The Rings of Power: Is the Dark Wizard of Rhun One of LOTR’s Blue Wizards?

This Lord of the Rings article contains spoilers for The Rings of Power season 2.

The Rings of Power season 2 has already introduced a number of new characters, but perhaps the most mysterious is the Dark Wizard played by Game of Thrones alum Ciarán Hinds. Briefly seen in one of the trailers for the series as well as in The Stranger’s (Daniel Weyman) vision at the start of episode 1 and again at his stronghold in episode 2, we don’t know much yet about this Dark Wizard, other than the fact that he seems to be connected to the Stranger’s true identity and his journey to Rhûn.

The season 1 finale revealed that the Stranger is not, in fact, the reincarnation of Sauron, but rather an Istar, or a Wizard sent to Middle-earth. There were five Istari sent to Middle-earth, according to The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, and the Blue Wizards, Alatar and Pallando. It was originally thought that all five Wizards arrived on Middle-earth at the same time, but letters from J.R.R. Tolkien suggest that the Blue Wizards may have arrived earlier in the Second Age than the other three.

We don’t know much else about Alatar and Pallando other than the fact that they were sent into the South and the East to disrupt the work of Sauron and were never really seen or heard from again in the West. In Tolkien letter 211, he says of the Blue Wizards that “I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and ‘magic’ traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron,” though in his Last Writings Tolkien changes course and suggests that they did manage to hold back Sauron’s forces in some way.

The good thing about the uncertainty of the Blue Wizards’ fate is that this gives The Rings of Power a lot of room to explore the Istari and their connection to Rhûn. The small glimpses we’ve seen of the Dark Wizard so far seem to suggest that he has some connection to the Sauron cultists who came after the Stranger at the end of season 1, which falls in line with part of Tolkien’s description of the Blue Wizards. And the Stranger seems to fall in line with the other so far, in that he wants to do good.

As far as we know, Alatar and Pallando were friends when they journeyed into Rhûn together, but The Rings of Power may be taking a different approach. Instead of choosing one side for the two to be on, maybe they’ve split the difference, giving The Stranger a potential adversary in his quest to find out who he is and why he crash landed on Middle-earth.

Or the Dark Wizard could be one of the Blue Wizards and the Stranger someone else entirely. The fact that the Harfoot’s song led Nori (Markella Kavenagh), Poppy (Megan Richards), and The Stranger right to the place of his vision suggests that they perhaps had some kind of connection to this land in their past. Maybe the Stranger isn’t the first visitor from the sky that Harfoots have encountered? The Dark Wizard could have come to visit them many generations before The Stranger did, gaining their trust before setting off to the East and becoming corrupt.

But this is all speculation. Just like The Stranger last season, it looks like we’ll just have to wait and see who this Dark Wizard really is and what his role is in the impending war against Darkness. At least this time, we have a pretty strong inclination of what side he might be on.