The Rings of Power opens up the mythos of J.R.R Tolkien for the screen, as it transports us back to a peaceful era of Middle-earth well before the events of the Lord of the Rings.
But that calm is just before a storm. Amazon’s epic production intends to cover the significant events of the Second Age of Middle Earth leading up to the epic war vividly captured in the opening scenes of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring.
Tolkien meticulously developed the long history of Middle-earth. However, many of us are most familiar with the books and adaptations that cover the end of that story. When the threat of the dark lord Sauron ended, the Age of Man began. But thousands of years before Frodo completed his task to destroy the One Ring and earned a place in the Undying Lands, an unprecedented union of peoples and creatures fought Sauron.
Middle Earth and the master of Mordor had history, and there’s plenty of material to be mined by resetting the narrative to the Second Age. One challenge is that Amazon’s television rights only cover Tolkien’s most famous and adapted works, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and not his wider myth-making tomes like The Silmarillion. Those looking for direct lifts from the expanded mythology may be disappointed. Still, their anchor in the extensive appendices of The Lord of the Rings should ensure The Rings of Power focus bridges the Second Age to stories of the Third Age and what we’ve already seen on screen.
Fortunately, as fans of Tolkien’s most famous work will know, Middle-earth is populated with many long-lived species. While even the men of the Dúnedain, the most famous of whom is Aragorn, don’t have the longevity to appear in the Second and Third Ages, others do. The Elves enjoy natural immortality, and familiar faces take a major role in The Rings of Power. Then there are the mystical wizards of Middle-Earth, most famously Gandalf. The wizened mage may look like a man, but Gandalf is a member of an entirely different and rarer species, tasked with a particular role on Middle-Earth.
Who are the Maiar?
Gandalf may be the most famous Maia, and we met two versions of him during the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings — the familiar avuncular Grey and the more powerful White. Those colors provide a clue to the order of these mystical beings.
The Maiar are spirits created by the mythology’s divine being, Eru. They were paired with the Valar, and these first beings in creation were collectively known as the Ainur. Their job of shaping the world was explored in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.
Although they were changeable and numerous in the First Age, the five dispatched from the Undying Lands during the Third Age are the most famous. Shapeshifters by nature, these Maiar manifested as older men in the spirit of their mission to help the free people of Middle-earth repel the evil of Sauron. They were more usually referred to as wizards or Istari.
In some senses, the Maiar are immortal — their spirits can survive the death of their physical forms, although it’s not guaranteed.
That was most famously seen when Gandalf the Grey died fighting the demonic Balrog during The Fellowship of the Ring. Divine intervention facilitated the wizard’s return following his worthy sacrifice. He could return in the more potent form as Gandalf the White, thanks to a vacancy at the top of his order. Corruption and distortion are a constant threat in the Middle-earth mythos. Gandalf could match the massive and powerful Balrog because the fiery demons were corrupted former Maiar. He could elevate to being a white wizard as a Maia closer to home had recently fallen.
Saruman the White is probably the second most famous of the Maiar, thanks to his fall into darkness before the War of the Ring during the Third Age. He was the most powerful of his kind on Middle-Earth and, as Gandalf said, “Great among the wise.” But his pride was his downfall. When he died in Return of the King, there was no resurrection following his betrayal of the order. His spirit is left to wander Middle-Earth, powerless and alone. The third most familiar wizard is Radagast the Brown, mentioned in Tolkien’s Hobbit and expanded by Peter Jackson on screen. He’s a powerful wizard, but not on the level of Gandalf or Saruman. The five was completed by the Blue wizards Alatar and Pallando, who Tolkien records ventured to the East and never returned.
So, that must mean Saruman is the most powerful of the magical Maiar? Not entirely — there’s a complication in Middle-Earth’s long history, and a hint lies in Saruman’s fall.
The most powerful Maiar
The five wizards that arrived on Middle-earth during the Second Age Earth weren’t the first, as the presence of Balrogs suggests. Just as the elves were corrupted to orcs, Maiar proved susceptible to evil despite their power.
Sauron was originally a Maia, too, arriving on Middle-Earth during the First Age, bringing his great power and obsession with order. As he increasingly allied with undesirables to achieve that order, he was corrupted to become the most significant threat Middle-Earth had ever faced. Enticed by the powers of the first Dark Lord, Melkor, Sauron was an archetypal fallen figure in the mythology and a key reason for the arrival of more Maiar centuries later.
Just as Gandalf was resurrected as his spirit was reborn in a physical form, Sauron’s spectacular death at the end of the Second Age left his corrupted Maiar spirit disembodied. Possessing darker and greater power than Saruman, he escaped to the depths of Mordor, licked his wounds, and arguably became more potent than ever over the years that followed.
Manifesting as a giant flaming eye above his dark stronghold of Barad-dûr, he wasn’t just intimidating — he could control vast armies and influence and corrupt the inhabitants of Middle-earth from afar, as he sought his most powerful weapon, the One Ring. In terms of eyesight alone, Sauron, despite his corruption, was the greatest of the Maiar on Middle-earth.
Our power ranking of the Maiar of Middle-earth looks like this:
6. Alatar and Pallando the Blue — also known as Morinehtar and Rómestámo
5. Radagast the Brown — also known as Aiwendil
4. Gandalf the Grey — also known as Olórin
3. Saruman the White — also known as Curumo
2. Gandalf the White — also known as Olórin
1. Sauron — also known as Mairon