Cate Blanchett Will Diminish, And Go Into The West, And Remain Galadriel

Cate Blanchett is returning to Middle Earth, once again playing Galadriel, Lady of Lothlorien. Warner Bros and MGM have announced that the actress has come onboard The Hobbit, along with Ken Stott, Sylvester McCoy and Mikael Persbrandt. Sylvester McCoy, who was once Doctor Who, has been rumored to be playing Radagast the Brown, one of Gandalf’s wizard broheims.

The casting of Blanchett is interesting and sheds light on how different this film could be from JRR Tolkien’s book. Galadriel doesn’t appear in The Hobbit, and I’m not sure where she would fit in the story. During the time of The Hobbit she was holed up in Lothlorien, with very little contact with the outside world. Bilbo Baggins and his band of dwarfs come across elves in Mirkwood, but Lothlorien wasn’t so tight with the Mirkwood elves.

Of course there’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff that Peter Jackson is probably intending to dramatize, including all of Gandalf’s interactions with the Necromancer in Dol Guldur, which end up being a prelude to the War of the Ring. Maybe a bigger nerd out there can tell me how Galadriel might play into that bit.