The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is here, and it is good. There are still a lot of question marks hovering over the series, but at minimum, I enjoyed watching the first two episodes.
And the question marks can be fun. The Rings of Power is set thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings, during the Second Age of Middle-earth, so technically, we know what’s going to happen, at least in broad strokes; J.R.R. Tolkien set them out in The Silmarillion and in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. But the show introduces lots of characters who were never mentioned there, and none of them more mysterious than a guy we’re just going to call Meteor Man.
And we call him that because he literally crashed to Middle-earth inside a flaming meteor hurled out of the heavens. Who is he? What does he want? Does he know God? If so, what’s God like? Is he cool? At this point, we just don’t know.
He certainly doesn’t appear in any of Tolkien’s writing about the Second Age, that’s for sure. For that matter, neither do hobbits (or harfoots, as they’re known in The Rings of Power). So a story about a meteor man meeting up with a harfoot in the Second Age? Definitely a new one on me.
That means that Tolkien fans are as in the dark as everyone else when it comes to this guy’s identity. But we do have some guesses.
Is the meteor man Gandalf?
Meteor Man is an older guy with a big beard who seems to have magical powers. Does this remind you of anyone from The Lord of the Rings? The answer is yes and that anyone is Gandalf, literature’s most famous wizard.
In The Lord of the Rings, that’s all we really know about him. Obviously he’s a badass, but where did he come from? The Silmarillion provides the answer. Gandalf is a Maia, a kind of demigod who came into existence before the beginning of time. He and the rest of the Maiar live in Valinor, a continent on the other side of the ocean from Middle-earth (it’s where the elves go when they sail west). But he and the other wizards are sent to Middle-earth in its hour of need to help the free peoples of that land fight the evil of Sauron, who is himself an extremely powerful Maia who has gone bad. Perhaps Meteor Man, who seems scatter-brained and unable to communicate, is Gandalf fresh arrived in Middle-earth from Valinor, still dazed and confused from his trip?
Well, no, because Tolkien stipulates exactly how and when Gandalf arrives in Middle-early. To start, he gets there pretty deep into the Third Age, well over a thousand years after The Rings of Power takes place. Also, when he gets there, he encounters the elf Círdan, who gives him Narya, the Ring of Fire.
None of that happens to Meteor Man. Hell, Narya isn’t even forged yet; it’s one of the Rings of Power from the title. Unless Gandalf secretly arrived thousands of years before Tolkien said he did and looped back around later to pretend he arrived during the Third Age, Meteor Man is not Gandalf.
And if this guy does turn out to be Gandalf, The Rings of Power will have committed a pretty big canon violation. Release the fans.