Gandalf And Bilbo

[Tuor of Gondolin]

To jump in with another quote from UT about selecting Bilbo:

'How would you select any one Hobbit for such a purpose?' said Gandalf. 'I had not time to sort them all out; but I knew the Shire very well by that time, although when I met Thorin I had been away for more than twenty years on less pleasant business. So naturally thinking about the Hobbits that I knew, i said to myself: "I want a dash of the Took" (but not too much, Master Peregrin) "and I want a good foundation of the stolider sort, a Baggins perhaps." That pointed at once to Bilbo. And I had known him once very well, almost up to his coming of age, better than he knew me. I liked him then. And now I found out that he was "unattached"- to jump on again, for of course I did not know all this until I went back to the Shire. I learned that he had never married. I thought that odd, though I guessed why it was; and the reason that I guessed was not the one that most of the Hobbits gave me; that he had early been left very well off and his own master. No, I guessed that he wanted to remain "unattached" foe some reason deep down which he did not understand himself- or would not acknowledge, for it alarmed him. He wanted, all the same, to be free to go when the chance came, or he had made up his courage. I remembered how he used to pester me with questions when he was a youngster about the Hobbits that had occasionally "gone off," as they said in the Shire. There were at least two of his uncles on the Took side that had done so."

[Child of the 7th Age]

I also happened to read a bizarre dialogue (ficticious I suspect) between Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky regards the first LOTR movie. Can anyone verify this was an attempt at humour. I find it hard to accept the thought that Gandalf himself killed the Dwarves in Moria, explaining why he didn't want the fellowship to go through the tunnels. That conjecture is just too absurd for me. Orc complicity is Occam's Razor here as far as I follow the gist of the story. Besides, the Orcs' are ugly and therefore evil, right.

Gloin,

I think the "bizarre dialogue" you are referring to is here: Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn in McSweeney's "Pink One is Now Dark Pink", Part I and Part II.

I had never seen these before so thanks for the reference. We are definitely talking parody here. When I started reading, I keeled over with laughter. Both Chomsky and Zinn are scholars with a definitely leftish (verging on radical) slant on politics and history. Hence you get the references to "pink" in the title. They are reading LotR with a socialist/Marxist slant, which of course is ridiculous. But for someone who's had to read a lot of Howard Zinn over the years vis-a-vis American history, this is really rather funny.

I don't know how you ran across these dialogues, but Messrs. Zinn and Chomsky would actually be quite sympathetic to your description of Gandalf as a "puppetmaster," a characterization with which I can not wholly agree...

Upon consideration, I'll easily replace "puppetmaster" from my characterization of Gandalf with "manipulator", seeing as he moved events but didn't control them. After all, the Wizards WERE sent to Middle Earth to perform a duty (some more successful than others). Peter Jackson's direction of or Ian McCellen's portrayal of Gandalf where he confronts Denethor illustates his ability/desire to command. Granted, I didn't get this feeling from the book(s), which I guess shows that my opinions are more influenced by the movie.

The Chomsky/Zinn dialogue I stumbled upon through the process of "Googling". I don't remember what I googled but I do recall my eyes snapping to attention when Chomsky's name showed up. I read this before I read the books believe it or not, so I had to mentally fight against the misinformation of the parody as the true story unravelled. (I'm ok now, I think)