The Great Tolkien Reread: The White Rider

"The White Rider" by Peter Xavier Price, 2006

Aragorn looked and beheld a bent figure moving slowly. It was not far away. It looked like an old beggar-man, walking wearily, leaning on a rough staff. His head was bowed, and he did not look towards them. In other lands they would have greeted him with kind words; but now they stood silent, each feeling a strange expectancy: something was approaching that held a hidden power—or menace.

Several times over the course of this series we've discussed Tolkien's refreshing indifference to the concept of spoilers. Major events in the plot, such as Boromir's betrayal, Gollum's return, and Gandalf's death, have been heavily signposted, and in some cases even explicitly stated as forthcoming. With "The White Rider", we come to what I believe is the sole exception. Gandalf's return as Gandalf the White is the one instance in the novel in which Tolkien tries to pull one over the readers.

This is not to say, of course, that there have not been hints that Gandalf is perhaps not as dead as advertised in the nine chapters since he fell in Khazad-Dûm. Frodo, whose powers of foresight and extrasensory perception have been growing increasingly keen, has dreamt of a figure in a white cloak walking on a mountainside. The voice he heard at the top of Amon Hen, which saved him from surrendering to the power of the eye of Sauron, was clearly Gandalf's. Nevertheless, when you compare these passages to the baldness with which the novel has foreshadowed previous turns of plot, it's clear that Tolkien is aiming at a bit more deniability in this case.

There is even a disorienting game of switcheroo between Saruman and Gandalf that plays with the expectations of the reader who is anticipating Gandalf's return. In "The Riders of Rohan", Éomer tells the three companions that Saruman walks in the wilderness near Orthanc dressed as a beggar in grey rags. When such a figure appears later in the chapter, the reader might expect a bit of semi-comedic confusion—Aragorn et. al will assume this is Saruman, but it will actually turn out to be Gandalf. This is, in fact, exactly what happens in "The White Rider". By the time that meeting occurs, however, readers will have already had the experience of getting their hopes up in the previous chapter, only to be left disappointed and disquieted. Gandalf's appearance in "The White Rider" is therefore suspicious, and like the three companions, we are inclined to believe that he is actually Saruman.

The entire sequence of Gandalf's reappearance in this chapter seems designed to evoke a sense of the uncanny. The grey-dressed beggar at first appears to be a weak old man, and then demonstrates surprising speed and sure-footedness. His speech seems teasing and cryptic—he knows a lot about our heroes, but holds back information about himself. Even the description of his clothing somehow contrives to be creepy and unwholesome: "As he stepped up on to the shelf there was a gleam, too brief for certainty, a quick glint of white, as if some garment shrouded by the grey rags had been for an instant revealed."

The prevailing sense of this scene is of expectant, overpowering stillness. Gimli and Legolas waver over whether to shoot the stranger from afar, but seem trapped by indecision. Aragorn's attempts to exert control over the conversation fall flat. The stranger comes closer and closer despite our heroes' warnings and demands. The ratcheting tension is an undersung but masterful example of Tolkien's facility with emotional tone (and perhaps also of his gift for horror). And yet after all that anticipation, the moment in which Gandalf reveals itself is an opaque one, leaving the reader uncertain whether what is happening is a resurrection or a magical attack.

The old man was too quick for him. He sprang to his feet and leaped to the top of a large rock. There he stood, grown suddenly tall, towering above them. His hood and his grey rags were flung away. His white garments shone. He lifted up his staff, and Gimli's axe leaped from his grasp and fell ringing on the ground. The sword of Aragorn, stiff in his motionless hand, blazed with a sudden fire. Legolas gave a great shout and shot an arrow high into the air: it vanished in a flash of flame.

'Mithrandir!' he cried. 'Mithrandir!'

It's only Legolas's cry at the end of this passage that definitively tells us who is standing before our heroes (and even then, only if we remember Gandalf's elvish name). It is several paragraphs more until the name "Gandalf" is uttered, and the prevailing feeling in those paragraphs is one of confusion. Is this actually...? But if so, surely they'd say? But now everyone's acting a bit more friendly? Ah, Aragorn has finally confirmed it!

I think "The White Rider" is both an example of Tolkien trying to do the kind of shocking plot twist that has become synonymous with "good" fantasy storytelling, and demonstrating that he isn't actually very good at it. Beyond some nitpicky problems with this sequence—it requires us, for example, to believe that Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli do not recognize the voice of one of the most distinctive and memorable people they've ever met—it mostly doesn't feel as if Tolkien's heart is in the big shocking reveal, so much as in the fear and unease that preceded it. The narrative doesn't come back to life again until it begins to hint at what Gandalf's resurrection actually means: "'Gandalf,' the old man repeated, as if recalling from old memory a long disused word. 'Yes, that was the name. I was Gandalf.'"

Before we can get to that, there's quite a bit of exposition—all the infodumping that the previous four chapters had rather nimbly avoided is paid back in spades here, as the four characters explain much of the preceding chapters' plot to one another. There is also a bit of table setting, with Gandalf informing Aragorn that his quest to rescue Merry and Pippin is over and that he must now proceed to Théoden's court for the next part of the story. It's not until the end of the chapter that we finally get to ask how Gandalf has returned. Here, too, there is an opacity, but for once the impression formed is not of the author concealing things from us, but of the insufficiency of words to express the magnitude of the events they describe.

We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted. Ever he clutched at me, and ever I hewed him, till at last he fled into dark tunnels. ... I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin. Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.

In principle, this is a clear summary of events, and yet every time I read it I get the sense that it is a placeholder for something incomprehensible. It's these passages, not Gandalf's return, that elevate "The White Rider" for me. They are what reminds us that Gandalf is only one facet of a character whose true nature we will never fully learn, and that his return, more than it is a surprising plot twist, is a true miracle.

Next time: On November 17th, it's time for some nominative determinism with "The King of the Golden Hall"

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