The Lord of the Rings: The White Rider [Part Three]

Gandalf looks up and says soon they must go. Aragorn asks if they are going to find Merry and Pippin and see this Treebeard. But Gandalf says their road lies elsewhere. He has spoken of hope, but war is still upon them all, and they have another mission to follow, which may yet fail. ‘I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still.’ He is glad the Ring is far beyond their reach, because with the mounting danger the temptation to use it will grow ever greater still.

But Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas have promised to go to Edoras and seek out Theoden in his hall. There is war in Rohan, in which Aragorn’s sword Anduril must join. Theoden himself is suffering a worse evil. Will they go with Gandalf?

Aragorn says without horses the battle might well be over before they get there. But he looks at Gandalf with a keen eye, then says he thinks Gandalf could get there before him, if he wished. ‘And this also I say: you are our captain and our banner. The Dark Lord has Nine: But we have One, mightier than they: the White Rider. He has passed through fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads.’

But Legolas wants to know first how Gandalf came out alive, and Gimli agrees, asking what happened with the Balrog. ‘Name him not!’ Gandalf looks in pain and as old as death for a moment, then slowly begins recounting the tale, as if looking back with difficulty.

He and the Balrog fell together for a long time. The Balrog’s fire burned him. But they landed at last into deep cold water at the bottom of the abyss. The Balrog’s flame was quenched, but it became a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake. They fought there far under the living earth, the Balrog clutching and Gandalf hewing at his enemy. At last the Balrog fled upward through dark tunnels, with Gandalf clinging to his heels, through the dark ways under the mountain, where the world is gnawed by nameless things. The demon knew the passages only too well.

They finally reached the Endless Stair, made long ago by the Dwarves but lost to legend, reaching ‘from the lowest dungeon to the highest peak’ in a long spiral staircase of thousands of steps, till it reached Durin’s Tower on the very pinnacle of the mountain. As the Balrog leapt out into the fiercely burning sun there it immediately burst out again into flame.

Their battle resumes again. Those that saw it from afar thought there was a storm upon the peak, with thunder and lightning and broken flames. Smoke and a vapor of steam rose about them, and ice fell like rain. Finally Gandalf throws down the Balrog, whose fall shatters the mountainside. ‘Then darkness took me, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.’

‘Naked I was sent back – for a brief time, until my task is done.’ The wizard lay there trapped alone on the mountain side, tower, window, and stair behind him broken and shattered, while each day seemed to last forever as he listened to the faint rumors of the lands below.

At last Gwaihir appeared, sent by Lady Galadriel to find him if he could, and the eagle bears him back to Lothlorien. The newly returned wizard is light as a feather in his claw, and the Sun seems to shine through him. Gandalf gets to Caras Galadon just shortly after the Fellowship leaves. There he rested and was healed from his ordeal, and there he was clothed in white.

 

Bits and Bobs

Tolkien had much to say about the death and return of Gandalf in a draft letter in late 1954. Here he makes it clear that Gandalf is an ‘incarnate angel’, subject to both weariness and death of the body. Although first sent to Middle-earth by the Valar with the other wizards as a prudential plan to counsel the Free Peoples against Sauron, after his sacrificial death he wanders ‘out of Time’ (and one must remember that Valinor, though peopled with the Undying, is still within Time), his spirit is enhanced and sent back to his body by ‘the Authority’ (Eru, God). Gandalf must still operate under the old conditions of his mission (not to dominate or just do the Free Peoples job for them), but he now has the authority to temporarily step in when a condition is beyond mortal means.  

It's a shame so many Dwarvish antiquities are destroyed by Gandalf on his journey, starting with the Bridge of Khazad-dum, to the Endless Stair and Durin’s Tower. But them’s the breaks, and as I’ve lately grown fond of saying, nothing lasts forever.

It would be curious to know exactly what physical items survived Gandalf’s fight. I mean, apparently his staff didn’t, because he had to rough-cut a new one. I suppose the ‘old grey rags’ covering his white clothes must be remnants of his old clothing; it’s hard to imagine he would pick them up in Lothlorien. And obviously he still has Glamdring.