[note to readers: This was written, carelessly, quite a few years ago. I realize now that my interpretation then of the events before LOTR recounted in other works is questionable, and in some cases incorrect. However, I believe that my overall interpretation of the motivation of Gods such as Gandalf is still worth considering, so I reprint it here.]
Here, supposedly, we send the Three Hunters off in a different direction: to shore up Rohan –thus making it very clear that Book III is indeed about Rohan, and nowhere else. And, not least important, we meet Shadowfax, horse of horses, North Wind made visible. However, I want to spend all my time on one small part of this Chapter: “Long I wandered, out of space and time, in places I will not tell. Naked, I was sent back.” And that’s pretty much all Tolkien has to say about the biggest deus ex machina in the whole of LOTR. It’s authorial magic, to make it all come out right! You knew Tolkien wasn’t going to kill off good old Gandalf, didn’t you? But having him around would have made Frodo’s job too easy …
Well, there may be that element of it too. But those few sentences probably conceal an enormous amount of Tolkien’s “world-building”. So let me explain, based on a wide range of Tolkien’s unpublished work (published by his son Christopher after his death), what I believe is probably going on. Fair warning: summarized as ruthlessly as possible, this will still take a while.
Gandalf is not dead or destroyed. He is “out of space and time.” Where?
Here’s the way, to me, the Silmarillion tells it. Originally, there is Eru and his children – all “spirit”, no body, somewhere surrounded by the timeless, spaceless Void. Eru teaches his children. Only Eru has the “imperishable fire” with which to create new life.
At one point, Eru tells his children a story in music that also displays to them like a movie, a story of an unfolding world. An egotistic child named Morgoth thinks he has a better story, and interrupts with his own music, creating cacophony. Again, Eru starts the story, with stronger music, and again Morgoth and some other confused children following Morgoth’s lead interrupt and mess up the music. A final time, Eru starts, and this time Eru’s music uses Morgoth’s very cacophony to make profounder sense. Then Eru creates a real world out of the music just played, with time and space, and some of the children decide to enter into that world and participate in it – including Morgoth and his buddies/servants, such as one Sauron. That world is Middle Earth.
So Gandalf is not dead or destroyed; he is in the Void, or with Eru. Gandalf is a spirit; he is one of Eru’s children.
Well, then, how do you kill or destroy a spirit? Won’t Gandalf, and Morgoth, and all the other children who enter Middle Earth keep coming back just as good as new, and far more powerful than anyone else?
Actually, no. It’s how Morgoth gets defeated in the first place, and how Sauron can be defeated. If you want your own way, as both do, the quickest and easiest way is to put a bit of your “spirit” in every living thing that you want to control. In fact, in one of his writings, Tolkien says that there is a piece of Morgoth in just about every living thing on Middle Earth, that seeks to manipulate them for Morgoth’s purposes. But when you do that, you diminish your own power. Taken to an extreme, your spirit becomes so diffuse that you no longer are able to exert central control and even think or hold your spirit together. When Sauron put his strength into the Master Ring, he became vulnerable to a destruction that would dissipate this part of his spirit across the air, and wipe out enough of the spirit to make him powerless forever.
OK, that’s how to destroy evil. What about good? Well, as we see with Saruman– oh, yes, he’s a spirit too – he can turn to evil, put his spirit into his Orcs and such, and dissipate his spirit that way. No, good spirits can’t be destroyed that way (at least as far as I can see); but they can be turned. And the usual way when Gods are involved is to point out how all this life is hindering your job of doing good, and how much better the good spirit could do the job if the good spirit could just whip the Men and Elves and Dwarves and Ents etc. into shape.
So what are the limits on the good spirits? In face-to-face battle, won’t the good spirits win, and then just keep the bad ones away from now on?
There are several answers to that. First, at least at first, the bad spirits are pretty much every bit as powerful as the good ones. So if you want to destroy them, you have to wait until their urge to control takes their power down enough – as, essentially, the good spirits known as Valar did to eventually pretty much finally defeat Morgoth (he’s wandering around now in the Void, much less powerful, still hoping to get back into Middle Earth, and will make one last try to re-enter The World at the end).
Second, spirits have unequal powers. If you meet up with a bad spirit with powers equal to or greater than yours (as Gandalf did with the Balrog, aka Valaraukar or bad Valar), that bad spirit can defeat you and maybe your body in this world. Gandalf dissipates the Balrog’s spirit and hence seems to destroy it; but Gandalf is kicked out into the Void (my interpretation of the meaning of “beyond space and time”; he could also be with Eru).
Third, and most important, the battleground of good and bad spirits is the life of Middle Earth. The good spirits want to live out Eru’s story, and have it show to them Eru’s lesson. Well, it can’t do that if it’s destroyed or turned to Morgoth’s evil song. And if they try to control that life to keep it from turning to Morgoth, then they are turning to evil and dissipating themselves. In fact, one part of the lesson of Eru is that direct Valar action has worse consequences than indirect encouragement of life to make the right decisions and choose the good path on their own.
OK, so Gandalf can be and is kicked out of the story, into the Void. We may suspect that it’s because he might be so tempted by the Ring that he eventually gives in, before it can be cast into the fire; remember, Tolkien says through Gandalf that even spirits can be so converted to evil – and thus, Sauron is destroyed but another Sauron arises.
But why is he sent back, and who sent him?
It could be Eru. But consider the possibility that it’s the Valar. We know from the Silmarillion that at least one of the Valar consults with Eru from time to time, and, in fact, at one point Eru intervenes to make the Undying Lands inaccessible from the rest of Middle Earth. There’s no reason the Valar can’t reach out to the Void and have Gandalf come back into “the circles of this world”, in the Undying Lands, and from there be “sent back naked” to Middle Earth. And, as we find out in the Silmarillion, Gandalf had already accepted a charge of acting on behalf of the Valar within Middle Earth as a lesser spirit – that is what the wizards are. Acting indirectly; acting as a counselor; not saying “I’m a Valar, do as I say.” So, assuming this is what happened, why did the Valar send him back to consult with Galadriel and go to Rohan?
The cheap and easy answer is that the Valar have learned that direct action doesn’t work, and they want to ensure that Gandalf acts only as a counselor, as much as possible. Again referring to the Silmarillion, a possible lesson the Valar learned in the First Age (the first musical theme) was that keeping people like the Elves away from the influence of evil just made things worse; it made them more vulnerable once Morgoth got near them again. A possible lesson the Valar learned in the Second Age was that giving rewards and power to the ones who were good in the First Age made things worse when many of them turned to evil themselves – the Man heroes of the first Age leading to the fall of Numenor. Now the Valar are assimilating the lessons of the first two themes in the third musical theme: just making it clear to Men (and, to a lesser extent, Elves and Dwarves) that the task for you is to take the evil within you and handle it so as to achieve a noble result. Give them the right notes and enough will play them that the result will be overall a more profound, ultimately good music.
But here’s the key, and here’s why this is not really a cheap and easy deus ex machina: at every level, good is plagued by uncertainty as to the outcome. Even at the level of the Valar, you don’t really know whether the outcome of your very indirect efforts will be good or bad. You have to have “intelligent faith.” Even the Valar don’t know if Sauron will be defeated. They have faith that Eru will make it come out all right, overall; but they didn’t actually see the end of the story, so that “overall” may mean that the Undying Lands are fine and everywhere else suffers under Sauron, until a grand Apocalypse that rights everything. That’s not what they want; but they can’t be sure it won’t happen. And, clearly, learning a lesson involves doing something: they can’t sit idly by. They just have to try and figure out what works best, by doing.
I believe that Gandalf in all his counsel is doing the same thing for Men, hobbits, Dwarves, and Elves (not to mention Ents). He doesn’t merely say, trust me, it will all work out. Rather, he counsels in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes: when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true. In this case, it’s: when you focus on maximizing the probability that good will win, permanently, as far as possible, and then take the rest on faith, that’s the best you can hope for – and, as it turns out, it works. So you give the Ring to Frodo as the most resistant of the resistant hobbits, knowing that he will fail but realizing that he has the best chance to get as close as possible to Mount Doom before failing – and then, because you can’t do anything else, trust that the unlikely will happen and some accident or miscalculation of evil will destroy the Ring at that point. You place the rest of your strategy around this unlikely but likeliest of chances. You have planned intelligently; now you watch and wait and suffer uncertainty and have faith that the workings of chance/the music or intervention from Eru will make it happen. Knowing that maybe not.
And so, try reading from now on as if the return of Gandalf has affected the ultimate outcome very little – although that very little may just turn out to matter a lot. You’re still facing an unlikely chance of success. You’re still dealing with a necessary sideshow in Rohan, that takes attention off Frodo and Sam as they creep, quietly, deeper into the fringes of Mordor. It’s just nice to have good old Gandalf at your side as you follow Tolkien to the Halls of the Rohirrim.
X X X
When I first wrote this section, several years ago, I thought I had completed my thoughts about Gandalf’s return. But now I wonder if there isn’t more to it. And so I’d like to raise another possibility that I think we ought to consider.
Let me put it this way: what if the reason for sending Gandalf to Rohan after his return was not only to keep him away from Frodo, but also to keep him away from Gollum?
We know, in the end, that Gollum is necessary to the success of the Quest; that both he and Frodo/Sam must be alive at the Cracks of Doom and he be still bent on possession of the Ring. We also know that, through pity, Gandalf perceives that he is still capable of being turned to good and cured of his addiction. So if Gandalf accompanies Frodo/Sam deeper into the Quest, Gandalf is bound to try to cure him yet again, and there is a very small chance that Gandalf will succeed. And what then?
Why, if I were Gandalf, I would take him away from the Ring, and to a place of rehabilitation and healing, as much as Gollum can manage. Away from people, in the wilds, until he will not reflexively bristle at the goodness of the Elves. And so, he would never do what he must do for the sake of the rest of the world.
But isn’t the rest of the theme of this Quest of all Quests that if you aim at doing good even in the dangerous situation of allowing Gollum to live, things will come out better in the end? That if you run back to Frodo instead of taking the Ring for yourself as Sam did at the high pass into Mordor, as illogical as it may be, it’s the good thing to do and the right thing to do for the success of the Quest? Wouldn’t having Gandalf be there for part of the time, at least until they are near Mordor, and trying to heal Gollum, be an example of that?
Until we arrive at the Cracks of Doom, I’ll leave it at that. But let me just say this, in advance: I think there’s a possibility that the tragedy of Gollum is more profound than we think.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It:
- The First of a Series of Ramblings About JRR Tolkien
- Part II. Pre-Psychology Writing, Poetry, and a New Hero
- Part III. Torture, Enlightenment
- Part IV. Weather, Mushrooms, Leaders
- Part V. In the Moment, Sam the Obscure
- Part VI. Folk Songs, Master, First, Fair
- Part VII. Hiking, Curses, Noble Language
- Part VIII. The Hiker’s Extrasensory Writing
- Part IX. Torture, Elves, Endings
- Part X. Your Highness
- Part XI. Business Meetings, Dwarves
- Part XII. Horns of Wild Memory
- Part XIII. Ecstasies of the Dwarves
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