(Note: if you don’t care about my
personal musings about the blog and want to get to the Gandalf bit right away,
scroll three paragraphs down. ;))
Well, you may have noticed that the blog has been rather quiet in 2025. Not counting the brief holiday post in January, we’ve only had two posts in February – about mermen and about Rise of Cadance, and then nothing again for two months now, and without forewarning. I apologise for that! I have in no way run out of ideas or enthusiasm for the blog – don't you worry about that! I have a few dozen ideas swimming in my head, at least, and some in drafts already. It was just an issue of time – a combination of work, family commitments and health problems. And I never announced a break, for which I’m sorry, too – I kept thinking that if I just roll Stamina well a few times in a row, I’ll surely squeeze in some time for the blog by next Sunday – but the dice didn't favour me, alas. I’ve even abstained from posting little things on the blog’s social media for a while, thinking it would be unfair to give you just a photo of a toy or an inspiring quote when I’m supposed to hand you a nice long-ish text – but I could have given you the pictures and quotes, and I was not in a position to write a proper blog post.
While I’m working on fixing up the situation overall, I’ve come to a realisation that may be bad for the blog’s schedule, but I feel it will be good for its quality: I don’t want it to be yet another piece of work that pressures me with tight deadlines. There’s enough of that in scholarly work, where I’m often sorry that I can't explore a subject I’m researching more deeply before publishing some paper, but there is a deadline to meet, and it wouldn’t be fair towards book editors and other authors to keep them waiting while I do all the digging to my heart’s content, even if that was an option. But here there are no other authors to be kept waiting, and I’m sure you, the readers, won't be terribly sad if the blog skips a few weeks. Even more, I don’t want to be in the situation to finally be spending some wonderful time with my family after an already busy workweek, but feeling guilty that the blog will be late because of that. Yet I’ve been in opposite situations, too – where I’ve had a blog post written in advance, but waited for Sunday to post it because I’d said I publish on Sundays. And, yes, I understand all the marketing strategies of having regular posts in order to grow an audience etc. – but I’m not really trying to sell anything here. If you like the texts, you’ll read them when they come up, too. Actually, the fact that I am, regularly, publishing this post of Sunday is a mere coincidence.
So, the big decision is: the blog post is never late, nor is it early. It arrives precisely when it means to. :) To translate to modern-earthish, there is no more schedule: there will be posts when I have time to write them while enjoying writing them, and writing them nicely, and not rushing them to get the weekly quota done.
But what about wizards, in fact? Or Gandalf in particular? Is that really true?
If you’re at all into The Lord of the Rings, you probably know the words: “A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” Spoken by Gandalf when Frodo chided him for being late, right? And if you’re a casual fan, you might even believe Tolkien wrote that. I have definitely seen many social media posts incorrectly attributing the words to him and to The Lord of the Rings as a book. But, in fact, the line was written for Peter Jackson’s film.
If you want to nitpick, it actually goes: “A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” Frodo’s name is usually omitted from online posts to make the line more quotable as a thought that can be applied out of context.
The books don’t have anything of the sort. In fact, the entire scene of Frodo meeting Gandalf as he arrives in Bag End for Bilbo’s 111th birthday party was invented for the needs of the film. The book merely describes Gandalf’s arrival, looks, and reputation. A few hobbit children run after Gandalf’s cart, hoping for fireworks, as Gandalf is famous for them, but they get none, as Gandalf goes into Bilbo’s hobbit hole. Frodo doesn’t even appear in the scene at all, though he is introduced previously in the chapter. Here is the entire scene (from chapter 1, A Long Expected Party):
Copied from the book as pictures, because I wasn’t sure the rune symbols would show otherwise.
Now let us have a look at the changes made in the film:
Never embedded video before. If it doesn't work, the link is https://youtu.be/qglEeUSqgu4
Almost everything is changed. Frodo is present, dwarves are absent, Frodo and Gandalf discuss Bilbo’s behaviour, and hobbit children do get some fireworks, leading us to believe that it’s relatively regular business with Gandalf, and definitely not that “neither they nor any but the oldest of their elders had seen one of his firework displays – they now belonged to a legendary past”.
Now, I am usually quick to frown upon any departures of an adaptation from the source material. However, when you think about it, the changes mostly make sense for film as a medium. Its main rule is “show, don’t tell”. Showing Gandalf in interaction with the hobbits was better than having a narrator, or even a side character, describe his character and his coming. While I do feel both the little fireworks in this scene, and the later movie-invented shenanigans of Merry and Pippin did somewhat devalue just how special Gandalf’s fireworks were, that is a minor objection, and most of the other changes are justified. Particularly if we also keep in mind the time constraints of a film, that has to fit the whole book in two to three hours (maybe four for the extended edition ;)). If it was filmed as a TV show, maybe there would have been time to introduce Frodo through hobbit gossip and have a nice first episode showing the preparations for the party and the party itself in 45 minutes, maybe even an hour. Without such temporal luxury, however, the filmmakers overall made the right call. Frodo is introduced early and directly as an important character, we see some of his and Gandalf’s character, their relationship to each other and to Bilbo. Nameless dwarves helping Gandalf unload are omitted so the audience wouldn’t falsely assume they will be important later, and Gandalf’s affection towards hobbit children instead of the dismissal of their requests nicely and quickly illustrates his love for the Shire and hobbits in general. A very similar modification can be found in the next scene, when Gandalf enters Bilbo’s hole, where again lots of new dialogue was written both to continue the subject of his arrival directly, and to show the relationship between Gandalf and Bilbo (and Gandalf knocking on the door with his staff is also a nod to The Hobbit), but let’s not digress into that one now. Overall, it’s worth keeping in mind that Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings as a sequel to The Hobbit, and thus Gandalf and Bilbo would be well-known and loved by the returning audience, while new readers had a short retelling of the story of The Hobbit (its main lines, at least) in the prologue. For Jackson’s film, however, there was no such previous story to lean on: any viewers who hadn’t previously read the book would be meeting all characters for the first time. Thus, a quick establishing of their relations and character was very useful.
But what about the “a wizard is never late” line as such? I found a comment on Reddit that nicely sums up a lot of the things good about it: it explicitly tells everyone that Gandalf is a wizard, asserts his authority and demeanour through his tone, and, yes, tells us that he likes to arrive when he plans to. With the sad omission of Gildor Inglorion from the film, it does really seem that this serves to warn us that when Gandalf is actually late, something seems to be wrong.
I might even add that the manner in which Gandalf says this line (and the grim few seconds of waiting before laughing afterwards) serves to establish not only his authority, but also the fact that he can be brusque and ill-tempered at times – which may well be how the hobbit children in the book perceived him when he shooed them off without a fireworks display.
However, the more I think about the line, the more there seems to be off about it, and the more certain I am that, in fact, Gandalf would not say that.
To start with the smaller reason, whatever else the scene may do, it does, in fact, establish him as being late. Slightly late, maybe, and for an occasion that is not yet of any urgency (there is still plenty of time to prepare for the party), but nevertheless, we cannot interpret Frodo’s line in any manner other than Gandalf, in fact, coming later than he was supposed to. Gandalf’s reply, on the other hand, doesn’t really seem to describe him (usually) being punctual: it sounds rather wilful. A wizard arrives when he means to, regardless of whether other people think that’s late or early. It’s the wizard who determines when the right time is to arrive. That might, to a point, be true (he may well decide to be late to a less important event because he has more important things to do first), but the whole statement just has a slightly too haughty, don’t-you-dare-question-when-I-come air to it than I personally feel is right for Gandalf. Just a whiff of it, given that it’s afterwards played as a joke, but nevertheless.
Secondly and more importantly, one could actually argue that Gandalf is habitually late. From The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, we so very often see him either arriving somewhere in the nick of time (to save the dwarves and Bilbo from the trolls, for example), or not making it somewhere in time at all and leaving his allies to fend for themselves, be it Thorin’s company in Mirkwood or Frodo leaving the Shire with the One Ring. That is, certainly, not something Gandalf does lightly, carelessly or without concern for his friends: in all these occasions, it is due to his “far more difficult and dangerous” business that he is delayed. Mostly it is truly dangerous work, regarding first Sauron as the Necromancer in Dol Guldur, and later research regarding the Ring, as well as his unfortunate capture by Saruman.
In the light of this, when someone as knowledgeable as Gildor says: “I do not like this news […] That Gandalf should be late, does not bode well,” it doesn’t merely mean that it’s alarming that Gandalf is late because he is usually on time, so there may be something wrong. Quite to the contrary, Gildor most likely knows for a fact that when Gandalf is late, that means serious trouble. Particularly with Frodo being pursued by Black Riders, and Gildor knowing very well what they are, though unwilling to share that information with the hobbits.
In light of this, with Gandalf already suspecting that Bilbo’s ring may be the One Ring, and definitely facing Sauron’s return to power either way, with all the difficult and dangerous endeavors that it involves… I doubt that he would make a statement about never being late. After all, when Bilbo, preparing to leave, asks him to keep an eye on Frodo, Gandalf replies: “Yes, I will – two eyes, as often as I can spare them.” He knows he will not be able to spare them all the time. He knows he will have important and dangerous work to do. He obviously wouldn’t lie to Bilbo and say he will watch Frodo all the time. I think, then, he also would not lie to Frodo about never being late – even jokingly. What do you think?
