Why Gandalf Is A Dick, And What It Means About The Cold War

I recently spent some time in rural England, and walking around the endlessly lush countryside of that nation, you can't help but feel some of the magic of it's rich history. Every coastal area has an abandoned World War Two-era radar station, and you can faintly see the outlines of the kings and tribal warlords of the past, leading armies over the dales. It's more than just the stuff of history books, though; you occasionally top the crest of a hill and feel an Arthurian presence, a sense that you're connected to the legends and myths of the past, a feeling of reaching through time.

So of course, as soon as I got home, I threw on THE LORD OF THE RINGS.


Twelve hours later, I started thinking about something that I had never really taken notice of before: the fact that Gandalf is a huge dick.

There are elements of Gandalf's dickish behaviour as early as "The Fellowship of the Ring", where he gets off on withholding the joy of fireworks from little children, or mocking Bilbo's lame smoke rings, or in his constant berating of Pippin, but his full douchebaggery only really reveals itself with his transformation to Gandalf the White, in "The Two Towers".

That's when his reincarnated ass shows up, does a little Saruman impression just to fuck around with his best friends, mutters a bunch of alarming shit like "the veiling shadow that glowers in the East takes shape", proceeds to do nothing to stop humanity from entering a giant trap, and then takes off just as the single most important battle in the world is about to begin, abandoning the task of protecting the world of men to twelve year-old boys.

Now, technically, he's going out to gather reinforcements, to bring back the banished horsemen of Eomer, but really, why does he have to go? Why can't one of those twelve year-olds run out on horseback and bring them back? "Oh, Gandalf has Shadowfax, the Lord of Horses," I hear you saying. "Only he could go get the Rohirrim and bring them back in time to save Helm's Deep." No. No. That's bullshit. If Shadowfax is the Lord of Horses, and can both understand humans and communicate with other horses, why can't Shadowfax just go get the goddamned Rohirrim? Hell, that way, we don't even have to spare the twelve year-old. He can help 'man' the gates. Meanwhile, Gandalf could be using his magic flashlight and/or one-time bubble shield powers to help defend humanity. But before hundreds of boy soldiers can even start to learn the subtleties of barracks humour, let alone the intricacies of swordplay, Mr. the White is off, on a mission that literally almost anyone else could do. I won't go so far as to call him a coward, but by leaving at the worst possible time, he's clearly a dick.

Okay, so what? What can we learn from Gandalf the Jerk? A surprising amount about the Cold War, I think.


Tolkien would decry those who look for historical parallels in his magnum opus, but just as surely as they were not intended, they could not be avoided. Every work is shaped by the time in which they are created, by the concerns of a society and the individual experiences of their authors, not to mention the interpretations of the audience.

So if post-WWII readers would read the descriptions of women huddling around their children in the Helm's Deep sequence of "The Two Towers" as echoes of the Blitz, or modern audiences see the film version of it as an echo of American civilians comforting each other on 9/11, or of innocent Iraqis surrounded by the bombing of Operation Iraqi Freedom, who's to say they're wrong? They're all valid interpretations.

So without talking about what Tolkien intended, how would a post-WWII Soviet reader see Gandalf's abandonment of the people of Rohan? That's mostly a hypothetical question, as the USSR banned the book from being published, seeing it as a "hidden allegory 'of the conflict between the individualist West and the totalitarian, Communist East'". So we know the censors saw at least some of themselves in Sauron, which is a psychologically interesting self-identification, but I think the Soviet people would have seen more of themselves in Rohan, a nation abandoned by all of its allies to face the wrath of their enemy, alone.

There are clear parallels between Stalingrad and Helm's Deep, and in this light, Gandalf's abandonment would carry Yalta-like repercussions, an act that the Soviets took as a betrayal and greatly furthered the animosity that would eventually lead to the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, and the closest this world has come to total annihilation. Thanks Gandalf, you absolute piece of shit.

Of course, in the book and film, Gandalf comes back with the Rohirrim (leaving it until the last second, of course) and helps save the day. In real life? Uh, not so much. The Allies left Russia to bleed the Germans while they carefully prepared for the Western front. In this light, then, "The Lord of the Rings" can be read as a sort of anti-Cold War parable about how the West ruined its chances to create a lasting peace. In fact, the later conflicts in "The Return of the King", where the men of Minas Tirith are saved by the very Rohirrim they did not come to the aid of in the earlier book, plays like a fantasy of how the post-war period could have evolved.

The word 'fantasy' is not to suggest that Tolkien was a naive idealist: "The Lord of the Rings" is full of descriptions of the corruptibility and weakness of humanity. But perhaps more than orcs and goblins, wizards and magic rings, the greater fantasy of Tolkien's is in the hope that humanity can put aside our ambitions for power and status in favour of peaceful co-operation. That would be greater in every sense of the word.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Gandalf is terrorizing an entire village, including women and children, with apocalyptic fireworks shaped as dragons. What a dick.