Wizard Gone Missing

[Ardent]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Madlener was certainly a late-Romantic artist, but his themes, when not religious, tended to run to German folklore...

Having grown up in Bavaria, I can verify how very much in tune with South German popular art Madlener's work was...

I like the Romantics, and that's probably why I like Tolkein. They laboured to revive a sense of the mysterious and noble, especially the notion of the "noble savage", in an age where xenophobia was being allied with social-Darwinism.
I also like the British Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau even though they added to the trend of depicting Iron Age Celtic knights in medieval Teutonic (Germanic) armour. Historically inaccurate but giving us the popular imagery we now think of as Arthurian.
I know how keen Tolkien was on Germanic saga, but none the less, probably because of the power of Arthurian tales in British culture, I find it hard not to see Gandalf as Merlin.