The Blue Wizards: Alatar, Pallando and the Two Names Tolkien Gave Them

Quick Answer: The Blue Wizards are the two Istari who never appear in The Lord of the Rings. Unfinished Tales ("The Istari") names them Alatar and Pallando and says they went into the East and did not come back. Tolkien's later notes, published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, call them Morinehtar ("Darkness-slayer") and Rómestámo ("East-helper"). In Sindarin they are the Ithryn Luin, "blue wizards". Tolkien gave two contradictory answers about their fate. In Letter 211 he fears they failed and founded secret cults. In his later notes he suggests they helped to weaken Sauron in the East. He never chose between the two.

Five wizards crossed the Sea. Readers know three of them: Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast. The other two are one of the oldest open questions in Tolkien's world, because Tolkien himself kept changing his answers.

The result is a good case study in how to read Tolkien. There is a published essay, a letter, and a set of late notes, and they do not agree. Fan sites often blend them into one story. This guide keeps them apart. It tells you which source says what, what each name means in Elvish where that can be shown, and where Tolkien simply gives no answer.

For the order as a whole, start with our overview, The Wizards of Middle-earth: Who the Five Istari Really Were. This post goes deeper on the two it covers in a few paragraphs.

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The Blue Wizards at a Glance

Notice what the table cannot say. It cannot tell you which wizard carries which name in the later notes, because the secondary summaries do not agree and we will not guess. The honest reading is two pairs of names for two characters.

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Where the Blue Wizards Appear

In the story proper, almost nowhere. The Lord of the Rings names three wizards by role. Gandalf is the one the Fellowship follows, Saruman is the head of the order and the one who falls, and Radagast is mentioned as a friend of birds and beasts. The appendices say the Wizards came over the Sea around the year 1000 of the Third Age, and the text hints that there were more than three.

The fuller account comes after Tolkien's death. Unfinished Tales collects his notes in a chapter called "The Istari". It tells how the order came, what limits were placed on it, and what became of the others. Its entry on the Blue Wizards is short. They are named Alatar and Pallando, they went with Saruman into the East, and they are not heard of again by the western peoples.

That is nearly the whole published picture, and it is why people keep asking. A great deal of what circulates online about the Blue Wizards, including their powers, their journeys and their battles, is fan invention. None of it is in Tolkien.

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What the Istari Were

A short reminder, because the Blue Wizards only make sense inside the order. The Istari were Maiar, spirits of the same kind as Sauron and the Balrogs, sent by the Valar. They took the shape of old men. They were forbidden to rule the Free Peoples or to answer Sauron's power with power of their own. Their work was to teach, advise and rouse hearts.

Unfinished Tales gives each of the five a Quenya name and a Sindarin one. Only the first three appear in the main story.

For the grey one, see Gandalf's Elvish Name: Mithrandir. For the white one, see Saruman and the Language of Isengard.

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The Group Name: Ithryn Luin

The Blue Wizards are called the Ithryn Luin in Unfinished Tales. The phrase is Sindarin and has two parts.

Ithryn is the plural of ithron, "wizard", the Sindarin counterpart of the Quenya Istar. Both come from a root for knowing: Quenya ista- means "to know", so Istar is "one who knows" and Istari is the plural. Luin is the Sindarin word for "blue", the same word that sits inside Ered Luin, the Blue Mountains, where ered is "mountains".

Put together, Ithryn Luin means "the blue wizards". Sindarin usually puts the adjective after the noun, so the order is wizards blue, not blue wizards. It is the same pattern as Ered Luin.

Notice that the colour belongs to the group name. Saruman is named for white and Gandalf for grey in the Common Speech of the story. The Blue Wizards are defined by their colour more than any other of the five, because it is nearly all anyone can say about them.

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Alatar and Pallando: The First Names

Alatar and Pallando are the names in Unfinished Tales. They are Quenya in form. Tolkien gives no gloss for either name in the sources we can cite, so we do not offer one.

One resemblance is worth stating honestly. The Quenya adjective palan means "far, far and wide", and Pallando looks at first glance as if it belongs near it, as does palantír, "far-seer". That resemblance exists, but Tolkien does not say the name is built from that word. An etymology that looks neat and has no source is the kind of thing that spreads online as fact. We leave it as a resemblance.

What the first names do tell you is where they sit in Tolkien's own development. They are the names of the earlier layer. In that layer the Blue Wizards come in the Third Age, around the year 1000, with the rest of the order, and head East along with Saruman. They belong to the same arrival as Gandalf, even though they do not stay.

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Morinehtar and Rómestámo: The Later Names

In his last years Tolkien returned to the Istari, and some of those notes are published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, in a section called the Last Writings. There the Blue Wizards have different names, Morinehtar and Rómestámo, and Tolkien gives their meanings: "Darkness-slayer" and "East-helper".

This second layer also changes the timeline. In the later notes the Blue Wizards come much earlier, in the Second Age, not with the rest of the order in the Third. Tolkien was rethinking the whole history of the order here, so the early date is not a typo or a retelling. It is a revision.

The two names are made from Quenya parts that can be checked elsewhere.

A few notes on the table.

• Morinehtar matches its gloss cleanly. The second half, nehtar "slayer", is attested on its own. The first half belongs with the Quenya family of words for dark and black that gives morë and mornië. We do not break the first element down further than that.
• Rómestámo begins with Róme-, the form of Rómen "East" used in compounds. We take the second element, stámo, as the "helper" of Tolkien's gloss, and we do not analyse it separately because we cannot cite a standalone entry for it.
• East. Quenya Rómen and Sindarin Rhûn are the two Elvish words for the East. Rhûn is the name the western peoples use for the distant eastern lands beyond Mordor and the inland Sea of Rhûn. See Khamul the Easterling for a Ringwraith who comes from that same direction.

Pronunciation. Under the stress rule in The Lord of the Rings, Appendix E, a long word is stressed on its second-to-last syllable if that syllable is long, and otherwise on the one before it. That gives AL-a-tar, pal-LAN-do, mo-ri-NEH-tar and ro-mes-TA-mo. The rule is the one that Tolkien describes. We have applied it to these names ourselves, because he did not mark the stress in print.

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Why They Went East

The reason is a matter of the Istari's mission. They were sent to challenge Sauron without matching his power. Their method was persuasion, teaching and encouragement. That is why Gandalf spends the Third Age wandering among Elves, Men and Hobbits, and why the Blue Wizards were needed elsewhere.

Sauron's strength was not only in Mordor. His influence ran far into the East and South, among the peoples called Easterlings and Southrons, who were largely unreached by the Elves and the men of the West. Tolkien's notes, including Letter 211, describe the Blue Wizards as sent to those lands as something like missionaries, to people who were under his shadow.

The East is also where Saruman was said to have gone with them. That is part of the first, Unfinished Tales layer of the story, in which the three travelled together before the Blue Wizards went on alone.

Three consequences follow.

1. The West never saw their work. The people in the story, and so the readers of it, saw Gandalf's war in the West. The Blue Wizards were working in lands where the books never go.
2. Their fate is hard to know. If nobody from the West was there, nobody from the West could report on what happened. Tolkien leaves it that way on purpose, or by accident.
3. The mission still counts. Whatever happened to them, their orders were the same as Gandalf's: oppose Sauron, rule nobody.

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Two Accounts of Their Fate

This is the heart of the matter, and the reason the Blue Wizards are discussed so often. Tolkien wrote at least two different answers.

The pessimistic answer: Letter 211

In Letter 211, written in 1958, Tolkien says he knows very little with certainty about the two. He describes them as missionaries sent into enemy-held lands. He then says he suspects that they failed, as Saruman did, and that they became the founders or beginners of the secret cults and magic traditions that outlasted Sauron's fall.

On this reading, the Blue Wizards are the first of Tolkien's wizards to go wrong, and in a quieter way than Saruman. They do not take a tower and an army. They found traditions of hidden power, and those traditions survive Sauron's downfall.

The hopeful answer: the later notes

In the later notes, published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, Tolkien takes a very different line. There the two wizards work in the East against Sauron. Their task is to cause trouble and division among his servants, and to undermine his hold. Tolkien suggests that without them Sauron's power in the East would have been far greater, and that his eastern armies would have been much more dangerous when the West finally fought him.

On this reading, the Blue Wizards do much more than Gandalf's story shows. They are the reason Sauron's armies in the East were not even larger, and no one in the West ever knew.

Which answer is right?

Neither is final. The letter is the earlier text and the notes are later, which might suggest that Tolkien came to prefer the second. But a late note is a draft, and Tolkien never put the Blue Wizards into a finished narrative. The honest summary is the one in our overview post: both answers are Tolkien's, and neither is the last word.

Other notes by Tolkien weigh the question differently again, and some details vary between the published summaries. We have kept to the two accounts whose sources are clear.

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The Blue Wizards and the Word "Wizard"

It helps to remember how strange the word is in Tolkien. The Istari are not conjurers. In the Elvish name, they are "those who know". The Common Speech word wizard is, in Tolkien's account, just the plain English for it, used by Men who did not know what they were.

That is one reason the Blue Wizards are interesting beyond plot. They show how Tolkien builds a figure out of language first. Their group name is Sindarin and ordinary. Their personal names come in two layers. Their story exists only as notes. A reader who comes to them expecting a character in the usual sense will find instead a series of names, each one a small piece of etymology, and a gap where the story would be.

For the other languages around the Istari, see Quenya vs Sindarin and What Language Do the Elves Speak in Lord of the Rings? For the colour words involved, see Elvish Words for Colors.

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The Blue Wizards in The Rings of Power

The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, and the later Tolkien notes also place the Blue Wizards in the Second Age. That overlap is why viewers ask about them.

We have not attributed any claim about a Blue Wizard in the series to a named source, so we make none. Do not treat rumours as fact, and note that the show is its own adaptation of Tolkien's Appendices rather than of the notes discussed here. Our preview of the third season, which premieres on 11 November 2026, covers the Elvish heard in it: Rings of Power Season 3 Elvish Preview. For the earlier wizard-like figure in the show, see our overview post on the Istari.

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How to Read the Blue Wizards Well

A few habits help.

• Check which layer you are reading. Alatar and Pallando belong to Unfinished Tales. Morinehtar and Rómestámo belong to The Peoples of Middle-earth. The date of arrival changes with the layer.
• Keep the fates apart. The letter and the later notes disagree. A page that says "the Blue Wizards founded cults and also defeated Sauron's armies" has merged two answers that Tolkien did not merge.
• Treat the meanings with care. Morinehtar and Rómestámo have glosses from Tolkien. Alatar and Pallando do not, in the sources we can cite.
• Be wary of fan material. Names, powers and journeys attached to the Blue Wizards online are mostly invented.

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People Also Ask

Who are the Blue Wizards in Tolkien's work? The two Istari who never appear in The Lord of the Rings. Unfinished Tales names them Alatar and Pallando, and later notes call them Morinehtar and Rómestámo. In Sindarin they are the Ithryn Luin.

What are the Blue Wizards' names? Alatar and Pallando in Unfinished Tales; Morinehtar ("Darkness-slayer") and Rómestámo ("East-helper") in The Peoples of Middle-earth. Treat them as two layers of names for the same two characters.

What happened to the Blue Wizards? Tolkien gave two answers. In Letter 211 he suspects they failed and founded secret cults. In his later notes they work against Sauron's hold on the East. He did not choose between them.

Why did the Blue Wizards go East? They were sent to the lands of the Easterlings and Southrons, where Sauron's influence was strong and the western peoples did not go. Their orders were the same as Gandalf's: oppose Sauron without ruling anyone.

Is there a Blue Wizard in The Rings of Power? We cannot give a sourced answer, so we make no claim. See the section above and our Season 3 preview for what is known about the languages in the show.

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Learn the Language Behind the Names

The Blue Wizards are a good reason to learn a few Elvish words that Tolkien did write: istar, luin, ered, rómen. For the first sounds, see our pronunciation guide, and for more attested words, the Elvish vocabulary guide. To see how a name looks in Tengwar, try our Tengwar name tool. To check a word against attested Quenya and Sindarin, use the Elvish translator. The free lessons start at Learn Elvish.

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Related Reading

• The Wizards of Middle-earth: Who the Five Istari Really Were
• Gandalf's Elvish Name: Mithrandir
• Saruman and the Language of Isengard
• Khamul the Easterling Explained
• Elvish Words for Colors
• Quenya vs Sindarin
• Rings of Power Season 3 Elvish Preview
• The Rings of Power Explained: Elven, Dwarven and the Nine