Lord of the Rings fans have given their reactions to the announcement that Anya Taylor-Joy has been cast as a new character not originated by J.R.R. Tolkien in the upcoming spinoff film The Hunt for Gollum.

Taylor-Joy's casting comes with few other details about her role, other than the fact that the Super Mario Galaxy Movie star will play a Sindar Elf of the Woodland Realm, described as "a trusted and lethal agent of King Thranduil."

Reacting to the news, many fans have commented that Seren's role sounds similar to Tauriel — the character played by Lost and Ant-Man star Evangeline Lilly in Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies — who was also an elven aide for Thranduil, as well as being one of that trilogy's most controversial additions.

"Who the hell is Seren?" wrote PuzzleheadedBag920, succinctly summing up many fans' thoughts in a lengthy thread on reddit. "The name of the Goddess of the Elves in RuneScape, funnily enough," added another fan, Any-sao.

Perhaps it is not a surprise that The Hunt for Gollum must feature additional characters not in Tolkien's work — simply because the movie's entire premise is based on a period only mentioned briefly in The Lord of the Ring's text. The film dramatizes Gollum's whereabouts prior to Fellow of the Ring, while Gandalf, Aragorn and Sauron's forces all seek the Ring. If you're adding enough material to turn that into a two-hour movie, then it's likely you're going to need plenty of characters to do so.

"My favorite part of the three paragraphs in which Gandalf described the Hunt for Gollum was when Seren came in and did whatever she's going to do or not do," quipped another fan, aragonaut. "I'm so glad they got Anya Taylor Joy to interpret such an unsung hero."

"I absolutely adore Anya as an actress so this isn't directed at her as a person," AnonyMcnonymous began, "but I really wish they would stop making up s*** and adding it to the story. Didn't they learn anything from that train wreck that happened in the last movies they made about Bilbo's journey?"

"New elf character worked so well in The Hobbit movies, why not run it back?" commented jayhawk8.

"As far as I'm concerned they made three films in the early aughts and then Warner Bros put the franchise on the boat to Valinor," claimed ASCII_Princess.

Other Tolkien fans have criticized Seren's name, which appears to have originated from the real-world language of Welsh.

"Seren means 'star' in Welsh," revealed No_Imagination5705. "Welsh and Finnish were linguistic sources of inspiration for Tolkien when he developed Quenya and Sindarin (the languages of the Elves). Call me pedantic, but that does not make Welsh canon, nor does the name [make] etymological sense in the fiction. Nearly all names in Tolkien's works have meaning, and with so many Tolkien scholars today, why not derive a Quenya or Sindarin name?

"Gil means 'Star-light', Elen 'Star'," they continued. "[So you could have] Elenya, Eleneth, Eleniel, Elenwë, Gilwen, Elenissë, Eleriel, Elenindë, Giliel, Elenwen. There's literally so many options they could've chosen that made sense. Seren doesn't."

The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum will bring Taylor-Joy to Middle-earth when the film premieres December 17, 2027. For more while we wait for updates, you can read about why Jackson compared the prequel movie to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.

Image credit: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social