[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.