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And when the time came for the final battle with Sauron before the gates of Mordor, Aragorn and the other lords of the West named Gandalf their leader (a detail not carried over into the films). The fall of Denethor to despair left Gandalf to command the defenses of Minas Tirith. He freed King Théoden from evil influence, broke Saruman’s staff and expelled him from the White Council, and repelled the Ringwraiths with his unveiled power. When Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli mistake Gandalf for Saruman in The Two Towers, he tells them: “Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been.” While still tasked to advise and counsel rather than apply force, Gandalf as the White had more power to “reveal” his true strength. The films push the physical differences further by having the white wardrobe as pristine as the gray one was weathered and dirty, by giving Gandalf the White more managed hair, and by making him unable to handle his pipe weed after his return.īut it was more than a wardrobe and a smoke tolerance that changed. Thus reincarnated, Gandalf was delivered to Lothlórien, where he received his white robes. The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Tolkien’s private letters imply that this was an act of divine intervention - that the Valar would have been bound by the laws of space and time, but Eru Ilúvatar (God) personally intervened at that moment to change the fate of Middle-earth. Instead of returning to Valinor, the Undying Lands of the West, his spirit was taken “out of thought and time,” only to be reclothed in mortal form and sent back to see his task completed. Yet even by those standards, Gandalf’s fate was unusual.

All this holds true in Tolkien’s books and Jackson’s films, though the timeline and details differ markedly.īeing an incarnated spirit, “death” for Gandalf had a different meaning than if any of the hobbits or Men of the Fellowship had fallen. That quest was one he had helped to organize as a means to take Smaug away as a potential ally for Sauron. He could move the Council at need, as when they put forth their power to drive the Necromancer - Sauron in disguise - from the fortress of Dol Guldur in Mirkwood, a business which took him away from the dwarves’ quest in The Hobbit. But Gandalf refused the position in favor of independence.

If Lady Galadriel of Lorien had her way, Gandalf would have been the head of the White Council formed to unite the West against Sauron. He became a good friend to the Elves and to hobbits, while with Men he could be warm and irascible by turns. While Saruman the White settled in Orthanc, Radagast the Brown in Rhosgobel, and the two Blue Wizards journeyed beyond reach into the East, Gandalf the Grey (as the Men of Middle-earth named him) wandered throughout the West, where the Elves and the descendants of Númenor opposed to Sauron were strongest. But the ring, and the power he still possessed, were kept veiled in weathered gray robes. Yet Círdan the shipwright, who greeted Olórin upon his arrival, perceived him as the greatest of the Istari and gave him the Elven Ring of Fire to aid him in his labors. Thus ordered, he arrived at the shores of the Grey Havens as the third of the Istari (wizards) in the Third Age, appearing the smallest and most aged of them. But in Manwë’s eyes, that was all the more reason Olórin should go. He wasn’t up to the task, he insisted, and he feared Sauron. He was proposed for the task by Manwë, wisest of the Valar, though Olórin initially begged not to be sent.

In Unfinished Tales, a collection of essays and story fragments Tolkien left behind, it was the Maia Olórin who became incarnated as Gandalf.

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Possessed of free will, they could also be tempted away from their task. They would be subject to weariness, hunger, injury, and the risk of death. So embodied, they would lose a great deal of their spiritual power they were not meant to exercise force nor to coerce anyone to act. The emissaries would be Maia, clothed in the bodies of Men advanced in age but possessed of great physical and mental ability. It was the persistence of Sauron’s power into the Third Age that made the Valar, a higher order of spirits analogous to archangels, wish to send emissaries to aid and inspire the Free Peoples of Arda (Earth) who resisted evil. Gandalf, like all the five wizards of Middle-earth, was a Maia, an angelic spirit of the same order as Sauron.

Runtime 178 minutes Who Is Gandalf in 'The Lord of the Rings'?

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