The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2’s final episode finally confirmed the identity of the Stranger, the wizard played by Daniel Weyman. However, the identity of the Dark Wizard introduced in The Rings of Power Season 2 remains a mystery. Some fans got Saruman vibes from the character, played by Ciarán Hinds, but that may simply be because he’s the only fallen wizard to appear in Tolkien’s fiction previously. In post-mortem interviews to The Rings of Power‘s Season 2 finale, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay confirmed that the Dark Wizard is not Saruman the White.
“We know that in the history of Middle-earth, some wizards become corrupted,” McKay told The Hollywood Reporter. “So there is precedent for this, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same guy.”
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In a separate interview with Vanity Fair, McKay stated, “Given the history of Middle-earth, it would be highly, highly, highly improbable that this could be Saruman. If not impossible… So the Dark Wizard’s fate is not decided and his name is not out there yet, but it would almost defy the laws of gravity and physics for it to be Saruman.”
This all fits with what McKay teased to ComicBook ahead of The Rings of Power Season 2’s debut. He stated, “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.”
So if the Dark Wizard isn’t Saruman, then who is he? Beside Gandalf the Grey and Saruman the white, “There’s Radagast the Brown and then there’s two blue wizards,” Payne reminded THR, “and that’s all we’ll say.”
Who is the Dark Wizard in The Rings of Power?
As explained, only five known wizards, or Istari, are in Middle-earth’s world. We know that the Stranger in The Rings of Power is Gandalf and that the Dark Wizard is not Saruman. Of the remaining possible suspects, Radagast the Brown seems an unlikely candidate given his friendly relationship with Gandalf in Middle-earth’s Third Age. It’s hard to imagine Radagast and Gandalf getting along that well after the way the Dark Wizard treats the Stoors and Harfoots in The Rings of Power Season 2’s finale.
That leaves the two Blue Wizards as suspects, and there may be another hint at this in The Ring of Power Season 2’s finale. The Dark Wizard tells Gandalf they were friends while living in Valinor before coming to Middle-earth as wizards. This tracks with the origin of the two Blue Wizards, which say that the one Blue Wizard chosen by the Valar, Alatar, invited another Maia, his friend Pallando, to join him on his mission to Middle-earth. They became the two Blue Wizards, who then mostly disappeared from Tolkien’s writings. The writers of The Rings of Power may be combining the Blue Wizards’ origin with Gandalf to give more personal stakes to the Stranger and the Dark Wizard’s rivalry.
The idea of the Dark Wizard being a Blue Wizard who has turned to evil tracks with Tolkien’s earliest known writings about the Blue Wizards. In a 1954 essay on the Istari (published in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth), Tolkien says that Alatar and Pollando traveled with Saruman into the East, but only Saruman returned to the West. Tolkien followed up on this in a letter he wrote in 1958, suggesting that the Blue Wizards must have abandoned their mission, likely creating cults rooted in dark magic, and the Dark Wizard seems to have done in The Rings of Power.
While we don’t know for certain who the Dark Wizard is, the idea that he’s a Blue Wizard who has fallen, as Tolkien described in his letter, is backed up pretty solidly. As long as Prime Video renews The Rings of Power for Season 3, as it is reportedly close to doing, fans stand a good chance of eventually learning the full story.
