LOTR: How powerful was Gandalf...and why didn't he flex?

[Andy_L]

@BigT

Yes, and that’s exactly why I hate Tolkien’s definition. There are very few if any allegories that are that 1 to 1. You mention Animal Farm: most of the characters do not have a direct analog. Even Animal Farm has several characters who don’t have any direct analogues. They just collectively represent the people of Russia.

In an allegory, one character can represent a class of people. In Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, “Mr. Worldly Wiseman” doesn’t represent one particular person, but any person who is an obstacle to the Christian path.

@BigT

Lewis’s Narnia doesn’t have a 1:1 relation, but each story is far more directly part of the Christian journey or mythology than anything Tolkien wrote. I can map most of the books easily: can map most of Lewis’s books to a part of the Christian mythology or journey, e.g. Wardrobe: Jesus on the cross, and his resurrection and beating the Devil. Caspian: Christian salvation after Jesus has been gone a while. Dawn Treader has a journey from salvation (Eustace) to going to heaven (Reepicheep) by remaining faithful. Silver Chair is an illustration of having a calling, the characters losing their way and forgetting, like happens on the Christian journey, but with God still working it out. (It also tells how even skeptics can be good Christians.) And Magician’s Nephew and Last Battle are clearly the creation story and the Last Judgement. Only A Horse and His Boy is hard for me to place.

I think a story can be consistent with Christian beliefs (and even hit the reader over the head with its Christian ideas) without being an allegory. What person or type of person does Mr. Tumnus, or Mr. Beaver, or Dr. Kirke in LWW represent? No one - they are just characters in a story that Lewis created to make Christianity interesting to people who might be so overly familiar with it that they find it boring.

@BigT

Edmund is,BTW, an allegory for betrayal. He is also his own person, but he’s still someone being misled by the tempter who offers him a more likely seeming treasure. There’s even a direct use of gluttony with the Turkish Delight. Yes, he’s also his own character, but it would be a bad story if he weren’t. Allegory doesn’t require stilted storytelling, even if A Pilgrim’s Progress would lead you to think otherwise.

Nah, Edmund is just a jerk of an older brother who likes candy a bit too much, and doesn’t like having to admit that his little sister knew something he didn’t.

Compare with Snowball - it’s impossible to discuss the character without reference to Trotsky, but plenty of people can talk at length about Edmund’s various faults and virtues.

@BigT

Lewis’s Narnia is so much more allegorical than Tolkien, and their use of “true allegory” feels more like “no true Scotsman” to me than actually describing anything that actually exists.

I would say that Lewis’s story is much more overtly Christian than Middle Earth is - but being overtly Christian is not a factor in deciding whether a work is an allegory (that’s why I mentioned “Animal Farm” - to provide an example in which the allegory has nothing to do with religion).

There are plenty of true allegories - they’re out of style these days, but a look back at history finds “Leaf by Niggle,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Pilgrim’s Regress,” and “The Enchanted Duplicator” - and the differences between any of those and Narnia is much bigger than the difference between Narnia and Middle Earth.

[smiling_bandit]

Back to the issue of Gandalf. I think one problem here lies in the thread title and how people view the world. I suppose that in a case of bad fantasy novels, mediocre videogames, and Dungeons and Dragons, it seems natural to think of “power” as being an abstract but accurate measurement. This was emphatically not the case for Tolkein, or his writings.

Wolves were dangerous not because they were level 2 Beasts with the Fell Creature template which were a standard challenge for the level 3 party, but because they were rather nasty wolves driven the violence by the shadow of evil. If anything, the Balrog was more “powerful” in the immediate sense than Gandalf, but Gandalf knew how to fight that kind of being and swung a really nice sword, but it still took a multi-day running fight that ended in a desperation move and drained Gandalf to death.

Saruman might have had even more lore than Gandalf - he was already crafting his own magic ring, and was capable of swaying the will of people who specifically came to kick his rear to the curb. The Captain of the Ringwraiths could terrify an entire city into submission. Gandalf couldn’t do any of those things! And as per Tolkein’s letters, Sauron was so strong that even had he gone all-in, taken the One Ring, and thrown down it would still have been a desperate struggle for Gandalf. However, power wasn’t really the question. If LotR was about anything, it specifically wrote about the fallibility of power in the hands of evil. It looks incredibly dangerous, but it is also fleeting and destructive. In that sense, his works also form a warning about how to use power well, constructively, and safely, and with a view towards tomorrow.

Middle Earth is a world where the jerk who shouts Meteor Swarm is going to be the bad guy, precisely because he’s the one who is calling down a flaming storm of meteors to blast things. The heroes are trying to make do without smashing up everything in sight. The reason Tolkein has the Fellowship of the Ring and DnD has murderhobos (and most fantasy works aren’t much better) kinda comes down to that.

[Morgyn]

smiling bandit, I find myself agreeing with everything you say with one exception: that Gandalf could not do the things that Saruman and the Captain of the Ringwraiths did.

I think he could have if he had chosen to, but he chose not to. Instead, he used his power to bring out the best in the people he helped so that in the future they wouldn’t need him.

[Chronos]

And even if not Gandalf specifically, the Good Guys do use powers like fear. When Aragorn walked the Paths of the Dead to call in his marker (which he had the authority to do), he ended up with an undead army that basically single-handedly won an important battle. And even after that, nobody was sure if the weapons the Dead used would have inflicted actual wounds or not, because all of the enemy just panicked and ran.