Rings of Energy’s white-robe Dweller and her Stranger connection, defined

This summer time, as the primary glimpses of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Energy got here to mild, there was one character specifically who grabbed fan consideration and held it quick: a white-robed determine, with intently shorn hair and paper-white pores and skin. Within the absence of some other indications, the creepy look and overtly menacing stare led followers to a single hunch: This was the present’s model of Sauron!

Properly, with the fifth episode of The Rings of Energy, that mysterious white-robed character has lastly made an look, and left solely extra questions of their wake. Tolkien’s supply materials offers hints at the place the story could also be going, and what relation the characters do need to Sauron, The Stranger, and the present’s different mysteries.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for episode 5 of The Rings of Power, “Partings.”]

What we all know concerning the white-robed Dweller

Picture: Prime Video

Our mysterious Sauron-potential makes her debut early within the episode, as one in every of a trio of figures who appear to be in search of the equally mysterious meteor man often called the Stranger. The episode’s credit confer with her as “the Dweller,” and he or she’s performed by Bridie Sisson; together with her companions the Nomad (performed by Edith Poor within the helmet with flowing pink hair) and the Ascetic (performed by Kali Kopae, hooded and carrying a spherical… factor).

They’re pale of pores and skin and pale of robes, and carry a collection of odd accoutrements. The Dweller has an ornate employees, whereas the Ascetic brandishes a metallic disk or dish emblazoned with circles and a crescent. The Nomad’s armor incorporates a number of motifs of eyes and circles — and fingers, interlaced excessive of her helm.

We all know extra key element past what’s on display in episode 5: Chatting with Time journal, Rings of Energy government producer Lindsey Weber stated that these characters have traveled right here from “from far to the east — from the lands of Rhûn.”

What’s Rhûn?

Picture: LOTR Challenge

In essentially the most broad sense, Rhûn means every little thing east of the map in The Lord of the Rings, all of the land in that path that didn’t issue into the story Tolkien needed to inform. And because it wasn’t vital to the story he needed to inform, it has largely remained undescribed.

Though the races of dwarves, males, and elves originated someplace in Rhûn and migrated west, that was so fantastically way back — and the world has gone by way of a number of geographic upheavals since — as to offer us no sense of its present state. It’s a clean canvas for Rings of Energy to discover, even perhaps an opportunity to flesh out the blanket time period of “Easterlings” that Tolkien’s trendy elves, people, and dwarves needed to confer with males from the east.

So, the place do these white-robed figures come from? In a really literal method, “Components Unknown.”

What does this imply for the Stranger?

Rhûn has one fairly strong attribute which will come to bear right here: It’s additionally the place the Blue Wizards supposedly skittered off to. And “one of many Blue Wizards” is a not-unlikely principle for the true identification of the Stranger.

The duo of azure-attired colleagues of Gandalf and Saruman is likely one of the lengthy checklist of ideas that Tolkien wrote into The Lord of the Rings with little elaboration, after which spent the remainder of his days deciding whether or not to elaborate on them in The Silmarillion. Like Rhûn itself, the 2 handed geographically out of the scope of Tolkien’s favourite tales, and so out of the need of exploring them.

He toyed with totally different names and totally different origins for them: Maybe they have been Alatar and Pallando, two wizards who ultimately grew to become actual slackers and forsook their mission to sit back in Rhûn. Or, possibly, they have been Morinehtar and Rómestámo, two wizards who struggled lengthy to dilute what they may of Sauron’s affect within the east of Center-earth, with out whose work the Darkish Lord certainly would have overrun Gondor and the remainder of Eregion.

Ultimately, we all know little or no about what Tolkien would have meant for the Blue Wizards had he completed his opus, besides that they traveled a lot farther east than the others and stayed there. It’s doable that this connection to Rhûn will ultimately flip right into a connection to the Blue Wizards.

However wait, there’s yet another factor.

It’s the moon

Picture: Jasper Jacobs through Getty Pictures

The different potential trace concerning the Stranger this episode is in his celestial origin, his seeming concentrate on the celebrities, a telling shot of him gazing up on the moon, and the very moon-reminiscent emblem on the Ascetic’s disk.

The Stranger might be the Man within the Moon.

This would possibly sound like a joke, however in Tolkien’s Center-earth, the solar and moon had their very own very particular origin story. You will have heard about how Galadriel’s struggle towards Morgoth started when he destroyed a few glowing timber. Properly, on the time, these timber (and the celebrities within the sky) have been the one sources of pure mild on the earth. The solar and moon have been created to interchange them, glowing ships that have been piloted by way of the sky and below the earth by a few Maiar, beings of the identical order as Sauron and Gandalf.

The moon’s vessel was piloted by the Maiar Tilion, who was identified for his unreliability — his unrequited crush on the Maiar piloting the solar is the rationale for why the moon typically seems within the sky with the solar. And the legend of the man who pilots the moon even reached “trendy” hobbits, who’ve tales and songs (one a parody of “Hey Diddle Diddle”) concerning the foolish issues that ensued through the bumbling Man within the Moon’s visits to Center-earth.

Metatextually, Center-earth’s moon is a mix of Tolkien’s lore of the elves, and the tales he informed to entertain his youngsters — identical to Tom Bombadil and hobbits themselves. The Man within the Moon appeared each in Roverandom, a narrative the professor invented to consolation his son after he misplaced a favourite toy on the seashore; and within the annual letters he wrote and illustrated for his youngsters within the voice of Father Christmas.

However whether or not the Stranger is the Man within the Moon or a Blue Wizard, it appears these milky-white-clad strangers from Rhûn know one thing about him. We’ll have to attend and see when The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Energy decides to resolve this explicit thriller.