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By Root 1697 0

in Middle-earth, was potent mainly in wisdom and goodness, as a director or counsellor in the struggle, unconquerable in resistance (especially in mind and spirit) but incapable of punitive action. In her scale she had become like Manwë with regard to the greater total action. Manwë, however, even after the Downfall of Númenor and the breaking of the old world, even in the Third Age when the Blessed Realm had been removed from the ‘Circles of the World’, was still not a mere observer. It is clearly from Valinor that the emissaries came who were called the Istari (or Wizards), and among them Gandalf, who proved to be the director and coordinator both of attack and defence.

Who was ‘Gandalf’? It is said that in later days (when again a shadow of evil arose in the Kingdom) it was believed by many of the ‘Faithful’ of that time that ‘Gandalf’ was the last appearance of Manwë himself, before his final withdrawal to the watchtower of Taniquetil. (That Gandalf said that his name ‘in the West’ had been Olórin was, according to this belief, the adoption of an incognito, a mere by-name.) I do not (of course) know the truth of the matter, and if I did it would be a mistake to be more explicit than Gandalf was. But I think it was not so. Manwë will not descend from the Mountain until the Dagor Dagorath, and the coming of the End, when Melkor returns. 8 To the overthrow of Morgoth he sent his herald Eönwë. To the defeat of Sauron would he not then send some lesser (but mighty) spirit of the angelic people, one coëval and equal, doubtless, with Sauron in their beginnings, but not more? Olórin was his name. But of Olórin we shall never know more than he revealed in Gandalf.

This is followed by sixteen lines of a poem in alliterative verse:

Wilt thou learn the lore. that was long secret

of the Five that came from a far country?

One only returned. Others never again

under Men’s dominion Middle-earth shall seek

until Dagor Dagorath and the Doom cometh.

How hast thou heard it: the hidden counsel

of the Lords of the West in the land of Aman?

The long roads are lost that led thither,

and to mortal Men Manwë speaks not.

From the West-that-was a wind bore it

to the sleeper’s ear, in the silences

under night-shadow, when news is brought

from lands forgotten and lost ages

over seas of years to the searching thought.

Not all are forgotten by the Elder King.

Sauron he saw as a slow menace. . . .

There is much here that bears on the larger question of the concern of Manwë and the Valar with the fate of Middle-earth after the Downfall of Númenor, which must fall quite outside the scope of this book.

After the words ‘But of Olórin we shall never know more than he revealed in Gandalf’ my father added later:

save that Olórin is a High-elven name, and must therefore have been given to him in Valinor by the Eldar, or be a ‘translation’ meant to be significant to them. In either case, what was the significance of the name, given or assumed? Olor is a word often translated ‘dream’, but that does not refer to (most) human ‘dreams’, certainly not the dreams of sleep. To the Eldar it included the vivid contents of their memory, as of their imagination: it referred in fact to clear vision, in the mind, of things not physically present at the body’s situation. But not only to an idea, but to a full clothing of this in particular form and detail.

An isolated etymological note explains the meaning similarly:

olo-s: vision, ‘phantasy’: Common Elvish name for ‘construction of the mind’ not actually (pre)existing in Ea¨ apart from the construction, but by the Eldar capable of being by Art (Karmë) made visible and sensible. Olos is usually applied to fair constructions having solely an artistic object (i.e. not having the object of deception, or of acquiring power).

Words deriving from this root are cited: Quenya olos ‘dream, vision’, plural olozi/olori; Mla-(impersonal) ‘to dream’ olosta ‘dreamy’;. A reference is then made to Olofantur, which was the earlier ‘true’ name of Lórien, the Vala who was ‘master