Quote:
Originally Posted by Inziladun
One thing that I find curious is that upon the arrival of the Istari in Middle-earth, staves were not apparently seen carried by all of them by the Elves at the Havens.
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If all of them had staves when the disembarked, why was Gandalf's possession of one noteworthy? And if only Gandalf brought his from the Undying Lands, perhaps that was symbolic of the fact that he was, ultimately, the greatest among them, as discerned by Círdan.
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Also, the only occasion in which we "see" Radagast personally in the story, when Gandalf describes their meeting on the Greenway to the Council of Elrond, he is not described as having a staff.
I'm not saying any of this is definitive, but I do wonder why it seems that the staff was mainly associated with Gandalf, and not to the Istari as a whole, at least not initially.
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I found this to be the most thought-provoking post in the whole thread, because it gives the strongest reasons to wonder whether there actually *is* an Istari-staff connection--whether we might just be over-valuing Saruman's possession of a staff and single statement about the five wizards as truthful of all wizards, rather than just momentary hyperbole (and appropriate rhetoric, perhaps).
On the side of "all wizards need staves," I'd like to just make the semantic quibble that Gandalf is singled out as using a staff, as needing a staff. Rather than implying that the wizards otherwise had no staves, this always occurred to me as signifying that Gandalf was somehow "older" in appearance than the others. One notes that Saruman has "raven" hair back then... perhaps he wasn't sent to Middle-earth as aged as Gandalf?
On the other hand, however, I wondered... if Gandalf is the only one with a staff on arrival, why did Saruman pick one up in the meantime? Clearly, not just because he got older, because Gandalf removing it is a major problem for him, and not because he needs a crutch.
The thought that occurred to me, reading all this, was that maybe it is because the staff belongs with the Keys of Orthanc--part of his badge of office as the steward of Gondor's power in their far-flung tower. Obviously, this thought owes a great deal to the aforementioned fact that Denethor and Faramir both have staves as their badge of office. What if, perhaps, this was not only true of the Steward of All Gondor, but true of any steward office holder in Gondor? Remember that one of Denethor's chief assistants in the rule of Minas Tirith was Húrin, Keeper of the Keys.
Mind you, that brings up the legal question of how Gandalf could deprive Saruman of a Gondorian office--although, I should mention, this problem still exists for the Keys, even if there is no connection to Saruman's staff. One answer is that, as the emissary of the Valar, Gandalf can "morally trump" the legal system. Another might be that, as
Saruman's superior in the Istari, he can declare Saruman unfit for duty, and ineligible to serve a "foreign power." Another could assume that Gandalf has Aragorn's implicit consent, and that (as with the Palantíri, Aragorn doesn't need to be crowned to exert his royal prerogative over Orthanc).