Who is Chernomor in Pushkin's poem & why are there two of them?

There are several theories about the poet's inspiration for this character. An evil sorcerer with this name appears in Nikolai Karamzin's poem ‘Ilya Muromets’. According to the plot, the hero sees a tent in a meadow where a beautiful woman is sleeping and decides to wait for her to awaken. However, she doesn't wake up that day, nor the next. She only opens her eyes when the hero, wearing the good sorceress' ring, swipes a fly from her face. Thus, he breaks Chernomor's sleeping spell. In Pushkin's poem, an evil sorcerer puts Lyudmila to sleep – isn't that a coincidence?

According to one theory, romantic, but not entirely plausible, the poet portrayed Karamzin himself as the dwarf. Young Pushkin attempted to court the historian's wife, but their courtship failed. She told her husband everything and they shared a friendly laugh over the ardent lyceum graduate. Pushkin supposedly realized his mistake and made no further attempts. But, he supposedly "got his revenge" in his poem. Perhaps, for the 18-year-old poet, the union of a 50-year-old historian and a 36-year-old beauty truly did not seem particularly harmonious. Furthermore, Karamzin's family descends from the Tatar Kara Murza ("black lord"), which also hints at the name of the literary character.

A much more plausible theory is that the dwarf's image was inspired by Germanic-Scandinavian myths. Pushkin's imagination filled in the rest. Then the origin of the sorcerer's name is easily explained: Chernomor is a derivative of ‘cherny’ (‘black’) and ‘mor’, meaning ‘disease’.

Interestingly, Pushkin has two Chernomors. He first appears, still unnamed, in the prologue to ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’, written in 1828: "And 30 handsome knights emerge, one after another, from the clear waters and, with them, their sea-going companion." Four years later, in ‘The Tale of Tsar Saltan’, 33 bogatyrs appear on the shore ("all dashing handsome men, young giants") and "with them is Uncle Chernomor". He obviously got his name from the Black Sea. As for the sorcerer who kidnapped Lyudmila, he is only a namesake.