8 Ridiculous Origins To The Names Of Iconic Movie Characters

4. Peter Jackson Did Use The Source To Name Tauriel In The Hobbit

There was so much "added value" cr*p in The Hobbit to make it into a Lord Of The Rings-aping trilogy that it's a shock there was even more left over for the "Extended Editions". On top of plunging into the depths of The Return Of The King's appendices for expansive story beats, so many Rings characters reared their heads for incredibly distracting cameos; so on top of giving us Gandalf, Bilbo, Gollum and Elrond, the prequel set sixty years prior to the original also had us meeting up with (deep breath) Leoglas, Frodo, Saruman, Galadriel, Sauron, along with references to Gimli and Aragorn.

But those extraneous additions pale in comparison to Tauriel, a wood elf warrior who never featured anywhere in Tolkien's works. And boy you can tell; putting aside the shoehorned, cross-species love triangle between her, Legolas and Kili, she managed to get an inordinate amount of screentime yet impacted the story in exactly zero ways.

The whole character seemed like a rushed mistake, which makes it all the more odd that Jackson, taking a break from having a mental breakdown, went to the effort of giving her a developed Middle-Earth name; Tauriel quite translates to forest maiden in Elvish. Why not make, say, anything else about her, fit into the world?