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.