Game of Thrones alum Ciarán Hinds will play another wizard in The Rings of Power season 2

Amazon is readying the second season of The Rings of Power, its spectacularly expensive Lord of the Rings prequel series set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Bilbo, Frodo, Aragorn or most of those guys were born. The first season got a lot of flack, and there are signs that people aren't super-jazzed about the new one, but we can all keep an open mind...right?

The acting talent, at least, is excellent. Games Radar reports that Ciarán Hinds, who Game of Thrones fans may remember as wildling leader Mance Rayder, will appear in the second season as a wizard. I have no doubt that Hinds will bring a lot of gravity and magnetism to the role, although as a hopeless Lord of the Rings dork, the idea of him playing a wizard does set off my "well, actually" canon violation alarm bell.

Then again, The Lord of the Rings creator J.R.R. Tolkien actually played pretty fast and loose when it came to the role of the wizards in Middle-earth. Let's take a closer look:

What wizard is Ciarán Hinds playing in The Rings of Power season 2?

So we've already met one wizard on the show: the man known only as the Stranger, played by Daniel Weyman. It's been heavily implied that he's actually Gandalf, the famous wizard we all know from the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this mythology, wizards are minor divine beings sent to Middle-earth the gods of this world, who dwell on a continent far beyond the western ocean called Valinor. You don't have to know any of that to enjoy The Lord of the Rings — Gandalf can just be a cool old guy with magical powers — but that's what's going on under the hood.

At the end of season 1, the Stranger set off into the east of Middle-earth with the harfoot Nori (Markella Kavenagh). They're heading to the land of Rhûn where they'll do what they can to stop the rise of Sauron (Charlie Vickers), who's currently at large. In Tolkien's writings, we hear of two wizards — Alatar and Pallando — who go into the east, although Tolkien barely writes anything about them and they don't come into any of his popular stories.

Thoughout his life, Tolkien changed his mind about when exactly the wizards showed up in Middle-earth. At one point, it looked like all five wizards (Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, Alatar and Pallando) all arrived in the Third Age, long after the events of The Rings of Power. Alatar and Pallando, the Blue Wizards, disappeared into the east and weren't heard from again, perhaps because they failed in their mission to stop Sauron's rise.

But later in his life, Tolkien rethought things and wrote about the Blue Wizards coming during the Second Age, theorizing that they were successful in undermining Sauron in the east, and that things would have gone a lot worse for our heroes had they not intervened.

Under this reading, perhaps the Blue Wizards came during the Second Age and the other three arrived during the Third. Or maybe they all came to Middle-earth during the Second Age; it's just not settled.

Into this ambiguity wades The Rings of Power. Maybe the Stranger, who has a bad case of TV-standard amnesia, really is Gandalf, and he'll grow into that role as the series goes on. Or maybe he's actually one of the Blue Wizards but doesn't know it yet, and Hinds will play the other.

I think that's the theory I'm gonna go with right now: these two wizards are Alatar and Pallando, and we're going to see them messing up Sauron's plans in the east. We'll see if I'm right when The Rings of Power season 2 premieres on Amazon Prime Video on August 29.

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