Ciarán Hinds plays the Dark Wizard in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2.
The Rings of Power Season 2 sees a new threat rise in the East of Middle-earth, and for once we’re not talking about Sauron. Yes, the Dark Lord is back, but there’s also a “Dark Wizard” amassing power in the realm of Rhûn, whence came the three Mystics that tracked the Stranger in The Rings of Power Season 1, mistaking the Istar for Sauron reborn. In The Rings of Power Season 2, the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) returns the favor, in a way, traveling with his Harfoot companion, Nori (Markella Kavanagh), to Rhûn in pursuit of the answers about his nature. In Rhûn, the Stranger will meet Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear, bringing the beloved Tolkien character to live-action for the first time), who has been acting in opposition to this Dark Wizard (Ciarán Hinds).
Wizards — dark or otherwise — are rare and powerful beings in the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien, which meant we had to ask showrunner Patrick McKay about the Dark Wizard’s role in The Rings of Power when we had the chance. “I don’t know that it’s that new of a concept,” McKay says. “We have seen throughout Tolkien that powerful beings are tempted to evil. Gandalf will not carry the Ring for he fears the evil it could do through him. Saruman turns to evil believing that that’s the best way to save the world, in whatever twisted logic he’s come up with. So we know that good characters can turn to evil and we know that even wizards can turn to the dark side, so to speak, and watching how that’s gonna play out with Ciarán Hinds is gonna be hopefully a real thrill for people.”
Who is the Dark Wizard in The Rings of Power Season 2?
McKay compares the Dark Wizard to the two wizards integral The Lord of the Wings, Gandalf (whom many fans believe the Stranger to be) and Saruman, who allies with Sauron during the War of the Ring in the Third Age. Could this Dark Wizard be Saruman in the Second Age, following a similarly misguided path? While Saruman should have arrived in Middle-earth at the same time as the other wizards (The Rings of Power nudges their arrival back from the Third Age of Middle-earth into the Second Age), and Hinds’ appearance in The Rings of Power isn’t far from how Christopher Lee appeared while playing Saurman in The Lord of the Rings films, it seems unlikely that The Rings of Power would suggest Saurman fell twice.
The next most prominent wizard in Tolkien’s writings is Radagast the Brown, and he barely has a presence, acting more as a plot device than a real character. Nonetheless, what we do know of Radagast — he loved animals enough to more or less abandon his mission to hang out with them in the forest of Middle-earth — doesn’t paint him as having the ambition to bother falling to darkness, and there’s no indication that he ever went to Rhûn.
Is the Dark Wizard in The Rings of Power a Blue Wizard?
That leaves us with two Wizards mentioned in passing in The Lord of the Rings and expanded on slightly in other areas of Tolkien’s legendarium: the Blue Wizards. Tolkien’s ideas about the Blue Wizards changed over the years, and his earlier writings contradict his later writings, not even agreeing on the two wizards’ names. It’s possible that The Rings of Power has combined aspects of both of Tolkien’s takes on the Blue Wizards to create Hinds’ Dark Wizard.
The earliest known writing by Tolkien on the Blue Wizards is his 1954 essay on the Istari (published in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth). He names the wizards Alatar and Pallando. In this iteration, the Blue Wizards went to Middle-earth during the Third Age, at the same time as the other Wizards, then traveled with Saruman into the East, with only Saruman ever returning to the West. In a letter Tolkien wrote in 1958, he suggests that the Blue Wizards must have abandoned their intended purpose in Middle-earth and likely founded cults steeped in dark magic traditions.
In a manuscript on the Five Wizards written during the last year of his life (he died in 1973), Tolkien reconsidered the role of the Blue Wizards — now called Morinehtar and Rómestámo — coming to a much more heroic conclusion. In this version, the Blue Wizards preceded the other wizards in coming to Middle-earth, first arriving late in the Second Age. They traveled alone into the East and South of Middle-earth, where they organized resistance to the practice of Melkor-worship that had taken hold in the regions during the Second Age, and played a role in disrupting Sauron’s activities in those regions, helping to lead to Sauron’s defeat during the War of the Last Alliance. Tolkien also comes to the conclusion that the Blue Wizards must have been active during the War of the Ring and working against Sauron or the forces that the Dark Lord mustered from the East and the South would have vastly outnumbered those of the Men of the West, leading to their defeat. That Sauron ultimately fell suggests the Blue Wizards succeeded in their mission.
