by Brooke Wolfe

Created on: April 13, 2009

Roots of English Literature

April 29th 2005

Brown University

J.R.R. Tolkien's writing has fascinated readers and scholars throughout this age. His styles were not nearly as popular as some of those which come far before him. Celtic and Britonnic tales include awed their audiences and likewise included elements of romance, warriors, and magical settings. Histories and legends from this period in fact influence many of Tolkien's modern plots and twists.

A fair argument can be made comparing Tolkien's good wizard Gandalf and a common character in Welsh and later English stories, Merlin. Both have one or more additional names. Merlin is also Ambrosius or "the sovereign" in the Welsh history of the Britons (Koch and Carey 283). Gandalf is also called Gandalf Greyhame by Eomer, a rider of Rohan (II, 425). In The Fellowship of the Ring he is called Gandalf the Grey or the Grey Wanderer. After dealing with the balrog in the mines of Moria, he passes into the otherworld and loses conception of time. He returns as Gandalf the White, White Rider, Stormcrow, and Mithrandir, the name Legolas calls when he first sees him after the undertakings in Moria (II, 483).

Traveling to the otherworld and back is a common theme in old Irish stories. It is not a joyful afterlife, and those condemned there are not quite human. The Irish write about the otherworld as an alternative to reality, a world which mortals can enter upon invitation, though they never stay. In The Spoils of the Unworld, Arthur and his men are permitted to enter the four-cornered "concealed fort" of the other world but not all of them return (Koch and Carey 296). Gandalf goes there in the middle of the Fellowship of the Ring and returns in the Two Towers even more powerful. Tolkien uses the return from the otherworld theme again in Return of the King when Strider, Legolas, and Gimli travel the paths of the dead to muster the spirit warriors who "suffer no living man to come to their hidden halls," and themselves "come seldom forth and only and times of great unquiet and coming death" (III, 62). The otherworld aspect of these different periods of literature remains a minor similarity compared to Gandalf and Merlin.
Merlin and Gandalf are comparable in a number of other ways. Both come from an ambiguous heritage. The Welsh record not only the deeds and prophecies of Ambrosius but his life as a young boy as well. As one of his playmates toss the young sorcerer a ball he teases him for being fatherless saying that he would

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