The Blue Wizards

The two chosen by Oromë

The order of the Istari numbered five. Three are well known: Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast. The other two are named only in Unfinished Tales, where they are called Alatar and Pallando, and are known collectively as the Ithryn Luin, the Blue Wizards, from the colour of the robes they wore. They were Maiar, like their fellows, and at the council of the Valar where the emissaries were chosen it was Oromë, the Hunter, who put forward Alatar; Alatar in turn asked that his friend Pallando come with him. Their association with the Vala who had ridden furthest into the darkness of Middle-earth in the days before the Sun is fitting, for their mission took them furthest of all the Istari.

The journey east

The Blue Wizards came to Middle-earth around T.A. 1000 with the others and, according to Unfinished Tales, passed into the East with Saruman. Saruman returned; they did not. Their purpose there is not stated in the published texts, but the lands beyond Rhûn and the Sea of Rhûn were the regions in which Sauron had built his strength during the Second Age and to which he retreated during the Watchful Peace, and it is reasonable to suppose that the Blue Wizards were sent to weaken his hold on the peoples of the East, the Easterlings whom he had long dominated.

What became of them

No one in the West of Middle-earth knew. Gandalf, speaking of the order at the Council of Elrond, mentioned the number five without naming them, and Saruman spoke of the rods of the Five Wizards as though the two absent members were still a factor in the balance of power. Unfinished Tales preserves Tolkien's own view that they failed, though not as Saruman failed; he feared that they became the founders of secret cults and magical traditions among the Men of the East that outlived Sauron's fall. Whether they died, were corrupted, or simply lost themselves in the vastness of the East is not recorded, and the histories offer no return to the Grey Havens for either of them.

Legacy

The Blue Wizards are the largest gap in the record of the Istari. Their absence from the War of the Ring meant that the whole weight of the mission fell in the end on Gandalf alone, and their fate, feared rather than known, stands as a reminder that the emissaries of the Valar could be lost as easily as any other traveller into the dark. Later and unpublished writings offer different names and a kinder judgement of them, but those belong outside the published histories on which this atlas is based.

Unknown. They went into the East and did not return, and it was feared that they failed in their mission and founded cults among the Men of the East.