Two Gandalfs

[littlemanpoet]

And I'm not speaking of his change from grey to white.

The Structure thread brought this to mind.

Sorry if this has already been discussed. I searched and did not find a similar thread.

The Gandalf in The Hobbit is different from the one in LotR, don't you think? I mean, the characterizations verge on being two different individuals! Especially at first.

Or am I mistaken? Is there a steady growth in Gandalf from the beginning of The Hobbit to its end, then LotR picking up where TH left off, with continued growth? I don't think so, but if you think so, please show me.

I see a much more Norse saga-influenced Gandalf in TH, complete with the trickery Gandalf uses to cajole Bilbo into the Dwarves' Quest for Erebor (with appropriate apologies and acknowledgements to Mithalwen). Then Gandalf uses the same trickery on Beorn! (Not to mention, the Elves in TH or more Norse than in LotR - or am I being unduly influenced by images from a very awful cartoon?)

Maybe in Tolkien's early drafts Gandalf started out in LotR as the same character as in TH, but once Tolkien realized he had a different kind of story on his hands, he knew he had to make the changes, and could not completely rewrite TH to achieve the consistency of his new vision? After all, it was published and extant for a good 20 years by then!

Suffice it to say that in TH the reader has no inkling of Gandalf as a Maia. He's a wizard straight out of the Norse sagas.

LMP

[ElanorGamgee]

Perhaps a lot of the differences between the Gandalf of The Hobbit and that of The Lord of the Rings can be attributed to writing style. The former is a children’s book; the latter is written for a mature audience. The early Gandalf will be shown in fewer dimensions and more simply for the sake of the audience. He is wise and knowledgeable, but mostly gruff, a father figure of sorts. This same gruffness comes through in The Lord of the Rings, especially in Gandalf’s interactions with Pippin, but is blended with a dozen other attributes that Tolkien has time to develop through the course of the (much longer) book. It is also worth noting that the Gandalf of The Hobbit is given less focus and time to develop; a great portion of the book is left for Bilbo’s growth. It is likely that Tolkien’s ideas about Gandalf changed to a degree by the time he finished The Lord of the Rings; the gap between the publishing dates of the two works gave him lots of time to “discover” his characters.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Imp -

You keep coming up with interesting questions! Here are my thoughts on the two Gandalfs... I am going to approach this a little differently since I actually think your question raises a much wider issue: what kind of a book The Hobbit is and how all the pieces of the Legendarium fit together.

I think the problem is that we approach The Hobbit backwards. We tend to focus on the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, and we read The Hobbit through the prism of those two works. When we do that, we inevitably find many inconsistencies. Our natural instinct is to ask why and to wish there were a way to reconcile or at least to explain the differences. That is true about the differences in Gandalf, and it is also true about other devices and themes in The Hobbit. These differences range from the childlike narrative voice used by Tolkien to the more serious problem such as explaining differences in Elven personality, how a common troll could have a talking purse, or why there were numerous Elven-rings scattered about when neither magic rings or talking objects were common in Middle-earth.

Even Tolkien was not immune from this desire to reconcile and explain: witness his numerous revisions of Riddles in the Dark.

The plain truth is we can't reconcile the differences between the two works, and I'm not even sure we should try. Feeling rather reckless tonight, I will go even further out on a limb ( ) and say that Tolkien took on an impossible task when he tried to rewrite the chapter about Gollum to bring the two books into agreement. In effect, he was trying to make The Hobbit fit into the legendarium as a whole. I think that's nearly impossible. He would have had to go back and create another Gandalf, get rid of extra rings and talking purses, and change considerable chunks of the sections with Elves to make the work agree substantially with LotR.

The Hobbit began as a bedtime story for his children. My guess is that some of it was communicated orally before it was actually written down. It was heavily influenced by at least one other bedtime story his children enjoyed: that of the snergs. I see little indication that Tolkien was trying to make it fit into his earlier writings: he was free to experiment in any way he pleased without paying attention to the structure of the existing Legendarium. To try to undo that all is simply not possible or desirable.

I'm willing to take your two examples of Gandalf and even add one more! Not only did LotR cause Tolkien to try and revise the Hobbit. It also had a profound influence on the Silm. I am no expert on the Silm. Someone in the Silm project could probably do a better job, but it is my understanding that references to the Istari (including Gandalf) were not inserted into the Silmarillion until 1950, about the same time when the author finally told his publisher this:

the Lord of the Rings, originally expected to be a sequel to The Hobbit [is rather a sequel] to the Silmarillion

It seems that Tolkien wanted to set Gandalf in the wider historical context of Middle-earth and he did this by revisions to Silm.

It's also my understanding that it was only with the appendices to LotR that we got a comprehensive historical structure of the Second and Third Age as it later appear in Silm. I believe that Akallabêth (the destruction of Numenor) was only written after the main body of LotR. His original plan had been to include much of the Numenor material in the Notion Club Papers, a work he deemed "serious", but which he quickly dropped. Much of this material was instead incorporated into Lotr and after that into Silm. Thus, Lord of the Rings threw a very long shadow and led to the revision of the legendarium as a whole, both The Hobbit and the Silmarillion .

It's almost as if, before LotR, Tolkien regarded his writings in two separate ways (not counting his academic work, of course, which can also be seen as a third category). First, there were those works he deemed light and humerous, often created for his own children....things like Hobbit, Farmer Giles, Father Christmas Letters, Roverandom, etc. Then there was the serious stuff of the legendarium. Only with the writing of LotR, and the use of Hobbits as a mediating voice, did he find a middle ground that enabled him to bridge the two.

That leaves us with two and even possibly three or four Gandalfs if you count the material on the Istari in Silm and the comments in Tolkien's letters about the underlying meaning of Gandalf's "death and resurrection". It's when you get to that point, where you see Gandalf coming into Eru's presence and being transformed, that we realize just how far we've come from the Norse fellow with the funny hat we first met in The Hobbit .

I personally like all four Gandalfs and don't feel the need to iron out any differences. I am comfortable with the revisions of the unpublished Silm, but in some ways I almost wished Tolkien had left Hobbit on its own, without trying patchwork fixes.

[HerenIstarion]

It may be explained (not explained away, mind you ) without leaving the plane of the story - Gandalf 1 (the Hobbit) is account of Gandalf as seen by Bilbo, who is light-hearted and 'childish' as compared to grave and serious Frodo, who's pen brought about account of Gandalf 2 (LoTR). Gandalf 3 (S77 ) is what some Númenorean and/or Elvish annalists thought of him. And so forth.

I wonder what Gandalf's Autobiography would have had to say...

[Lalwendë]

It may be explained (not explained away, mind you ) without leaving the plane of the story - Gandalf 1 (the Hobbit) is account of Gandalf as seen by Bilbo, who is light-hearted and 'childish' as compared to grave and serious Frodo, who's pen brought about account of Gandalf 2 (LoTR). Gandalf 3 (S77 ) is what some Númenorean and/or Elvish annalists thought of him. And so forth.

H-I has said exactly what I was going to say. But to add to this, it's interesting that LotR is supposed to be based upon The Red Book of Westmarch, which was itself begun by Bilbo. Perhaps we have here a character seen through two sets of eyes, and within the texts themselves, a demonstration of the differences in authorial 'voices'. And with Frodo, that authorial voice is one which has seen much that is truly serious and threatening. Bilbo's voice is almost the young Tolkien, while Frodo's is the older Tolkien.

If the Gandalf we see in The Hobbit is in some way more simple, more traditionl, then I would say that this is to be expected as it was written as a children's book, and characters do tend to be more clear cut in such works. However, I love the fact that there are all these different 'Gandalves' as it verifies his complexity as a character.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

There may be a definite difference in their presentation, but I very much see these two Gandalfs as being the same figure -- both in terms of characterisation and in their thematic importance.

In both LotR and TH, Gandalf is there for part of the journey and absent for others: absent for those moments in which the heroes much first start really thinking/operating choosing for themselves. In this way, he is a guide and mentor, but not someone who forces change or awakening.

But for me, the clincher of the 'same' Gandalf idea comes right at the very end of TH, when Gandalf says to Bilbo:

'Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!'

How many times in LotR do we see Gandalf expressing this same sentiment, albeit in a more grandiloquent style?