Many people wondered how you could do a Lord of the Rings prequel without Hobbits, and the answer Amazon found—from Tolkien’s own vast worldbuilding—was in the form of Hobbit predecessors. Rings of Power‘s first season gave us the nomadic Harfoots as our halfling-adjacent culture, but season two is moving on to new locales away from them. It is keeping the smallfolk around in spirit though.
Season two will introduce Harfoot Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and her companion, the mysterious Stranger (Daniel Weyman), to another bit of Hobbit lore in the form of the Stoors. One of three splinter-predecessors to the Hobbits we know and love of the Third Age (alongside the Harfoots and the Fallohides), the Stoors were broad, heavyset halflings who were more comfortable coexisting with the humans of the realm than their more insular relatives. Eventually, they would settle along Anduin in the Gladden Fields and become known as riverfolk—the Hobbit descendants that Sméagol and his brother Déagol were part of.
But when we meet them in Rings of Power, they’ll offer a much starker contrast: they’re currently settled in the deserts of Rhûn. “The Stoors’ ancestry at some point was nomadic,” Tanya Moodie, who will play Gundabel, the leader of a community of Stoors Nori and the Stranger come across in their travels, said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “But over the years, we as a group have settled and that has become our culture, to look after one another.”
Given that we left the rest of the Harfoots behind at the end of the season, it makes sense to introduce a new Hobbit-adjacent culture to act as a foil to Nori and the Stranger. Especially one in such contrast to what season one did. Unlike the Harfoots, Rings of Power‘s Stoors are settlers, with records of history that stretch far beyond the nomadic recollections of Harfoot society. And by settling them in Rhûn, they also give another layer to the eventual migration and development of the Hobbits we come to know of in the Shire.
“We wanted to make something that was very different from the Shire that we’ve seen on screen,” Kristian Milsted, Rings of Power‘s production designer, added. “So it was more like they have these abodes that are dug into the rock of this very hostile environment, which creates a very close-knit community. They have a written history, they have a library, they have a map of the stars, they have a whole history woven into this set.”
Maybe the third time will be the charm, and we’ll see Fallohides in Rings of Power season three? For now, we’ll have to wait until after season two hits Amazon Prime, starting August 29.
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