A fan-favorite character is finally coming to the screen in The Rings of Power season 2

Hey come, derry dol! Can you hear him singing?

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy is widely celebrated as an extremely faithful adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy novel. There's just one particularly offbeat character who Jackson never even tried to adapt for the screen, not even in his trilogy's many deleted scenes. But in the upcoming season 2 of Amazon Prime Video's TV series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Tom Bombadil finally takes the spotlight.

Bombadil has become a favorite of Tolkien fans over the years, partially because of his absence from both Jackson's adaptation and the earlier animated Lord of the Rings films by Ralph Bakshi (though he was included in an obscure Soviet adaptation). Until now, Bombadil was primarily present in Tolkien's writing, where he shows up early in The Fellowship of the Ring to save Frodo and the other hobbits from various dangers but is rarely mentioned again.

Now, Rory Kinnear (Men, Black Mirror) will don the hat and boots of Tom Bombadil in The Rings of Power season 2. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay reveal that the character will cross paths with the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) and his Harfoot companions Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and Poppy (Megan Richards) during their travels in the eastern regions of Middle-earth.

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The Stranger was heavily implied to be a newly-arrived Gandalf by the end of The Rings of Power season 1, while the Harfoots are nomadic ancestors of hobbits. But Bombadil is hard to reduce to Tolkien's familiar categories. The author never quite defined his role in Middle-earth. He is old ("Tom was here before the rivers and trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn," he tells the hobbits) and powerful (the One Ring has no effect on him when he puts it on; he doesn't even turn invisible) but apparently unable to help with the fight against Sauron. "Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself," Gandalf tells the Council of Elrond in Tolkien's text.

Bombadil seems much more concerned with nature and growing things, which is how McKay and Payne figured out how to fit him into their story.

“In our story, he has gone out to the lands of Rhûn, which we learn used to be sort of Edenic and green and beautiful, but now is sort of a dead wasteland,” Payne tells Vanity Fair. “Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings.”

Payne continues, “when he finally crosses paths with the Stranger, you could say he has a desire to try to keep the destruction that has happened there from spreading to his beloved lands in the West. He nudges the Stranger along his journey, which he knows will eventually protect the larger natural world that he cares about. So I’d say our Tom Bombadil is slightly more interventionist than you see in the books, but only by 5 or 10 percent.”

There's no word yet on whether Kinnear's Bombadil will be as musical and prone to song as Tolkien's version, but the actor does tell Vanity Fair he'll be playing the character with a Cornish accent because he "wanted to choose an accent that felt old — that was British, but felt like the oldest part of Britain.”

The Rings of Power season 2 premieres Aug. 29 on Prime Video. Fans can prepare with the new edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a collection of Tolkien's poems and writings about the character, when it is published on Aug. 20.