Sixteen-year-old actress Saoirse Ronan is the latest person to join the cast of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. Although no official announcement has been made, an interview with casting director Ros Hubbard, who also worked on Jackson’s epic The Lord Of The Rings, has confirmed that the Atonement and Lovely Bones actress will be appearing in the two-part adaption of J R R Tolkien’s classic novel.
As there’s no female characters of note in The Hobbit, speculation is running that Ronan will be playing a young elf maiden by the name of Itaril. However, the character name doesn’t actually appear anywhere in Tolkien’s work that I can find. Is her character part of the material from the Lord Of The Rings‘s appendices that Jackson is mining for additional story material?
