Alatar

Alatar is the only name recorded for this member of the Istari, and it is preserved without a gloss. It stands in the essay on the Wizards edited in Unfinished Tales beside Curumo, Aiwendil, Pallando and Olórin — a set of forms belonging to Valinor rather than to the tongues of Middle-earth, where certain of the same spirits came to be known by such later names as Curunír and Mithrandir. For Alatar no Sindarin or Westron equivalent survives, nor did Tolkien anywhere translate the elements the name appears to contain, so that the customary pairing of a Valinorean name with a name given by the peoples of Middle-earth is, in his case, left incomplete.

In kind he belonged to the Maiar, the lesser spirits of the same order as those who had long served the Valar in the West, and among the Maiar he is associated with Oromë, the huntsman of the Valar, whose people rode in Middle-earth in the ages before the Sun. The order to which he was appointed is called Istari in Quenya, a word rendered as those who know or the Wise; the English word Wizard is used for it in the narratives. Of the outward form assumed by members of that order the same account is explicit: they took the shape of aged Men, seemingly slow to age but not exempt from hunger, weariness or fear, and their power was veiled rather than displayed.

His better-known designation is not properly personal at all. He and Pallando were called the Ithryn Luin, a Sindarin phrase in which ithryn is the plural of ithron, a wizard, and luin means blue; in English this is rendered as the Blue Wizards. The name follows the practice by which each of the order was distinguished by the colour of his raiment — grey, white, brown — and refers to garments of the blue of the sea. Because it was applied to the two of them together, no source assigns it to one rather than the other, and Tolkien himself remarked in his letters that he knew little with clarity about this pair, whose concerns lay away from the histories he had set down.

The one episode in which Alatar acts on his own account belongs to Valinor, before any of the order had set foot in Middle-earth. The account edited in Unfinished Tales describes a council of the Valar, called when it became plain that the shadow in the East was gathering again, at which Manwë asked who among the Maiar would go as emissaries in humbled form to contest that power. The record dwells on the reluctance in the hall: of all the spirits of the West only two offered themselves, Curumo, whom Aulë put forward, and Alatar, whom Oromë sent. Olórin came forward only at Manwë's asking, and pleaded that he was too weak for such an errand and afraid of Sauron, which Manwë judged the more reason for him to go. Curumo was burdened with Aiwendil at Yavanna's entreaty and is said to have resented it afterwards; Alatar alone chose his own companion, taking Pallando with him out of friendship rather than at any Vala's bidding.

The crossing itself is placed by the chronicles at about the thousandth year of the Third Age, when Sauron had begun quietly to gather strength again and the Wise had not yet named the source of it. The Tale of Years marks the appearance of the Wizards in Middle-earth at that season, and the prefatory notice to it adds that they came out of the Far West by sea, and that they did not arrive all at once. Of those who came into the northern lands the chiefs were five: first the tall figure in white, whom nearly all the peoples afterwards reckoned the head of the order; then two robed in the blue of the sea; then one in earthen brown; and last of all the grey-haired one, less tall than the rest and leaning upon a staff. Nothing in that passage separates Alatar from his fellow, who enter the published record already as a pair and are given no further part in it. This remains the only point in the writings issued in Tolkien's lifetime at which he can be placed at all.

What followed is stated in a single stroke and never dated. The essay on the Wizards says that the two blue-clad emissaries passed away into the East and did not return, and it does not say in what year they departed, by what road they went, or how far their travels carried them. The lands in question lay beyond the reach of the chronicles kept in the West: beyond Rhûn and the countries of the Easterlings, and beyond the southern realms that had once known Númenórean settlement. A rough jotting preserved with the same papers goes one step further, setting Curumo's road eastward beside Alatar's and observing that Curumo came back while his companion remained. Since that note stands apart from the narrative and was never worked into it, it is best treated as an unfinished thought rather than as a settled account of the parting.

From that point the western annals are simply silent about them, and the silence is consistent across two thousand years. When the White Council was first assembled in the year 2463 of the Third Age, its members were the chief of the Eldar together with three of the order; the two who had gone east are neither present nor mentioned. They have no part in the long watch upon Dol Guldur, in Saruman's settling at Isengard in 2759, in the driving out of the Necromancer in 2941, or in the events of 3018 and 3019, when the last of the Wise still at work in the West brought the errand of the order to its end. No embassy from them is recorded, no message, and no report of their death. Whatever they did after their departure lay outside the reckoning of those who kept the histories, and their names do not recur in them.

The editorial account of the order is candid about this gap and does not attempt to close it. It states plainly that no tales came out of the East concerning the two, and that it is not known what became of them; three possibilities are set side by side without decision between them. They may have remained in the eastern lands and continued there the work for which they had been sent; they may have perished; or they may have been caught in the snares laid for them and ended as servants of the enemy they were sent to oppose. That last suggestion carries some weight because the order was known to be capable of failure, one of its members having fallen away in full view of the histories. Yet nothing in the surviving material decides Alatar's case, and the essay leaves the question standing.

Tolkien touched on the matter once at some length in his correspondence, in a letter of 1958 in which he ran through the members of the order for a reader. He allowed that he knew nothing clear about the two who went east, since they fell outside the history of the north-west with which he had been occupied, and offered only a supposition: that they had gone as emissaries into the distant East and South, into regions never reached by Númenórean influence, as missionaries into lands already held by the enemy. He feared that they had failed, as Saruman failed, though in ways of their own, and suspected that they had become the originators of secret cults and traditions of magic which persisted after Sauron's downfall. This is an author's conjecture about his own invention rather than a statement drawn from the annals, and it fixes no event and no date. It does, however, indicate the shape the eastern journey held in his mind when he last considered it.

What can be said of Alatar's function rests almost entirely on the terms given to the order as a whole, since no act of office is recorded of him. Both the essay edited in Unfinished Tales and the closing account of the Third Age in the Silmarillion describe the emissaries as sent to rouse the peoples of Middle-earth to resist Sauron and to draw together those with strength enough to oppose him, and both are explicit that this was to be done by counsel and encouragement rather than by force. The prohibition attached to the errand is stated twice over: they were not to meet Sauron's power with power of the same order, and they were not to master the wills of Elves or Men through fear or through open display of what they were. The concealed form in which they came, described elsewhere in this article, was the outward condition of that restriction. Alatar stood under these terms exactly as the members of the order whose work in the West is set down at length.

The only thing that distinguishes him individually within the order is the Vala who sent him. The essay ranges each emissary beside a power of the West with whom he had some affinity, and for Alatar that is Oromë, whose concern was the wild lands and the hunt and who of all the Valar had ridden most often east of the Sea. Tolkien nowhere explains what the pairing was meant to imply, so that any conclusion drawn from it about Alatar's particular knowledge or aptitude is inference and not report. Beyond it the record is bare: no craft, no lore, no working of any kind is credited to him, and no instrument or token is said to have been placed in his keeping, unlike the ring of fire that came to one of his fellows from the shipwright of the Grey Havens.

Tolkien restated the same limits in his correspondence, describing the members of the order as spirits of angelic kind clothed in flesh, whose task was to instruct, advise and stir up the hearts of others rather than to accomplish the work in their stead, and whose power was accordingly held in check. Read against the eastern errand, this makes the assignment a hard one: whatever the two blue-clad emissaries attempted among peoples long within the enemy's reach, they were barred from the two instruments that would have made it swift. Applied to Alatar, then, the evidence yields an office, a sender, a set of constraints, and nothing further. His powers are known only as those of his order, never once described in exercise, and the sober statement of them ends there.

Only one of Alatar's ties is presented as his own choosing, and it is the tie that has determined how he is remembered. Pallando enters the writings not on his own account but as the friend Alatar took with him, so that his place among the emissaries rests on an attachment between two Maiar rather than on the judgement of any of the Valar. The consequence falls on both alike: from the setting out the sources handle them as a single subject, granting them one colour, one direction and one silence, and never assigning a word or a deed to the one rather than the other. What may be the most personal thing preserved about Alatar — that he would not go unaccompanied — is also the reason that nothing individual survives of either of them.

The relation that runs upward from him is stated and left unexplained. Each of the emissaries is set beside a power of the West in the essay on the order, and where the other appointments are attended by friction in the telling — one of the Valar pressing an unwanted companion upon a colleague, another adjusting an order of precedence with a single word — the arrangement between Oromë and Alatar is made at once and disputed by no one. Oromë is elsewhere the Vala least withdrawn from the lands east of the Sea, hunting the creatures of the Enemy there through the long dark and finding the Elves at their waking; that one of his people should be despatched eastward is at least consistent with what is told of him, though no text draws the connection.

Downward, towards the peoples he was sent to help, there is nothing whatever. No king, captain, house or kindred of Middle-earth is recorded as having received him, taken his counsel or remembered his passing, and Sauron, the adversary the errand was framed against, is nowhere said to have met him or heard of him. Tolkien's later supposition in his letters, that the two who went east ended as the source of hidden cults and magical traditions that survived their enemy's fall, is the single hint that Alatar formed any bond at all in the lands he entered; it is an author's guess about his own creation, and it names no people and no follower. Set against the fellows he left behind, whose alliances and quarrels fill the western annals, he is the member of the order whose relations are exhausted by one sender and one friend.

The one body of draft material bearing directly on this member of the order belongs to the last years of Tolkien's work: a short note on the five emissaries printed among the late writings in The Peoples of Middle-earth. There the two who went east are handled quite differently from the essay edited in Unfinished Tales. They are given Quenya names used nowhere else, Morinehtar and Rómestámo, which the note glosses as darkness-slayer and east-helper, and neither Alatar nor Pallando is mentioned. Their coming is moved as well: rather than arriving with their fellows about the thousandth year of the Third Age, they are said to have been sent much earlier, in the Second Age, at roughly the season of Glorfindel's return and of Sauron's war upon Eregion. On that reckoning only three of the order came at the later date, and the two blue-clad emissaries had already laboured in the East for an age before the others set foot in Middle-earth.

The note also reverses the estimate of what the pair accomplished. Their errand is described as the hindering of Sauron in the eastern and southern lands — to search out what he kept hidden there, to stir revolt among the peoples he had bound to him, and to work against the gathering of his strength. Their labours are credited with weakening and dividing the forces of the East, without which the numbers ranged against the West in both the Second and the Third Age would have been overwhelming. Nothing in the passage suggests failure, capture or the founding of hidden cults. Because the piece stands alone, was never worked into the narrative and was never reconciled with the earlier essay, it remains undetermined whether Morinehtar and Rómestámo were meant for the same two spirits under other names, and if so which of them would answer to Alatar.