Six episodes in, the true identities of several new characters in Amazon’s “Lord of the Rings” series remain unknown. Our resident Tolkienologist speculates.
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By Jennifer Vineyard
Many of the biggest unsolved mysteries in J.R.R. Tolkien’s sprawling “Lord of the Rings” trilogy have resulted from the tiniest scraps of writing he left behind — a line here, an aside there, or some tiny revision that raised a question he never answered before dying in 1973.
Six episodes in, the Amazon series “The Rings of Power,” set before Tolkien’s trilogy and drawing from details in its six appendices, seems poised to solve some of them, including longstanding questions about the origin of the orcs, the fate of the Blue Wizards and what Sauron got up to during the centuries after Morgoth’s defeat.
More than likely, those answers will relate to several mystery characters in the series — characters who, so far, are unfamiliar to even the best-read Tolkienologists. Who is Adar? Who is Halbrand? Who is the Stranger from the sky? And what about those three ominous priestesses?
All must wonder what has woken in the darkness; with only two episodes left in the first season, their true identities are still unknown. Here are some theories that may light the way.
The man who fell to Middle-earth
There is no shortage of theories about the confused celestial traveler known to many as simply the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), or more affectionately as Meteor Man. Some say he is Sauron, or a Balrog, or Tilion — or even Gandalf.
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That last possibility has emotional appeal. Also, he traveled by meteor: Surely, he must be a Maiar — who, as Gandalf later explains, originate in the spiritual realm before arriving to Middle-earth in physical form. Being newly corporeal could explain the Stranger’s difficulty controlling his immense magical powers. (One of his special skills — spellcasting in the Elvish tongue Quenya, such as the healing/renewal incantation “envinyanta.”)
This facility recalls wizards, or Istari, such as Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White and Radagast the Brown, but most don’t arrive in Tolkien’s saga until the Third Age. There are two others in this same order, though, and they could be in Middle-earth as early as the Second Age, in time for “Rings of Power.” These are the Blue Wizards: Pallando (also known as Rómestámo, which means “East-helper”) and his colleague Alatar (also known as Morinehtar, which means “Darkness-slayer”). Tolkien wrote contradictory versions of their tale, but it seems likely that the Stranger might be searching for a fellow fallen friend.
Menacing mystics
Ominously closing in on Meteor Man are three other strangers, known as the Dweller (Bridie Sisson), the Nomad (Edith Poor, in a helmet) and the Ascetic (Kali Kopae, in a hood). They definitely appear to have uncanny powers, so it would make sense if they turned out to be members of a creepy Sauron cult — specifically the Cult of Melkor — what with their celestial iconography and ritualistic talismans.
But Sauron’s minions don’t wear white; maybe these interlopers are cultists of a different order. One of the show’s producers revealed that the three beings have traveled from the lands of Rhûn, far to the east, which is where the Blue Wizards traveled.
Tolkien was of two minds about his Blue Wizards. As captured in letters and outlines published in “Unfinished Tales” and “The Peoples of Middle-earth,” his conception of them changed over time. At first, he speculated that they had failed in their original mission and became the leaders of secret magic cults; later on, he suggested that they had succeeded in helping to block Sauron.
But what if both versions could be true? What if the wizards operated independently, on opposite sides? The mystics could belong to one such wizard cult and seek to welcome — or thwart — any newly arrived member of the order.
Father figure
“You are Sauron, are you not?” When Waldreg (Geoff Morrell) asks this much-screencapped question, the dark elf Adar (Joseph Mawle) erupts in anger. Why? Because Sauron is actually an insult, meaning “the Abhorred.” Because it was Adar, called “father” by his orc followers, who killed Sauron to protect his people.
Later, when the supposedly virtuous Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) advocates systematic orc genocide, Adar makes a persuasive case to join the orc sympathizer camp. Galadriel and Adar articulate both versions of Tolkien’s competing orc origin theories: that orcs were bred as mockeries of elves (“The Book of Lost Tales” version), and that they were actually corrupted elves (“The Silmarillion” version). Tolkien himself struggled with this dilemma, second-guessing whether orcs were completely irredeemable. Adar argues for orc rights. If you prick us, he asks, do we not bleed (black)?
Adar himself is still more elf than orc, or uruk, his preferred nomenclature. He is still immortal, for one thing, having lived since the First Age. He can stand in the sun. And he observes the tradition of planting seeds before battle. Instead of threatening to kill his “children,” Galadriel might better have asked how many more elves like him had been transformed by darkness.
Lost lord
At the very start of the show, Galadriel says, “Nothing is evil in the beginning.” What she doesn’t say — but it is said in the book — is that “even Sauron was not so.” It’s worth noting that Sauron is a Maia, a being who can be severed from his physical form and come back in a new body, or without a body at all. And during the Second Age, Tolkien wrote, the Dark Lord spent some time in disguise, which is why there are now so many characters who are suspected of being Sauron.
Of the various Sauronic possibilities, the show leans hardest toward Galadriel’s shady shipwreck buddy (and smithing enthusiast), Halbrand (Charlie Vickers). Has she not been too eager to believe that he is a lost king? Does that seem to be the end of his secret? All the furtive camera angles suggest not.
In Tolkien’s letters, he writes about a moment when Second-Age Sauron tried to repent; the nature of that repentance kept changing. It’s possible that Halbrand is not just a reluctant hero but also a reluctant villain. Halbrand’s “binding” chat with Galadriel, then, would read less as romance than as a sign of a struggle not to relapse into a darker form. As Halbrand says himself, “Looks can be deceiving.”
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