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.
Is the meteor man Radagast?
As I alluded to above, Gandalf wasn’t the only wizard. We all remember Saruman, who went over to Sauron’s side during the War of the Ring. Then there’s a Radagast, a nature-loving wizard who featured fairly heavily in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies.
Meteor Man does at least one thing that reminded me of Radagast: at one point he talks to some fireflies to help him communicate with Nori, the harfoot who found him after he crashed. Radagast was known to talk to animals. Also, his general spaciness recalls Radagast; dude didn’t have his head screwed on completely striaght. Perhaps they’re one and the same?
Again, this is very unlikely, because all the wizards — Radagast included — are said to have arrived during the Third Age. The Rings of Power takes place in the Second, ergo, not Radagast.
And again, if Meteor Man does end up being Radagast anyway, The Rings of Power producers will have some ‘splaining to do.
Is the meteor man Sauron?
Yes, I know these choices are crazy. There aren’t many characters who could survive falling to Middle-earth in a meteor, so our picks are limited.
As already mentioned, Sauron is a Maia, one of the strongest in existence and certainly the strongest being on Middle-earth. He could survive a meteor crash…but what would he be doing up there in the first place?
As the show lays out for us, Sauron fought for his master Morgoth during the First Age of Middle-earth. After Morgoth’s defeat, Sauron disappeared; Galadriel has apparently been searching for him for centuries. We don’t where exactly he went or what exactly he was doing during this time; Tolkien never fills us in. Maybe he lived in a meteor for a while?
There is one troubling thing about Meteor Man worth noting: when he uses his powers, things around him die. We see this most clearly with the fireflies he uses to communicate with Nori. Those bugs are dead. That seems to be the kind of thing Sauron would do; whatever he was in the beginning, he has long since become a spirit of malevolence. Then again, it’s hard to know if Meteor Man killed the fireflies intentionally or if he was as surprised as the rest of us.
This doesn’t seem likely, but maybe there’s some big twist coming. And speaking of things that aren’t likely…
Is the meteor man Tom Bombadil?
Tom Bombadil is the weirdest thing in The Lord of the Rings books by a wide margin. A merry forest dweller, he first appeared in a poem by J.R.R. Tolkien published in 1934, a few years before The Hobbit. It never appeared like Tom was supposed to be a part of Tolkien’s wider Legendarium, and indeed, he doesn’t really fit into The Lord of the Rings. Frodo and company encounter Tom early in the story, he is apparently a being of limitless power, and he never shows up again, nor is it ever revealed how he fits into Tolkien’s wider cosmology. Honestly, it kind of just seemed as though Tolkien liked him and wanted to shove him in the book, and he’s been confusing readers ever since.
Tom claims to be one of the oldest creatures in Middle-earth. He could be the oldest. Hell, he could have existed before Middle-earth came into existence. When it comes to Tom Bombadil, we will ever have more questions than answers. The point is that he would have been around — somewhere — during the Second Age. Could he have also flown up in a meteor and crashed near some hobbits? Sure, why not?
All that said, this is our least likely candidate yet. Most adaptations of The Lord of the Rings exclude Tom on account of how confounding a character he is, and I don’t expect The Rings of Power to kick that hornet’s nest by exploring his backstory.
So who is the meteor man?
I don’t know. I don’t know. We’ll just have to watch and find out together, won’t we?
But if I had to guess, I’d say that Meteor Man is an unnamed Maia who has come to Middle-earth for some purpose. What purpose it is we know not, or not yet. Remember that the meteor came out of the west, so Meteor Man is probably from far Valinor. But was he sent by the Valar, the gods of that realm, to help the people of Middle-earth? Or is he a wicked Maia who is fleeing Valinor? No one but Jeff Bezos and friends know for sure, but I certainly want to find out.
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