. Alas, not me: Peregrine Took
Showing posts with label Peregrine Took. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peregrine Took. Show all posts

17 January 2016

Gandalf, Odin, and the Wolf's Belly (FR 2.iv.298)


At Ragnarök the monstrous wolf, Fenrir, will swallow Oðinn, some of whose attributes Tolkien drew on in envisioning Gandalf, whom he saw as an 'Odinic wanderer' (Letters, no. 107).1  Gandalf shows this in The Lord of the Rings, as Marjorie Burns points out, 

by wearing a broad-brimmed hat and carrying a walking staff, as the wandering Odin does, though Gandalf's association with eagles, his enmity with wolves, and his ownership of a nearly supernatural horse add to this as well.2

All of which leads me to think that Sam's remark when the Company is being menaced by wolves is a joke on Tolkien's part:

'My heart's right down in my toes, Mr. Pippin,' said Sam. 'But we aren't etten yet, and there are some stout folk here with us. Whatever may be in store for old Gandalf, I'll wager it isn't a wolf's belly.' 
(FR 2.iv.298)


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1 See John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, Oxford (2001) 111-14, 247-52, 254-58.

2 Marjorie Burns, Norse and Christian Gods: The Integrative Theology of J. R. R. Tolkien, in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance, The University of Kentucky Press (2004) 168; Marjorie Burns, Gandalf and Odin in Tolkien's Legendarium, edd. Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, Greenwood Press (2000) 219-31. Gandalf, however, would have balked at the claim that he owned Shadowfax, a horse that carried riders only by his own consent. In Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, University of Toronto Press (2005) Burns rightly notes that Odin's fate is hinted at in Sam's words, but overlooks their humor.

29 November 2015

The biter bit -- Gandalf and Sauron Share a Perspective

© Jeff Murray

As Merry tells his comrades of the storming of Isengard by the Ents, he doubts the accuracy of Saruman's previous repute, 'wonder[ing] if his fame was not all along mainly due to his cleverness in settling at Isengard.' 
'No,' said Aragorn. 'Once he was as great as his fame made him. His knowledge was deep, his thought was subtle, and his hands marvellously skilled; and he had a power over the minds of others. The wise he could persuade, and the smaller folk he could daunt. That power he certainly still keeps. There are not many in Middle-earth that I should say were safe, if they were left alone to talk with him, even now when he has suffered a defeat. Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel, perhaps, now that his wickedness has been laid bare, but very few others.' 
(TT 3.ix.567, emphasis mine)
Later, after Pippin has looked into that same palantír and encountered Sauron, Gandalf says: 
'Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle's foot, the spider in a steel web! How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction, and the Orthanc-stone so bent towards Barad-dur that, if any save a will of adamant now looks into it, it will bear his mind and sight swiftly thither.... 
'I wish I had known all this before,' said Pippin. 'I had no notion of what I was doing.'
'Oh yes, you had,' said Gandalf. 'You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen. 
(TT 3.xi.598, emphasis mine)
Pippin's experience with the palantír re-enacts for us, on a smaller scale, that of Saruman himself, who thus became the fool (TT 3.viii.583) that Gandalf often considered Pippin to be (FR 2.iii.272, iv.306-07, 313; TT 3.ix.570, xi.593-94, 598; RK 5.i.754). To Sauron he is now one of 'the smaller folk' whom he 'could daunt.'