[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

There are multiple 'Gandalfs', multiple 'Galadriels', multiple 'Elronds' (& of course a couple of 'Glorfindels' )scattered through the works. Come to that there are multiple 'Gondolins' - the Fall of Gondolin we have in BoLT is not the same as the account we find in the published Sil.

Certainly it's true that over the course of Tolkien's work on the Legendarium, characters, places, and events underwent profound changes. Texts written at different times are often in direct contradiction with one another - and indeed one must expect that a revision of some story will contradict earlier versions. Characters changed, sometimes profoundly - the character that eventually became Sauron, for example, started out as a cat.

But to me to say that there are "two Gandalfs" or "two Gondolins" sounds suspiciously mystical. There aren't really two Gondolins, because Gondolin isn't real. There are simply certain texts that say certain things about Gondolin and other texts that say other things. As I said in that most infamous of threads:

Nor do I care about the semantics of "the same character" and "different characters with the same name" and "the same character with different names", etc., etc.

It is semantics because it depends entirely upon your definition of "characters". Your Galadriel (1) and your Galadriel (2) differ in certain ways and are similar in others. On the most basic level, that's all there is to be said. There's no need to argue about how to translate those differences into a proposition using the word "character".

This is the same reason that I have a problem with the insistence (e.g. by M. Martinez) that the Silmarillion is a "different mythology" from the Book of Lost Tales. That's a perfectly valid way of defining "mythology" in the context of Tolkien's work (we could speak of BoLT mythology, '30s mythology, '50s mythology, Myths Transformed mythology, . . .) but it is just a definition. Similarly, we could call the two Galadriels different characters, or we could call them the same character portrayed differently - but we would not be saying anything substantive; we would simply be defining a convention for the word "character".

A distinct question we might ask is: how different is the portrayal of person/thing/event A in text X from the portrayal of A in text Y? Do the portrayals directly contradict each other? Do they implicitly contradict each other? Do they differ in style or tone? And so forth.

Now, obviously there are differences to be found. But I think that these differences tend to be exaggerated, largely because we know so much about the way Tolkien wrote. What in other works we might call character development or simply the portrayal of different aspects of a character's personality, in Tolkien we tend to call conradiction, because we know about his tendency to revise and rewrite and change elements of the story.

In the case of Galadriel, we have some direct contradiction among some of the stories. The late version that has her leave Aman separately from Feanor is in direct contradiction to the earlier version that had her join in the rebellion. But what about Gandalf? Here we do not have direct contradiction. The claim is that we have different portrayals. But what specific things did Gandalf do in The Hobbit that LotR Gandalf could not have done? Is there really enough there to call the portrayals implicitly contradictory?

I don't think there is. We certainly do see more aspects of Gandalf's personality in LotR, but I see no problem there. Most people speak differently, for example, depending on whom they are addressing. Why shouldn't Gandalf do the same? Tolkien even notes (I can't recall whether this is in the appendices or only in HoMe XII) that the variation in speaking style by some of the characters was intentional.

For what it's worth, I see a far greater change in personality when he goes from being Gandalf the Grey to Gandalf the White.

Yet its a trap Tolkien himself falls into.The changes he made to TH later, to bring it line with LotR - principally the change in Riddles in the Dark - don't really fit the mood of the rest of the book.

This is an interesting issue. Do the changes really not fit the mood of the rest of the book? I first read The Hobbit (or rather, had it read to me) about seventeen years ago. It was only a few years ago that I learned about the extensive changes that had been made to that chapter. Prior to learning about them, I never detected any discrepancy in tone. Of course, it's possible that I simply wasn't attentive enough. Still, I can't help thinking that this:

And they weren't actually necessary, as the original version of that chapter is accounted for in the story of Bilbo's 'lie' about how he came by the Ring which we're given in LotR.

. . . is being a bit too kind to the story of Bilbo's lie. It always struck me as rather forced.