Two new ‘The Rings of Power’ season 2 characters have an interesting Gollum connection

It’s time to brush up on lore and return to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth (some of us never really left). New characters are being introduced in Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2. And get excited, because these ones have an interesting connection to Gollum.

You know the guy? Yea tall, grey pallor, skin-and-bones, talks about himself in third person, obsessed with jewelry, hates hobbitses with pocketses? Yep, him.

Last season on The Rings of Power, we met the Harfoots, who looked like the hobbits we know, enjoyed the fruits of the earth like the hobbits we know, and their names were just as goofy, too. But anyone familiar with the “Concerning Hobbits” prologue to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will know that they aren’t the same kind of hobbits that we meet in The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. Though, the Shire hobbits are surely descended from the Harfoots, and maybe TROP could try to establish some connection between Nori Brandyfoot and Poppy Proudfellow and Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.

However, as Nori and Poppy leave their homes-on-wheels and the Harfoots behind in season 2 to travel with the wizard to far off lands like Rhûn, it looks like we’re all going to encounter some new hobbit-adjacent folks. Tolkien’s published works haven’t elaborated much on Rhûn, but The Rings of Power season 2 will be going there, and in the process introduce the Stoors, or as you might call them, the distant cousins of the Harfoots.

Who are the Stoors?

The early English word “stor” means “large” or “strong,” which is exactly how you’d describe the Stoors. As Tolkien wrote, the Stoors, with their broader build and heavy feet, were much closer in physical appearance to the race of men than the other two kinds of hobbits—the Harfoots and the Fallohides. They even grew facial hair, which the other hobbits didn’t.

In the books, the Stoors are the last of the hobbit tribes to have migrated to the west to Eriador in the Third Age. And a few hundred or so years later, after the threat of the kingdom of Angmar, some of them even returned to Rhovanion, and settled the Gladden Fields (where Isildur was killed after he got the One Ring) by the river Anduin, where they became riverfolk. Unlike the other hobbits, they could swim, fish, and even use boats. While the Harfoots and Fallohides seem to have a patriarchal family system, the Stoorish hobbits had a matriarch at the head of the family.

However, The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age (SA), and is far from the life of the hobbits as we know it. In the SA, unlike the nomadic Harfoots who carry their homes from one place to another in a caravan, the Stoors stay put. As reported by as reported by EW, in TROP, the Stoors will be inhabitants of a canyon in the deserts of Rhûn, a landscape that has never previously been explored in any LOTR screen adaptations. But this makes it even more interesting that their descendants many, many years later will be river folk!

In fact, you already know two of their descendants in the Third Age, and one of them is literally a central character of the War of the Ring. It’s Gollum! Gollum! Remember Sméagol and Déagol are fishing in the river when they find the One Ring? And Gollum singing this fishing song in the Forbidden Pool when he gets caught by Faramir and his men in Ithilien?

In the books, Gandalf attributes Gollum’s long life not just to the One Ring but also to the fact that he is much like the hobbits, like Frodo, who has also shown great resilience. Interestingly, the Brandybuck hobbits are also descended from Stoors, with a strain of Fallohides. So that makes Meriadoc Brandybuck a.k.a. Merry the hobbit a part-Stoorish hobbit, too!

Which Stoors will we meet in The Rings of Power season 2?

So far, two actors have been revealed to be playing Stoors in the TROP season 2. There’s Tanya Moodie, who plays Gundabel, a sort or community leader of the Stoors settlement that we are going to see. And there’s Gavi Singh Chera, who plays a Stoor named Merimac. 

The choice to bring the hobbits so early into the picture has been an controversial one, and not welcomed by all. There are many fans who were opposed to the Harfoot storyline in The Rings of Power season 1, because technically, the Harfoots or the other hobbits don’t have much to do during the Second Age, as far as the book lore is concerned. 

One of the reasons that the hobbits are able to slip past Sauron during the War of the Ring is that in his grand scheme of things, he has never paid any attention to them. It is their inconsequential-ness that allows them to be nigh invisible and sort of the secret weapon against the Dark Lord. So any impact that the Harfoots and Stoors might be shown to have in The Rings of Power will mostly not overlap with Sauron’s plans because he cannot be aware of their existence just yet. 

And yet, it is interesting to see the showrunners try to give us some hobbit origin story, as if showing us that hobbits didn’t just suddenly get uplifted to unlikely hero status because Gandalf decided to knock on their door one day. This could be a great way of proving that even as the bigger wars are being fought, the tiniest of acts by the smallest of folks can have a great impact on the end game.