Unfinished Tales - Part Four - II - The Istari

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by jallanite

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.

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.

[Formendacil]

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.

[sbw]

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