The Stranger and his harfoot friends are facing down a Dark Wizard on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He hasn’t been identified, but there are only a few options for who he could be.

The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is airing now on Prime Video, with the first three episodes already available to stream. In one of the show’s many plotlines, the mysterious character known only as the Stranger travels to the desert land of Rhûn with his harfoot companions Nori and Poppy. There, he faces off against lieutenants of an equally mysterious character known in these parts only as the Dark Wizard.

The identities of both the Stranger and the Dark Wizard are shrouded in mystery, which frankly is getting tiresome. How many nameless magic-wielding wizard characters can one show have? However, if we look at The Lord of the Rings lore, there are only a few options for who these characters can be.

in the world of The Lord of the Rings, there are five wizards, known as the Istari (a word the Dark Wizard has already mentioned on The Rings of Power): Gandalf, the most famous; Saruman, the leader of the Istari who turns his coat and works with Sauron; Radagast, a nature-loving wizard who featured prominently in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies; and two other wizards named Alatar and Pallando, about whom we know almost nothing.

All of the Istari are divine being that take the form of old men. As laid out in J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Silmarillion, they were sent across the sea from the sacred land of Aman (the same place the elves sail to when they leave Middle-earth) to aid the peoples of Middle-earth in their fight against Sauron. Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast mostly stayed in the western part of Middle-earth, but Alatar and Pallando are said to have gone to the east, to try and tamp down Sauron’s influence in that region. Of note, the land of Rhûn is in the east of Middle-earth.

So are the Stranger and the Dark Wizard actually Alatar and Pallando? Those are the wizards about whom we know the least, so the producers of The Rings of Power have the most leeway when crafting their stories. I think it’s definitely possible.

That said, if these two wizards are Alatar and Pallando, the show has already broken canon. In The Silmarillion we learn that Alatar and Pallando arrived in Middle-earth together, and there’s no mention of one of them having amnesia.

Credit: Ben Rothstein / Prime Video. Copyright: Amazon MGM Studios /

Also, the show has dropped a lot of hints that the Stranger is actually Gandalf, what with him saying things like “follow your nose,” a line Gandalf says in The Fellowship of the Ring. That would also push against the source material, since there’s no record of Gandalf doing any of this stuff in Tolkien’s book. I guess the producers would say they’re just filling in the gaps, but that seems like a stretch.

Basically, the show is going against canon no matter what happens, so it’s hard to drill down on the identity of these characters just by looking at the source material. Maybe the Dark Wizard is actually Saruman, who will later side with Sauron during the War of the Ring. But if that’s the case, that would mean that Saruman is evil for a while in Rhûn, then turns towards the light and fights Sauron as the leader of the Istari, and then betrays everyone, which seems circuitous. I don’t think the Dark Wizard is Saruman.

Right now, I’m guessing that the Stranger is Gandalf — the hints are too many to ignore — and that the Dark Wizard turns out to be either Alatar or Pallando. But only time will tell. New episodes of The Rings of Power drop Thursdays on Prime Video.