord of the Rings, and Homer’s Illiad) another line reads:
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die
Two pages, seemingly from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings.
The left page appears to be random sentences from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings.
We read “THE CLOSEST THAT HAS EVER (BEEN BETWEEN THE RACES)”, which is in Appendix B (The Second Age), but the sentence immediately below “AFTER THE END OF THE FIRST AGE” does not immediately follow. “OF THE KINGS OF THE NOLDOR IN EXILE” appears two lines later, whereas in the actual appendix it begins at the paragraph before.
The right-hand page indentifiably contains “…DWELT GIL-GALAD, LAST…”, and “…ELVES OF THE WEST”. It may be that it’s meant to portray the following passage from Appendix B, but it’s difficult to tell:
In Lindon north of the Lune dwelt Gil-galad, last heir of the kings of the Noldor in exile. He was acknowledged as High King of the Elves of the West. In Lindon south of the Lune dwelt for a time Celeborn, kinsman of Thingol; his wife was Galadriel, greatest of Elven women. She was sister of Finrod Felagund, Friend-of-Men, once king of Nargothrond, who gave his life to save Beren son of Barahir.
The Ring verse on sheaves of paper.
The loose paper reads:
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie
The Ring verse on wall art.
Although dim and hard to read, the wall art concludes the verse:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Seu Jorge‘s mysterious sapphire pendant.
Seu Jorge also wears a large, sapphire pendant. Could it have some prominence?
A painting that shows close remsemblance to part of a scene from The Rings of Power teaser.
Finally, the painting that Jorge faces near the conclusion of his spiel bears a close resemblance to the gigantic waterfall streaming off a mountainside that we saw in the teaser trailer — a waterfall that according to Vanity Fair is a Second Age location in Forodwaith.
Acknowledgements. Many thanks to TolkienGuide, our fan community and Discord folks — including Duilo, sigurboy, JJJaded, and DrNosy — for helping to dissect this teaser, and supplying screencaps.
About the author: Staffer Demosthenes has been involved with TheOneRing.net since 2001, serving first as an Associate News Editor, then as Chief News Editor during the making of the Hobbit films. Now he focuses on features and analysis.The opinions in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of TheOneRing.net and other staff.
Saul Zaentz Co., has filed two trademark applications covering a pair of phrases now associated with Amazon’s forthcoming TV series: “Rings of Power” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”.
The company is the current owner of exclusive worldwide rights to motion picture, merchandising, stage and other rights in certain literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. It also announced in early February that it was putting all those rights up for sale.
The trademark applications, which were filed with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) on April 5 through German intellectual property specialists Boehmert & Boehmert, cover a wide array merchandising for goods and services under different categories.
Closer examination of the two filings, however, reveal that the key crossover between the two seems to cover electronic downloadable and online games and trading cards under Nice categories #9 and #41.
Whether that indicates that a Rings of Power-associated video game might be in the works as part of some partnership with Amazon remains to be seen. But, since the Saul Zaentz Company holds in perpetuity the trademarks on all the characters and places in the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, it might have to be involved in merchandising deals.
The EUIPO filing on “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”.
The news of the filing first emerged on the Reddit forum Leaks and Rumours.
