That’s a good timeline, thanks for finding it.
It appears I was right about Galadriel “only” going as far as Eregion, assuming that person’s palantir isn’t on the blink.
Conceded - but if so, it’s still way too far for someone who’s dying of sepsis to travel on horseback - about 820 miles by his reckoning, which, if you’re riding 50 miles a day consistently, would take about 17 days, and they’ve got to cross a mountain range, ford the Anduin, and get over or around the Misty Mountains to get there. Tolkien would have milked a couple hundred pages out of a journey that long.
Oh, sure, agreed.
I’ve heard an amusing theory that it’s Theo who’s secretly Sauron? After all, he’s done a lot to help the orcs.
The most amusing theory I’ve heard so far is that Disa is Sauron, which implies that the Lord of the Rings himself, scourge of Mordor, master of the Uruks, the Enemy incarnate, decided to conceal himself by becoming a thicc homemaker and letting a ginger dwarf knock him up twice.
No one would see it coming. And children are often called “gifts.”
I don’t doubt these theories are out there but Sauron is working on a global scale trying to bring all of Middle Earth under his sway.
It seems unlikely he would be working on a local level (read rural…very rural).
He’s delegating like a good manager!
It was long enough for Papa Harfoot’s rather severe fracture to heal.
Jesus. So Sadoc just sent Gandalf pretty much back the way they traveled for the entire run of the show. Barefoot and in rags. With an apple.
Gandalf is in the show?
I thought he didn’t pop on the scene till the Third Age.
He is being insistent that the Stranger is Gandalf. It is a little odd or confusing.
So far we still don’t know who the Stranger is, though Gandalf or Radagast seem most likely.
At least Blue Wizards were suppose to be there this early.
I’m not insisting, I just find “The Stranger” unwieldy, so Gandalf is shorthand. And let’s face it, it’s very likely going to be Gandalf.
I disagree. The show runners have confirmed that they are not allowed to directly contradict anything in The Silmarillion or LOTR. Having the Stranger be Gandalf would be a direct contradiction. I do not think the books state how Sauron came back to Middle-Earth, so I think The Stranger is Sauron. The shock and confusion of being dead and returning has lead to this fugue state. If you note, his power brings cold and darkness, not warmth and light.
If that is the case, the pursuers may be the Blue Wizards.
I think the point is that, regardless of how long it takes to get from A to B, Rings of Power seems to have fallen into a similar pattern as later seasons of Game of Thrones where it mostly teleports from one action set piece to another. IMHO it makes the world feel smaller, less lived in, and less epic. It also leaves less room for character development. Like nothing changed in anyone’s relationships while being stuck on a boat for weeks or months sailing from Numenor up river to the Southlands?
I don’t believe the blue wizards would have set the harfoots’ settlement on fire just for funnsies.
I liked the scene label dissolving from Southlands to Mordor in ep. 7.
To be fair, we don’t know when he arrived. According to lore, the wizards first gathered together in Middle-earth around year 1000 of the Third Age (arriving by ship from the west), but that doesn’t mean they weren’t around at all earlier than that.
There was also discussion of Gandalf traveling to Middle-earth as early as the First Age in the essay Glorfindel in volume XII of The History of Middle-earth (called The Peoples of Middle-earth). You can point to that as evidence that Gandalf was indeed in Middle-earth prior to the Third Age. (Though it’s far from proof he was there in the Second Age.)
I actually don’t hate the idea that The Stranger is Gandalf. Or another emissary from the Valar. We know the wizards weren’t the first Maiar sent to Middle-earth. For example, there was Ossë who was a vassal of Ulmo sent to help the Lindar (the clan of elves who later became known as the Teleri). This was very early First Age, before humans were around.
And of course Melian, who was the mother of Luthien, was a Maia who dwelt in Middle-earth long before the Istari arrived.
I do suspect that The Stranger is Gandalf (or the person who will eventually have that moniker, his original name of course being Olórin)
So, any speculation as to what the three nasties are?
I’m hoping they’re blade runners. It would explain a lot.
No serious thought, other than agreeing that blue wizards wouldn’t run around setting people’s stuff on fire.