Blue Wizards

We're starting at the bottom of the list, the two mysterious figures who disappeared into the East.

The Blue Wizards, Alatar and Pallando.

Right.

They sit at the absolute bottom of Ulric's list, and like you said, they don't appear in the main narrative at all.

The notes about their success, yes.

Exactly.

Tolkien speculated later in life that the Blue Wizards actually succeeded in the East.

They fermented rebellions.

In The Peoples of Middle-Earth and Unfinished Tales, we get some ideas from Tolkien about Eloran or Gandalf maybe arriving in the Second Age.

And a lot of these are attached to the ideas about the Blue Wizards and the idea in various conceptions of Glorfindel that Tolkien was working through.

So Tolkien says that Eloran, as was possible for one of the mire had already visited Middle-earth and become acquainted not only with the cinder and elves and others deeper in Middle-earth, but also with men, is likely, but nothing has yet been said of this.

I mean, it could have been said if you had written it, but that is...

But this is part of Peoples of Middle-earth contained within the last writings of Tolkien.

So these are, like, the very latest things that Tolkien ever wrote about.

And they include stuff about Glorfindel, Círdan, Gandalf, the Blue Wizards.

some really important stuff

Corvo the Crow says, if Amazon is so set on actors of color and making up their own story anyway, why not just do Rune and Umbar during the War of the Ring? Exactly.

Plus, you can show the Blue Wizards, cast Charles Dance and Bill Nighy in Call It A Day.

I've said this before, man.

There's many stories to be told in the world of Middle Earth, right? And they don't all have to be set in the northern...

There was also Ewendil, who is going to be Radagast, who would come to love nature and beasts.

And then there was the mysterious ones that everybody on YouTube loves, the blue wizards.

The blue

wizards.

No, their names kind of change, but they're known as Alatar and Palando.

And then they're later called, because Tolkien, again, he changed his writing, Morhintar, known as the Darkness Slayer, and Romestamo, known as the East Helper.

The two blue wizards are the ones that...

Tolkien writes that they come late into the Second Age and then he changes his mind and he says during the Third Age.

He pulls a buddy system move and recruits a friend, Palando, to join him.

Which is funny because these two will eventually just disappear into the east as the Blue Wizards.

Yeah, we'll touch on them later.

But then we arrive at the choice made by Manwe himself, the king.

The deployment is fractured across vast spans of time.

How vast would be time?

While Tolkien's later notes suggest a staggering gap in their arrivals, the two blue wizards, Alatar and Pallando, are said to have arrived in Middle-earth during the Second Age around the year 1600.

Okay, wait, that timing is wild.

To be called a north spy indicates that men of the south opposed him in some way, and Harad and Sindarin does mean south.

Gandalf then seems, if we care to speculate, like he had some part of his mission match that of the blue wizards who journeyed to the eastern regions, to Rhun, in an attempt to sow discord among peoples who had long fallen under Sauron's sway, to those regions who viewed Sauron as a god-king.

Couldn't Gandalf in his earlier wanderings, before the threat of Sauron in the north of Middle-earth was at its peak, have wandered in these southern lands? With a name derived from an alien tongue of the Haradrim, it seems possible.

Maybe realising that his efforts were best spent in the north, where Sauron would go to war, and rally his enemies over efforts to turn indoctrinated servants and slaves from the path their ancestors walked long before Gandalf walked in Middle-earth.