Were the Middle-earth Wizards born as Wizards?

Q: Were the Middle-earth Wizards born as Wizards?

ANSWER: No. The “wizards” such as Gandalf, Radagast, and Saruman were angelic beings sent to assist Elves, Men, and Dwarves in their resistance to Sauron in the Third Age. Some Websites claim that the Istari were “gods” and this is wrong. In The Lord of the Rings we are told that the word “vala” means “angelic power”; hence, any emissary from the Valar must be of a similar order or less in nature.

The true nature of the Istari is only fully disclosed in the essays and notes published in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth in the chapter titled “The Istari”; but there are other passages, such as in The Silmarillion, which make it clear to the reader that the Istari (the Wizards) were members of the Maiar, angelic beings of lesser strength and stature than the Valar, who in origin were members of the Ainur (“holy ones”), the first children of Ilúvatar’s thought.

The confusion over the true nature of the Istari may arise from readers’ misunderstanding of the relationship between The Lord of the Rings and The Book of Lost Tales. The Book of Lost Tales was J.R.R. Tolkien’s “mythology for England”, filled with pagan gods and enchanted creatures, set in ancient England itself (indirectly, since the stories were simply tales revealed to an Anglo-Saxon traveler who wandered into Faerie).

J.R.R. Tolkien reused some of the character templates and plots, as well as many names, to write a new legendary cycle or mythology that had no connection to England; this new cycle eventually became The Silmarillion, and as John Rateliff disclosed in The History of the Hobbit when Tolkien wrote down the story he had devised for his sons he entangled it with the Silmarillion world and legends. But as Tolkien prepared the book for publication he dropped some of the Silmarillion connections; hence, when his publisher asked him for a sequel to The Hobbit Tolkien had to build out the world of Hobbits, which he did in part by adding new concepts and in part by adapting the older Silmarillion and Anadune stories.

But England and its mythological “gods” from The Book of Lost Tales was never included in the world of The Lord of the Rings; unfortunately, some people have been so determined to misrepresent the facts they have persuaded other readers to believe that The Lord of the Rings was Tolkien’s “mythology for England”. Hence, many readers infer that the Istari were some of the “gods” from The Book of Lost Tales, when in fact none of those characters had ever been part of the original story collection.

# # #

Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?