What Middle-earth’s Other Wizards Did During The Lord of the Rings

There are five Wizards in The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien’s capital-W Wizards are far more than ordinary sorcerers. They are angelic beings sent to Middle-earth in the bodies of old men, tasked with helping the Free Peoples resist the Dark Lord Sauron. So where are all five when the War of the Ring begins? Gandalf is unmistakably at the center of the action, while Saruman famously abandons his mission. The whereabouts and activities of the remaining three—Radagast the Brown and the two Blue Wizards—depend on which version of Tolkien’s writings you consult. The author left behind only scattered clues, and some of them contradict one another.

Radagast is present in Middle-earth and even makes a brief appearance in the books, although he contributes little to the main conflict and disappears when the war reaches its decisive stage. The two Blue Wizards, meanwhile, are known to be somewhere in the eastern regions of Middle-earth. Whether they are undermining Sauron or inadvertently advancing his cause is far less certain.

Gandalf, by comparison, devotes everything to completing his mission—even losing his body and returning in a new form. Saruman takes the opposite path, rejecting his purpose and aligning himself with Sauron before turning against the Dark Lord, a betrayal that ultimately brings him a fate worse than death. The stories of the other three Wizards are much less complete, but Tolkien’s surviving notes offer enough clues to examine what they may have been doing during the War of the Ring.

Radagast’s movements during The Lord of the Rings are both easy to trace and frustratingly vague. Peter Jackson’s film trilogy leaves him out entirely, but the books give readers a short appearance. Saruman sends Radagast to find Gandalf and ask him to come to Isengard, a mission that takes place just before Saruman captures the Grey Wizard.

That episode does not make Radagast evil. Gandalf explicitly says he does not suspect Radagast of treachery, believing instead that Saruman took advantage of the Wizard’s trusting nature. Yet Radagast does not go on to play a major role in supporting Gandalf or the Fellowship.

Before the Fellowship leaves Rivendell, Elrond sends scouts ahead to gather information. Their report notes that some of the scouts eventually reached Radagast’s former home at Rhosgobel, only to discover that “Radagast was not there.” The passage confirms little beyond the fact that Radagast is absent from the central events of the War of the Ring. Tolkien never clearly explains where he has gone.

In Unfinished Tales, Tolkien offers a particularly troubling assessment: “Indeed, of all the Istari, one [Gandalf] only remained faithful … for Radagast, the fourth, became enamoured of the many beasts and birds that dwelt in Middle-earth, and forsook Elves and Men, and spent his days among the wild creatures.” The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion characterizes this apparent failure as Radagast being “neglectful and easygoing.” He may have been protecting the animals he cherished, but that still placed him far below Gandalf in fulfilling the mission of the Istari. At worst, his withdrawal made him nearly as negligent in his duties as Saruman was openly treacherous. Either way, Radagast was not where he was most needed when the war began.

The remaining two Wizards are Tolkien’s famously mysterious Blue Wizards. They traveled into the eastern regions of Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, and the East remained their sphere of activity during the War of the Ring. Their location is relatively clear; their purpose there is not.

In his earlier ideas, Tolkien viewed the Blue Wizards as figures who had failed much like Saruman. Unfinished Tales suggests that they never returned from the East and may have become servants of Sauron. In a 1958 letter, Tolkien wrote, “What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and ‘magic’ traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron.” This concept appears to echo the storyline involving The Rings of Power’s Dark Wizard in the East.

Later, however, Tolkien reimagined the Blue Wizards in a far more favorable light. In The Peoples of Middle-earth, he wrote that they played a crucial role in resisting Sauron in the East. Their efforts supposedly weakened and divided the eastern forces, which otherwise would have greatly outnumbered the peoples of the West during both the Second and Third Ages. These two versions cannot easily be reconciled, and Tolkien never specifies exactly how the Wizards carried out their work. Still, the later account presents the more heroic possibility: while the main conflict unfolded in the West, the Blue Wizards may have been waging a crucial, unseen campaign against Sauron in the East.