Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [243]
These discussions of olos, olor are clearly to be connected with the passage in the Valaquenta (The Silmarillion pp. 30 – 1) where it is said that
Olórin dwelt in Lórien in Valinor, and that though he loved the Elves, he walked among them unseen, or in form as one of them, and they did not know whence came the fair visions or the promptings of wisdom that he put into their hearts.
In an earlier version of this passage it is said that Olórin was ‘counsellor of Irmo’, and that in the hearts of those who hearkened to him awoke thoughts ‘of fair things that had not yet been but might yet be made for the enrichment of Arda’.
There is a long note to elucidate the passage in The Two Towers IV 5 where Faramir at Henneth Annûn told that Gandalf had said:
Many are my names in many countries. Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, 9 in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.
This note dates from before the publication of the second edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1966, and reads as follows:
The date of Gandalf’s arrival is uncertain. He came from beyond the Sea, apparently at about the same time as the first signs were noted of the re-arising of ‘the Shadow’: the reappearance and spread of evil things. But he is seldom mentioned in any annals or records during the second millennium of the Third Age. Probably he wandered long (in various guises), engaged not in deeds and events but in exploring the hearts of Elves and Men who had been and might still be expected to be opposed to Sauron. His own statement (or a version of it, and in any case not fully understood) is preserved that his name in youth was Olórin in the West, but he was called Mithrandir by the Elves (Grey Wanderer), Tharkûn by the Dwarves (said to mean ‘Staff-man’), Incánus in the South, and Gandalf in the North, but ‘to the East I go not’.
‘The West’ here plainly means the Far West beyond the Sea, not part of Middle-earth; the name Olórin is of High-Elven form. ‘The North’ must refer to the North-western regions of Middle-earth, in which most of the inhabitants or speaking-peoples were and remained uncorrupted by Morgoth or Sauron. In those regions resistance would be strongest to the evils left behind by the Enemy, or to Sauron his servant, if he should reappear. The bounds of this region were naturally vague; its eastern frontier was roughly the River Carnen to its junction with Celduin (the River Running), and so to Núrnen, and thence south to the ancient confines of South Gondor. (It did not originally exclude Mordor, which was occupied by Sauron, although outside his original realms ‘in the East’, as a deliberate threat to the West and the Númenóreans.) ‘The North’ thus includes all this great area: roughly West to East from the Gulf of Lune to Núrnen, and North and South from Carn Dûm to the southern bounds of ancient Gondor between it and Near Harad. Beyond Núrnen Gandalf had never gone.
This passage is the only evidence that survives for his having extended his travels further South. Aragorn claims to have penetrated ‘the far countries of Rhûn and Harad where the stars are strange’ (The Fellowship of the Ring II 2). 10 It need not be supposed that Gandalf did so. These legends are North-centred – because it is represented as an historical fact that the struggle against Morgoth and his servants occurred mainly in the North, and especially the North-west, of Middle-earth, and that was so because the movement of Elves, and of Men afterwards escaping from Morgoth, had been inevitably westward, towards the Blessed Realm, and north-westward because at that point the shores of Middle-earth were nearest to Aman. Harad ‘South’ is thus a vague term, and although before its downfall Men of Númenor had explored the coasts of Middle-earth far southward, their settlements