Doesn’t matter. While that amazon shitshow tells a different story, Gandalf (as Radagast and Saruman) only arrived in the third age, long after the War of the Last Alliance. Gandalf might be infinitely older than Elrond yet wasn’t there.
This does raise the question “Does your age count when you’re in Valinor?”
Because it’s literally the undying lands. Are we really going to pull rank between two functionally ageless beings? Seems petty.
It’s not about rank or age. It’s about who’s been present at the last battle of the War of the Last Alliance. Also, at the time of the depicted scene Elrond never was in Valinor, so at this point in time Gandalf definitely easier Elrond’s senior by orders of magnitude.
I thought the way it was worded, it was still technically the second age?
“Well I read in a book that I was there. I can’t actually remember more than a few hundred years back.”
Ashildr from Doctor Who was brilliant.
I’m wondering now, how our little brains would adapt to living like for thousands of years. Would we really start forgetting things that are waaaay back?
I’ve already forgotten most of my childhood and I’m only around 30. So I’d assume, yes.
That’s… that’s not normal.
Thats usually trauma suppressing memories, sorry mate,
Nah, it’s just shitty memory. I have had quite the happy childhood, actually.
I don’t find myself reminiscing a lot and in the rare cases I do, there are quite some gaps. Even in more recent times. If I really try to dig, maybe it comes back, but I assume it’s “use it or lose it”.
That still ain’t normal dude. You’re supposed to be able to recall memories from any point of your life…
You actually can’t. Human memory is really quite terrible. Most of your older memories are likely distorted by other people telling you about them, or even just the natural decay that occurs whenever you recall a memory.
This is a really interesting part of the Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
So there were five godlike beings sent to fight Sauron. Only one of them did his job.
I need to reword it.
You are the big cool powerful god. One of your servants, a minor much less powerful god does bad things to the world. So you send five your other servants just as powerful as the bad one to deal with him.
A lot of time passes. Three of those spend their time chilling. One joins the bad one. The last one turns out too weak. Who solves the problem? Four hobbits.
You really should reconsider your politics after that.
Wait till you learn about Melkor! He’s a Vala, or one of the Valar, which is a higher order than the Maiar, and was basically super-Sauron from the before times
Isn’t much of the power of the Maiar in diplomacy and setting events in motion? Gandalf was as much of an interloper and manipulator as he was anything else, and his hiring Bilbo as a thief was the penultimate piece of his mission, as inadvertent as I’m not entirely sure it was. Right? No, really, I’m kinda asking, I don’t know for sure.
To be fair, the istari were diminished Maiar who weren’t allowed to use their full power, and Sauron was a full Maia with no qualms about flexing his true strength.
Had Manwë been given the license to send just Eönwë, then Sauron would’ve been rekt in a year tops
Why were their powers limited?
The lore reason is essentially that defeating Sauron was mankind’s coming-of-age story (the age of elves was ending, and mankind was set to take over control of middle earth), and having a bunch of maiar come in and wreck Sauron wouldn’t teach men to stand up for what’s right. Instead, Eru told Manwë to send the istari to guide men and elves to defeat Sauron on their own
The “real” reason is that it wouldn’t be a very good story if Manwë just sniped Sauron from the hidden West with magic
It’s complicated but basically the gods learned that flexing their full strength caused cataclysmic events. Not ideal. But in doing so they got rid of Sauron’s daddy, so it wasn’t all gloom. But it did mean they weren’t keen on the idea of going rampage mode to deal with a lesser threat.
Do we know that the Istari who go east were just chilling? I thought they were trying to rally men in the east to fight Sauron. They might even have fought some of his troops in the far off east during the Battle of the Black Gate? Or were those just fan theories and never actually confirmed?
There’s no exact details given for what the blue wizards (the two in the east) were up to. Tolkien only said they were sewing dissent against Sauron
Hey Gandalf, fuck off. Were you literally there 3,000 years ago? Or are you just going “You’re younger than me, so you know fuckall”?
Fuckin boomer
Am I wrong or do the wizards not remember their lives before they were sent to middle earth?
I don’t think the original books ever told anything about it.
Iirc the books themselves didn’t say, but Tolkien’s letters say something to the effect of the Istari only having vague memories of their time as Maia, with the exception of things that they were explicitly meant to remember, e.g. Olórin’s memories of being sent back after his physical death while fighting Durin’s Bane.
They know that they are, in our parlance, embodied angels or minor gods, but they don’t remember a ton of where they came from
Do the balrogs have the same memory issues?
That’s a very good question, and one that I don’t know the answer to. I would guess no, as the point of the Istari losing their memories was to make them more like the people they were sent to save; it’s not something about being embodied that made them lose their bodyless memories, it was part of their mission. The balrogs had no such mission
Small nerd gripe. Maia is the singular form of Maiar. “I am a Maia,” or “I am one of the Maiar” get you there
