The primary season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Energy liked its mysteries — a secret Sauron, a spooky sword, and an amnesiac meteor man. And whereas we had a fairly good concept of who that meteor man was on the finish of season 1, the finale of season 2 lastly offers him a reputation.
Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay couldn’t let viewers have all of the solutions, although — they usually’ve pulled the intelligent trick of naming one unknown wizard whereas teasing one other unnamed one on the identical time.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power through the finale of season 2.]
Photograph: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
This week’s episode caps off the season in a number of methods, together with with the anticipated confrontation between the Stranger and the Darkish Wizard. The Darkish Wizard provides the Stranger an opportunity to recuperate his identify, his previous, and his workers, if solely he’ll flip to the Darkish Aspect — I imply, if solely he’ll be part of the Darkish Wizard in his quest to defeat Sauron, after which supplant him as Darkish Lord. As soon as the Stranger noticed via the Darkish Wizard’s makes an attempt to place a kindly face on his true nature, the Wizard blasted a hillside aside and made his exit, leaving the Stoors with out a house.
Fortunately, Nori and Poppy are readily available to show the Stoors the touring method of the Harfoots, and after just a few farewells from the newly migratory hobbits — calling the Stranger “Grand Elf” — the Stranger has a brand new identify: Gandalf.
Is that basically how Gandalf bought his identify?
No, however it’s not that far off. See, Tolkien didn’t invent the identify “Gandalf” — he cribbed it from someplace else. Gandalf first seems in The Hobbit, which Tolkien wrote as a story for youngsters (initially instantly as bedtime tales improvised for his personal sons and daughter). The author didn’t conceive of rooting The Hobbit into his Center-earth lore and languages till he was practically midway carried out with the draft that turned The Fellowship of the Ring, years after The Hobbit had been printed.
As a substitute of being rooted in one in all Tolkien’s constructed languages, Gandalf and all of the dwarves in The Hobbit have been cheekily named after dwarven characters talked about in a piece of the Völuspá, a set of anonymously authored poems important to the research of the Outdated Norse language — that’s, important to Tolkien’s personal tutorial focus. Gandalf, Thorin, Fili and Kili, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and even Durin, the identify of all of Moria’s kings, come straight from the Poetic Edda.
Whereas “Gandalf” isn’t derived from any of Tolkien’s fictional languages, the roots of the phrase gandalfr mainly imply “cane-elf” in Outdated Norse — which isn’t so unhealthy of a derivation for a man who’s ageless like elves and wields a workers. Gandalf was what the wizard was known as in most human and hobbit languages in Northwestern Center-earth, although in Gondor, probably the most elf-adjacent human nation in The Lord of the Rings, he was known as by his Sindarin elven identify, Mithrandir.
In The Two Towers, Faramir recollects Gandalf telling him about an entire slew of names:
Many are my names in lots of nations. Mithrandir among the many Elves [meaning “Grey Pilgrim/Wanderer”], Tharkûn to the Dwarves [Staff-man]; Olórin I used to be in my youth within the West that’s forgotten [his original name, probably meaning something to do with dreams/vision/the mind], within the South Incánus [Tolkien changed his mind about the meaning of this one a bunch of times], within the North Gandalf; to the East I am going not.
Suffice to say: Gandalf has discovered one in all his names, however there’s tons extra for The Rings of Energy to choose from if it needs to.
So is the Darkish Wizard Saruman?
Photograph: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video
The Darkish Wizard confirmed right here that he was one of many Istari, or wizards, that the Valar despatched to assist the peoples of Center-earth oppose Sauron. However simply because he looks like an evil wizard, doesn’t imply he’s The Lord of the Rings’ most distinguished evil wizard.
It’s true, in Tolkien’s lore, that Saruman was all the time jealous of his Istari friends, significantly Gandalf, and resolved early on to develop his personal energy till he might find the One Ring, seize it for himself, and supplant Sauron, a lot in the best way The Rings of Energy’s Darkish Wizard needs to do.
However Saruman stored all of that so completely secret that even within the time of the Warfare of the Ring, Gandalf brazenly thought of him “the best of my order,” and trusted that Saruman’s hard-won information of Ring lore was being wielded for the forces of fine.
Saruman gave the impression to be a great man to Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and all people else who knew him, proper up till he locked Gandalf up in Orthanc in The Fellowship of the Ring. That doesn’t appear in step with this Darkish Wizard, who simply out-and-out tried to kill an entire village of hobbits in entrance of Gandalf. Maybe there’s a redemption arc in his future, however it’s arduous to think about one that may be that convincing.
What’s extra possible is that the Darkish Wizard, regardless of his monochromatic robes, is among the “Blue Wizards.” On this episode, he confirmed that 5 Istari have been despatched to Center-earth to oppose Sauron, and from Tolkien’s writings, we all know precisely who these 5 wizards are: Gandalf the Gray, Saruman the White, Radagast the Brown, and the 2 Blue Wizards, as they’re now known as.
The Blue Wizards exist due to a line Tolkien gave Saruman in The Two Towers, when, sarcastically, the cornered wizard protested towards Gandalf’s promise to offer him again his workers later, based mostly on good habits. “Later! Later! Sure, if you even have the Keys of Barad-dûr itself, I suppose; and the crowns of seven kings, and the rods of the 5 Wizards, and have bought your self a pair of trainers many sizes bigger than those who you put on now.”
Tolkien didn’t come again to the query of the remaining wizards till after The Lord of the Rings was totally printed. As he wrote to a fan asking about “the opposite two” in 1958, “I actually have no idea something clearly concerning the different two – since they don’t concern the historical past of the [North West of Middle-earth].” In later writings that have been solely printed after his demise, he gave the wizards a shade (blue) and mentioned that they went into the far off components of Center-earth and by no means returned to the principal places of his saga.
Being so unenumerated by Tolkien, these closing two Blue Wizards are ripe for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Energy to broaden on in its subsequent seasons. However that’s not all. The Rings of Energy can solely put what’s within the textual content of the Lord of the Rings books themselves on the display — and in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien by no means gave the final two wizards a shade. That signifies that although he’s not sporting blue in any respect, the Darkish Wizard might really be a Blue Wizard. And the looks of a Saruman, wisest and better of wizards, might nonetheless be on the horizon.