Istari

The order was known among the Eldar as the Istari, a name rendered into the Common Speech as Wizards, and it was under this latter title that Men and Hobbits generally spoke of them, with little sense of what the word truly implied. The Tale of Years notes that they appeared in Middle-earth around the time the first shadow fell upon Greenwood the Great, already bearing the guise of aged men, a guise that altered only very slowly as the centuries passed. To most of the peoples they moved among, they were simply wandering men of unusual wisdom, and it was this surface impression, rather than any deeper account of their nature, that shaped how they were named and remembered in the West.

Elvish tradition kept a fuller memory of the name than common report allowed. In Sindarin the order was called by the singular Ithron and the plural Ithryn, and the two who journeyed into the East, beyond the later knowledge of the West, were remembered apart as the Ithryn Luin, the Blue Wizards. The Quenya word Istari itself carried the sense of those who know, and was rendered by some as the Wise Ones, a naming that pointed toward counsel, knowledge, and guidance rather than toward mastery or craft, and that reflected how the Eldar understood the order's purpose from the very choice of its name.

Behind these names lay an origin hidden from most of those the Istari walked among: they were not aged Men but spirits of the same kind that had labored in the shaping of the world from its beginning, sent out by the powers of Aman and given the bodily form of old men before their crossing of the Sea into Middle-earth. This deeper lineage was deliberately concealed, so that the name Istari, properly understood, pointed to a far older and stranger origin than the weathered travelers most people took them for.

Once ashore in the West, the five Istari did not travel or labor together as a single company. Each took up his own path among the peoples of Middle-earth, appearing under different names in different lands and following his own sense of how to counter the growing dark. Some kept close to the councils of the great, others withdrew toward remote peoples and wild places, and for long stretches of the Third Age their doings were known to one another only by report, if at all. This scattering meant that the order's shared purpose was pursued through separate, often uncoordinated efforts rather than through any common strategy.

Not until the middle of the Third Age did the order's most prominent members act in concert with the leaders of the Eldar and other lore-masters. In the year 2463 of the Third Age the White Council was formed to watch and resist the power that had reappeared at Dol Guldur in southern Greenwood, and Saruman, judged the foremost of the Istari, was set at its head, though Gandalf too sat among its members. It was Gandalf's suspicion that the stronghold's hidden master was Sauron himself that eventually drove the Council to act, and assaults on Dol Guldur followed in 2850 and again in 2941, the latter coinciding with the departure of Sauron to Mordor and his open assumption of that name.

Saruman's leadership of the Council did not preserve him from the very corruption the order had been sent to oppose. In the decades before the War of the Ring he turned his study toward the lore of the Rings of Power, fortified Orthanc and the vale of Isengard as a private stronghold, and bred a soldiery of Orcs and Men to serve his ambitions, ultimately seeking the One Ring for himself and entering into dealings with Mordor. His forces were broken by the Ents and the Rohirrim after his assault on Rohan, and Gandalf, now returned with greater authority, cast him out from the order and broke his staff before Orthanc's gate. Saruman's final years were spent as a petty tyrant in the Shire under the name Sharkey, where he was killed by his own servant Wormtongue during the Scouring that followed the war.

Gandalf, by contrast, remained a constant if wandering presence among Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Hobbits throughout the age, involving himself in matters both great and small, from the recovery of the Dwarf-kingdom under the Lonely Mountain to the quiet affairs of the Shire. His pursuit of the truth about the One Ring led him into the War of the Ring itself; he fell in combat with a Balrog in the mines of Moria and was sent back to Middle-earth with greater power as Gandalf the White, in which guise he helped lead the resistance to Sauron to its victory. With the war ended and Sauron overthrown, he departed over the Sea together with the Ring-bearers, bringing his long labor in Middle-earth to a close.

The remaining two members of the order followed still more obscure courses. Radagast, who settled at Rhosgobel near the edges of Greenwood, devoted himself chiefly to the creatures and growing things of Middle-earth and took little part in the political struggle against Sauron, though he rendered occasional aid to Gandalf when called upon. Alatar and Pallando, the two Blue Wizards, went into the eastern lands at the time of the order's arrival and passed wholly out of the knowledge of the West; no reliable account of their later deeds or ultimate fate survived among the loremasters who preserved the history of the Istari.

The order operated under strict limits set by the Valar at its sending: the Istari were forbidden to overawe Men and Elves through their own might, to compel obedience by force, or to answer Sauron's power with power of the same kind. Their charge was instead to kindle courage and hope in the hearts of the free peoples through counsel and persuasion, working by suggestion and encouragement rather than command. To hold them to this restraint, they were bound within bodies that shared the true frailty of the old men whose shape they wore: weariness could slow them, hunger and cold could trouble them, and even their considerable strength was checked by design rather than by any natural weakness of the flesh.

None but Radagast, who kept a dwelling at Rhosgobel, settled into a fixed household; the others lived largely as wanderers, moving from hall to hall and land to land and depending, like any traveller, on the welcome of those they visited. Each carried a staff, the visible token of his calling, through which such craft as he practised was worked — the kindling of fire, small feats of light and shadow, quiet promptings of will — for theirs was a craft of persuasion and subtle effect rather than of open spectacle. This wandering life brought them into closer daily contact with the tongues, customs, and small concerns of ordinary folk than their bearing as emissaries of the Valar might suggest, and each, by temperament, gravitated toward different company and different learning, from the courts of the great to the wild solitudes and the hearths of the untutored.

Because the Istari were spirits of the same order as the Powers that had shaped the world, clothed in bodies rather than born to them, their relation to death and time differed from that of the peoples they served. The guise of age they wore changed only very slowly across the centuries, so that they appeared to Men neither to grow visibly older nor, like the Elves, to remain wholly unaltered, but to occupy a middle course between the two. Their bodies of flesh could be worn down or destroyed as any body could, yet such destruction was not, for them, the ending it was for Men, since their spirits belonged to a life reaching beyond the circles of the world, and their fate thereafter rested with the Valar who had sent them rather than with the doom appointed to mortal kind.

Within the order, individual members were commonly distinguished from one another by colour, a mark tied to dress and standing rather than to any division of kindred or descent. Saruman was known as the White and, by Gandalf's own account before the Council of Elrond, held the foremost place among the order by virtue of that title. Gandalf himself went by the Grey, and Radagast, settled among the beasts and birds near Greenwood, was called the Brown; the three were spoken of together in the West as the White, the Grey, and the Brown, a set of names that marked rank and character among those who had direct dealings with them rather than any shared lineage.

The two who travelled into the East stood apart from this threefold Western grouping under a separate name. The Eldar remembered them by the Sindarin term Ithryn Luin, the Blue Wizards, a designation drawn from the blue-grey raiment they wore rather than from any rank distinct from Saruman's general precedence within the order as a whole. Unlike the White, the Grey, and the Brown, whose colour-names became familiar to Men and Elves through direct dealings in the West, Alatar and Pallando were remembered chiefly by this shared epithet, without individual colour-titles of their own, marking them as a paired branch of the order rather than as separately distinguished figures.

Within the narrative, the Istari function less as agents of power than as agents of persuasion, and this distinction is made a matter of plot rather than mere description. When Frodo, still ignorant of what he carries, offers Gandalf the Ring at Bag End, Gandalf's refusal is staged as a genuine crisis: he recoils physically from the offer and explains that his pity and desire to do good would, through the Ring, curdle into exactly the domineering power the order was forbidden to wield. The scene establishes early that wisdom in this story is defined by what a powerful character declines to do, and it sets the pattern by which the reader is meant to judge every subsequent test of will among the great.

Saruman's downfall gives that same test its negative proof. Because he and Gandalf are drawn from the same order and were sent on the same charge, Saruman's slide into a Sauron-in-miniature — hoarding lore, fortifying a stronghold, breeding soldiers, reaching for the Ring he could not master — reads within the story as a warning built into the very structure of the order: the Istari are shown to be as capable of the fall they were sent to prevent as anyone else, and their number supplies both the story's clearest example of resisted temptation and its clearest example of succumbed temptation, staged side by side for contrast.

This deliberate limiting of the Istari's power also shapes how the plot itself is allowed to resolve. Gandalf drives events, arrives at crises, and rallies the fearful, yet the story consistently withholds from him the capacity to simply overpower the enemy or carry the Ring himself to Mount Doom, so that the war's outcome is left to hinge on the endurance of Hobbits rather than on angelic intervention. Radagast's marginal role and the unrecorded fate of the two who went into the East reinforce the same narrative logic from its quieter edge: even members of a company sent with authority from the Valar can pass out of the tale unfinished, leaving the story's sense that no single order of the wise, however lofty its origin, holds the whole outcome in its hands.

Tolkien's latest writings on the order, preserved among the notes gathered as "Last Writings" and printed in The Peoples of Middle-earth, reconsidered the two Wizards who passed into the East. Where earlier material left them almost anonymous, known only by the shared Sindarin epithet Ithryn Luin, these late notes supply Quenya names for the pair, Morinehtar and Rómestámo, glossed as Darkness-slayer and East-helper. The same notes entertain the possibility that Alatar and Pallando did not arrive together with Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast around the year 1000 of the Third Age, but were sent out considerably earlier, in the Second Age, to work against the dominion Sauron had already begun to establish among the peoples of the East.

These late speculations leave the ultimate purpose and success of the two Wizards unresolved. Tolkien weighed whether Morinehtar and Rómestámo had stirred lasting resistance to Sauron among the Easterlings and Southrons, perhaps surviving as hidden cults or traditions of opposition long after Sauron's fall, against the darker possibility that they had themselves failed in their errand and become, wittingly or not, founders of the magical lore later associated with those same peoples' service to the Enemy. Christopher Tolkien notes that his father reached no settled conclusion between these readings, so that even in this last phase of writing the fate of the order's most distant members remained as open as it had been in the earliest published accounts.