Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong doovie! Stephen Colbert is writing a Lord of the Rings movie!
It’s based on the chapters that did not make the trilogy
But Colbert has teamed now with Boyens and McGee.
Fog on the Barrow-downs is the missing chapter
With hobbits on the run and darkness coming after
But there you will also find, a merry old fellow
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
Old Tom Bombadil was missing from the story
But this new fil-um COULD present him in his glory.
Okay, I’m no Professor Tolkien but you get the jist. The proposed film is tentatively called The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, and based on the early chapters of the book which were not included in the film…and that means Tom Bombadil, a doggerel speaking charmer of mysterious origin. Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens are all involved.
Colbert is a HUGE Tolkien fan – perhaps even a bigger one than the writer of this post – so no one could be more immersed in the lore. However, it appears that the film is set as a sequel of sots – or possible a framing sequence? The Bombadil content is not expressly confirmed.
The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set fourteen years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry, and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.
“You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me, but the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in the Fellowship that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day,” Colbert said in a video with Peter Jackson announcing the project.
Apparently, Colbert had been working on the idea for a while, before he worked up the gumption to send it to Jackson.
“It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call, but about two years ago I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it … and I could not be happier that [Warner Bros.] loved it,” Colbert told Jackson.
Once again, the Bombadil-maxxing content is speculative……but seriously what else could it be? Bombadil is a bit of a divisive figure – the sequence where he rescues the hobbits is a lot lighter in tone than the rest of the trilogy as Tolkien was still working things out. While he definitely wouldn’t have fit into the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy as presented, fans have long mourned his absence. But Stephen Colbert might just be healing this grievous wound. As Tom himself might have said:
Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow!
Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before me.
Hey now! merry dol! We’ll be waiting for you at AMC!
