The Blue Wizards: Did They Defeat Sauron? | Tolkien Deep Dive

An investigation of the two wizards Tolkien wrote out of The Lord of the Rings. The only in-text evidence of their existence is Saruman's slip at Orthanc invoking the rods of the Five Wizards. Early in his life, Tolkien feared that the Blue Wizards, Alatar and Pallando, had failed as Saruman did, perhaps founding secret cults in the East. But in notes written in 1972, the last year of his life, he reversed himself entirely, renaming them Morinehtar, Darkness-slayer, and Romestamo, East-helper, pushing their arrival back to the Second Age, and declaring they had very great influence in weakening the forces of Rhun, Khand, and Harad that would otherwise have outnumbered the West. Read that way, the Blue Wizards did not defeat Sauron. They spent forty-six centuries making his defeat possible.