Rings of Powers white robed resident and her stranger connection explained

This summer, when the first glimpses of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power came to light, there was one character in particular that caught and held fans’ attention: a figure dressed in white with close-cropped hair and paper-white skin. In the absence of other clues, the creepy appearance and overtly menacing gaze led fans to a single guess: this was the show version of Sauron!

Well, with the fifth episode of The Rings of Power, that mysterious character in the white robe has finally emerged, leaving only more questions. Tolkien’s source material gives clues as to where the story might be going and how the characters relate to Sauron, The Stranger and the other mysteries of the series.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for episode 5 of The Rings of Power, “Partings.”]

What we know about the resident dressed in white

Image: Prime Video

Our mysterious Sauron potential debuts early in the episode as one of three characters who appear to be seeking the equally mysterious Meteor Man known as the Stranger. In the episode’s credits, she is referred to as “the resident” and is played by Bridie Sisson; with their companions, the Nomad (played by Edith Poor in helmet with flowing red hair) and the Ascetic (played by Kali Kopae, hooded and with a round… thing).

Pale in skin and robe, they wear an assortment of strange attire. The dweller wields an ornate staff, while the ascetic wields a metal disc or bowl decorated with circles and a crescent. The Nomad’s armor contains multiple motifs of eyes and circles – and fingers intertwined across the top of her helm.

We know other important details beyond what’s seen on screen in Episode 5: In an interview with Time magazine, rings of power Executive producer Lindsey Weber said these characters traveled here “from the Far East – from the lands of Rhûn”.

What is Rhun?

Picture: LOTR project

In a broad sense, Rhûn means everything east of the map in Lord of the Rings, all the land in that direction that played no part in the story Tolkien wanted to tell. And since it wasn’t important to the story he wanted to tell, it went largely unwritten.

Although the races of dwarves, humans, and elves originated somewhere in Rhûn and migrated west, it was so fantastically long ago – and the world has undergone several geographic upheavals since then – that we get no sense of their current state. It’s a blank canvas for rings of power to explore, perhaps even a chance to flesh out the generic term “Easterlings” that Tolkien’s modern elves, humans, and dwarves had to relate to people from the East.

So, where are these white-clad figures from? Literally “unknown parts”.

What does that mean for the stranger?

Rhûn has a pretty solid attribute that might come into play here: it’s also where the Blue Wizards are said to have blasted away. And “one of the blue wizards” is a not unlikely theory for the stranger’s true identity.

The duo of azure-clad fellow Gandalf and Saruman is one of the long list of concepts written by Tolkien Lord of the Rings with little elaboration, and then spent the rest of his days deciding whether to carry it out further The Silmarillion. Like Rhûn himself, the two went geographically outside the scope of Tolkien’s favorite stories, and thus out of the need to explore them.

He played with different names and different origins for them: maybe it was Alatar and Pallando, two wizards who eventually became real idlers and abandoned their mission to chill in Rhûn. Or perhaps it was Morinehtar and Rómestámo, two sorcerers long struggling to dilute Sauron’s hold in eastern Middle-earth as much as possible, without whose work the Dark Lord would surely have overrun Gondor and the rest of Eregion.

In the end we know very little about what Tolkien would have intended for the Blue Wizards once he had finished his opus, other than that they traveled much further east than the others and stayed there. It is possible that this connection to Rhûn will eventually become a connection to the Blue Wizards.

But wait, there’s one more thing.

it’s the moon

Photo: Jasper Jacobs via Getty Images

That Miscellaneous A potential clue to the Stranger in this episode is his celestial origin, his seeming focus on the stars, a telling shot of him gazing up at the moon, and the very lunar-like emblem on the ascetic’s disc.

The stranger could be the man in the moon.

This may sound like a joke, but in Tolkien’s Middle-earth the sun and moon had their own very specific origin story. You may have heard of how Galadriel’s war against Morgoth began when he destroyed some glowing trees. Well, back then, those trees (and the stars in the sky) were the only sources of natural light in the world. The sun and moon were created to replace them, luminous ships piloted through the heavens and under the earth by a pair of Maiar, beings of the same order as Sauron and Gandalf.

The ship of the moon was piloted by the Maiar Tilion, who was known for his unreliability – his unrequited crush on the Maiar, who pilots the sun, is why the moon often appears in the sky with the sun. And the legend of the man who rules the moon even reached “modern” hobbits, who have stories and songs (one of which is a parody of “Hey Diddle Diddle‘) about the stupid things that happened in Middle-earth during the visits of the clumsy man in the moon.

Metatextically, the moon of Middle-earth is a combination of Tolkien’s legend of the elves and the tales he told to entertain his children – just like Tom Bombadil and the hobbits themselves. The man in the moon appeared in both Roverandom, a story invented by the professor to comfort his son after he lost a favorite toy on the beach; and in the annual letters he wrote and illustrated for his children in Santa’s voice.

But whether the stranger is the man in the moon or a blue wizard, it seems these milky-white clad Rhûn strangers know something about him. We’ll have to wait and see when The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power decides to solve this particular mystery.