Unfinished Tales - Part Four - II - The Istari
 

Readers who are interested in the wizards, especially those wishing to know more about Gandalf's history, find a goldmine in this chapter! On the one hand we receive lots of information, yet on the other there are many questions left unanswered.

Were there more Istari in the Order? The Five named are called chiefs, which implies that there were others, but Tolkien himself leaves that question open to speculation.

We read more about the Three Elven Rings and find out why Gandalf was given Narya. This chapter also includes some linguistic information on the names in general and of Gandalf specifically.

What do you find most interesting about this chapter? Are you interested in the etymology of names given here? What do you miss and wish Tolkien had written more about?

Tolkien actually wrote:

Of this Order the number is unknown; but of those that came to the North of Middle-earth, where there was most hope (because of the remnant of the Dúnedain and of the Eldar that abode there), the chiefs were five.

This seems to indicate many wizards sent to the south and east of Middle-earth, mostly outside the published maps of the Third Age, and to indicate that each of the five wizards who came to the North country originally had followers. These apparent followers are never explicitly mentioned again.

Tolkien here claims that the elf Círdan freely gave his ring Narya to the wizard later called Gandalf and Tolkien makes the same claim in The Return of the King, Appendix B, end of the introduction to The Third Age. But in The Fellowship of the Ring Tolkien makes Gandalf say:

A Ring of Power looks after itself, Frodo. It may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it. At most he plays with the idea of handing it on to some one else’s care—and that only at an early stage, when it first begins to grip. But as far as I know Bilbo alone in history has ever gone beyond playing, and really done it. He needed all my help, too.

That Gandalf does not recall that his own hidden Ring of Power was given to him freely is incredible. Presumably Gandalf is here not taking the three Elven-rings into consideration, the only three that were according to some traditional lore not at least partly made by Sauron. Gandalf ought to have begun by saying, “One of Sauron’s Rings of Power looks after itself, Frodo,” to indicate that Gandalf is not considering the Three.

Tolkien’s various versions of the history of the Istari indicate that Tolkien himself did not have a firm history of the wizards in his mind, complete in all the details. He did not even have a firm history of Gandalf in mind. Gandalf’s “southern” name Incánus is originally supposed to be a Quenya adaptation of a Haradrim word Inkā-nūs or Inkā-nūš meaning ‘North-spy’ but later is explained as from Quenya In(id)-kan- meaning ‘Mind-ruler’.

Is it to be taken that the second of these two explanations is now the correct explanation as representing Tolkien’s latest thinking, or is it a simple error on Tolkien’s part because he no longer had the earlier essay at hand to consult?

There is no correct answer to such a query.

The very last sentence in the main text before the notes in my first edition contains the form orpanc instead of the correct form orþanc. I take this as printer error missed by Christopher Tolkien rather than one of Christopher Tolkien’s errors as Christopher Tolkien knows Old English better than that. I do not know whether this is corrected in later editions.

In my opinion there were not more than five wizards in Middle-earth.


I think this text (quoted in part by jallanite) is superseded by later references, and that five wizards agrees best with what Tolkien himself published in The Lord of the Rings as well. I suppose it's possible that in every later mention Tolkien simply noted five for ease of reference, but on the other hand he may have forgotten what was said in the account in question here, or purposely went back to only five due to statements in The Lord of the Rings.

In any case, for myself so far I go with five wizards.

The only mention at all of the five wizards in The Lord of the Rings is when Saruman screams out:

Yes, when you also have the Keys of Barad-dûr itself, I suppose; and the crowns of the seven kings, and the rods of the Five Wizards, and have purchased yourself a pair of boots many times larger than those you wear now.

All material in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and other later books edited by Christopher Tolkien was not published by Tolkien in his life time.

Personally, I don’t believe any of it. It is all just a story. I was simply pointing out what Tolkien himself wrote in a proposed index to The Lord of the Rings written to be included in the third volume (then not yet published) “until it became clear that size and cost were ruinous.” I believe that Tolkien meant what he wrote when he wrote it. Nothing more.

But let everyone believe in this matter as they think best, or not.

There's another mention in the books published by JRRT; see Appendix B as well.

Or maybe Gandalf is speaking of the way a Ring of Power (any RoP, maybe even the Three?) affects mortals and isn't implying anything about elves like Círdan or Maiar like himself because it's beside the point. He's talking to a mortal (Frodo) about two other mortals (Bilbo and Gollum) and telling him what he needs to know in order to understand the situation he's in; a digression about exceptions to the rule would only muddle the picture, besides needlessly adding infodump to a chapter already fraught with it.

I have very little to say about this chapter: not because it doesn't interest me, but because I am not very interesting. The one thing I *do* have to say comes out of the footnotes: namely the fact that we get the story here of Queen Beruthiel. Tolkien's pursuit of small, lost nuggets of history behind names apparently extended not just to his professional philological studies, but also to his own world.

To me, what was most surprising was the bluntness with which Tolkien called Radagast a 'failure'. I had never thought of him before in those terms. But now given the context of a 'mission', of course that term is justified,

nevertheless even with other examples of fallibility, like Denethor II, Tolkien softened his judgment of them by a description of their challenging circumstances the presence of a Palantir, etc.]

On another side note, I would have liked to known more about Radagast's haunts. It mustn't extend far beyond Dol Gudur, if Treebeard is aware of Gandalf and Saruman yet not of Radagast, despite plants and animals being Radagast's special province