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.