The Crowns of Seven Kings

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Mind you, Tolkien wrote 'five' at the time just because 'five wizards' sounded good. He didn't invent the Blue Wizards until years later.

Indeed, early in the writing of Book V, four years later, he thought the Witch-King might be a renegade wizard.

[Gordis]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Mind you, Tolkien wrote 'five' at the time just because 'five wizards' sounded good. He didn't invent the Blue Wizards until years later.

Indeed, early in the writing of Book V, four years later, he thought the Witch-King might be a renegade wizard.

That is correct. Almost the whole book had been written before Tolkien has changed his mind about the Wizard-King, "the mightiest of all the wizards of Men".
At the time all the wizards were Men, not Maiar.

I think the Wizard King's color was supposed to be Black as the following sentence likely used to refer to him:

"I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still.'- The White Rider, LOTR

[zxcvbn]

Originally Posted by Gordis

That is correct. Almost the whole book had been written before Tolkien has changed his mind about the Wizard-King, "the mightiest of all the wizards of Men".
At the time all the wizards were Men, not Maiar.

Aaah....interesting. If Tolkien had decided that Men could gain Wizard-like powers and be called Wizards, then my theory of there being more Wizards than the Five(the 'How Many Wizards?' thread) sounds a lot more plausible than before.

I also found it strange that Seven Kings(presumably of Men) were mentioned when so far we've only seen 3 kingdoms(Gondor, Rohan and Dale). Then I thought of the Haradrim and Easterlings. Tokien wrote somewhere that they were a diverse and divided people, ruled by various petty kings. The additional Crowns could be obtained from there.

[skip spence]

Don't see the point of speculating too much about 'the crowns of the seven kings'.

Apparently there are (or were) seven proper kingdoms according to Sauruman's knowledge. It is however unlikely that we readers are aware of all these kingdoms. In fact, it is probable that they didn't even exist as more than vague notions in Tolkiens head, and that seven is an arbitrary number.

You must also remember that Middle Earth is a big place and that the stories Tolkien wrote mainly concerns the north-western parts of it. In the east (where Sauruman travelled in the past) and in the south there would've been many lands inhabited by darkelves, men, dwarves and god known what else, even if there are no stories written about them.