Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Middle-earth Psychology: Gandalf

I first introduced Gandalf during my overview of wizards and balrogs, noting that he was an archetypal wise old man similar to Odin, Merlin, and Prospero. He also appeared as Olórin while discussing Lady Nienna, his mentor who was “acquainted with grief” and taught him “pity and patience”. While Gandalf was not born as a baby, since he did not have a biological mother, he did describe his early years in Valinor as his “youth”. He shared a commonality with Tolkien and many other characters in the legendarium: he was a foster child. This experience affected him throughout his lives. In this essay, I will explore how his experience as a foster child with a grieving surrogate mother may have related to his homelessness, apparent nicotine use disorder, and internalized need to always be good.

Foster Children & Homelessness

For a quick linguistics and cultural note, I am going to use the term “homelessness” and “homeless” in this essay. In progressive urban circles, the term “unhoused” has become trendy within the past twenty years, starting on the west coast and moving across the United States. Both words are old, although their meanings have shifted over time. The adjective “homeless” appeared as a compound word during the 1620s, while the phrase “the homeless” dates to 1857. The adjective “unhoused”, implying that someone had been forcibly driven from a house by another person, dates from about 1600, although its modern meaning appeared in the mid-2000s. People who do not like the term often describe it as “clunky” or “woke”, but I have a simpler explanation why it is not great to use: homeless people never use it. They say “homelessness” and “homeless”. Using different terminology alienates the very people that the discussion is supposed to help.

Some readers may not appreciate the discussion of Gandalf being homeless, although he is homeless by the literal definition of the word. Rather than having a wizard tower like Saruman, a cozy hole like the Baggins family, a homely home like Tom Bombadil or Elrond, or a fancy tree house like Galadriel, Gandalf wanders from place to place staying at other people’s houses. His elvish name, Mithrandir, even means “grey pilgrim/wanderer”, someone who is constantly on the road despite having many wealthy, generous friends who are willing, even eager, to let him stay with them. However, moving from home to home, which is colloquially known as “couch surfing”, is still considered a form of homelessness, even if it is more socially acceptable than living on the street.

The same readers might not appreciate Gandalf being referred to as a foster child, in which case they may need to find a different book series. Other foster children appearing or referenced in The Lord of the Rings include Frodo, Aragorn, Elrond and Elros, and Turin; this is not a bug but a feature. Other Maiar seemed to be fully adopted children: Melian was “akin before the World was made to Yavanna herself” and Eönwë was a herald but treated as a son by Manwë and Varda Elbereth (The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1, 74), while Olórin acted only as their messenger. Nienna allowed him to linger in her halls, where she spent her time weeping for the destruction of Arda. This was not a happy foster home.

Modern studies on public health and child psychology have drawn a strong connection between foster care and homelessness. A study in the American Midwest indicated that 31% to 46% of its participants who were in foster care as children were homeless at least once between the ages of 19 and 26, since they had grown out of the government-run support system. The reason for the discrepancy in percentages is equally unsettling: these were “unobserved outcomes”, or losing track of 15% of the young adults. The study also found higher rates of mental health disorders in young adults who aged out of foster care, and that the rate of homelessness rises for males but lowers for females during the transition.

The portrayal of Gandalf as a homeless adult avoids stereotypes associated with modern media, which include substance use disorders, failure to meet bills, criminal behavior, and Hollywood-style mental illness. While he does have disordered substance use, to be discussed in the next section, this is so common within Middle-earth society that it is nearly overlooked. No character blames Gandalf for his homelessness. At the same time, they do not show awareness for how a lack of social services may negatively affect his life. Perhaps they consider homelessness to be his quirky character trait, just as Frodo befriends others too quickly, Sam weeps and curses frequently, and Bilbo needs constant attention.

Tobacco and Nicotine Use Disorders

Homelessness can be caused by other factors besides foster care. Substance use disorders are sometimes a root cause or become exacerbated by the situation. A 2016 study of 500 randomly selected homeless Canadians in British Columbia found that “78% suffered from at least one substance use disorder” with “tobacco use disorder” excluded from this percentage, a strange case of not taking tobacco usage seriously. A study based in Boston, MA found that 236 of 1,302 deaths of homeless people between 2003 and 2008 were caused by tobacco, or 18%, a number estimated to be 3 to 5 times higher than the housed Massachusetts population . Several of the doctors involved in that study wrote an open letter in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, warning fellow doctors that 73% of homeless adults were smokers with the highest correlations to developing this addiction being childhood foster care. 54% had been told to quit by a medical professional, but only 9% managed to do so.

This habit was considered less detrimental in past generations when smoking was the norm. From World War I through the early 1950s, smoking was encouraged by government-funded propaganda published in the United States and Great Britain. In Middle-earth, people had no understanding of smoking being detrimental to their health, only that they felt better after doing it. Smoking was commonplace and done by most male characters: from hobbits and dwarves taking out their pipes at any given opportunity to Aragorn “smoking a long-stemmed pipe” in the Prancing Pony and Bill Ferny “smoking a short black pipe”. Even in the Mines of Moria, Gandalf calmed his anxiety by smoking, telling himself, “I know what is the matter with me… I need smoke! I have not tasted it since the morning before the snowstorm.” (Book II, “Chapter 4, A Journey in the Dark”)

Gandalf appears to be experiencing a subset of “Disorders due to use of nicotine” known as “Nicotine withdrawal” according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Withdrawal begins between six to twenty-four hours after the last smoking session and can last up to ten days. Symptoms include insomnia, irritability, anger, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and craving nicotine-containing products. Within the last chapter, Gandalf struggled to remember the password for a door (difficulty concentrating), repeatedly grew frustrated with members of the Fellowship (irritability), became angry at adolescent Pippin for dropping a stone down a well (anger), and was unable to sleep (insomnia) due to his inability to remember the route (difficulty concentrating again), which in turn caused anxiety. Gandalf correctly pinpointed the source of his trouble — not young Pippin but a lack of “smoke” in his system — yet he seemed to view smoking as an aid rather than the source of his problems.

Perfectionism and Always Being Good

When Frodo offered the One Ring to Gandalf, the wizard was shocked and begged Frodo not to tempt him, explaining, “Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.” (Book I, “Chapter 2 The Shadow of the Past”). He had learned “pity and patience” from Nienna thousands of years before. His desire to do good was his greatest strength, but with the potential to become his undoing. If the Maiar were childlike compared to the greater Valar, then Gandalf was the “good child” among them, especially compared to the “problem children” like Mairon, who became Sauron, and Ossë, who narrowly avoided joining the original Dark Lord Morgoth.

When I use the term “good child”, I am not referring to the general idea of what it means to be a good person, and how that goodness is taught to children. Instead, I am referring to the phenomenon of children who believe they must be good, even perfect, to relieve adults from additional burden after caring for “problem children”. The concept of a “problem child” dates from 1916 and spawned such books as The Problem Child by Alexander Sutherland Neil (1927), The Problem Child at School (1925) by Mary Buell Sayles, and its riveting sequel The Problem Child at Home (1928). These books set up a clear binary: some children are bad, and some children are good. What makes them bad or good is up for debate.

To better understand the issues of problem children during this time period, here is what each of the authors said. Neill believed “it is moral instruction that makes the child bad” (18) and that teaching morality to children “is psychologically wrong”. The cure to this was teaching them Freudian concepts of sexuality instead. It is worth nothing that Neill was a teacher at his own school, Summerhill, and his biographer Richard Bailey described his teaching methods as “simply awful… incoherent… resorting to insults” (146). Sayles described the “feelings of inferiority” and “diverse issues” found in case studies of problem children, from a “show off” who likely had dyslexia to a habitually absent immigrant child who began coming to class upon being placed with a teacher who “liked Italians” to a child with chronic illness who was called “little grandpa”. These children were all “curable”, although the methods of cure were different from what would be used today.

In contrast, the good child appears to be free of flaws to the point of being perfect. Child psychologist Susan S. Isaacs described the mental health of “excessively good” children in 1928, around the same time “problem children” were discussed by her peers. Isaacs found that while “good children” appeared “pleasant and amenable” on the surface, in contrast to the “caricature” of a good child who was obsessed with rules, these children frequently harbored “a deep neurotic guilt and anxiety”. For one child in her study, this developed into nail-biting and anxiety attacks (traits of other members of the Fellowship to be discussed in a later essay). Isaacs noted that such children had high intelligence and self-awareness; in modern terms, they will never be able to chill out.

As adults, “good children” develop into moral perfectionists. According to licensed mental health counselor Leon Garber, such people can become so attached to a code of conduct — which may combine religious beliefs, societal norms, and their own sense of justice — that they will sacrifice the well-being of themselves and their loved ones to defend the code. At the same time, perfectionists are terrified that they might burden other people, even if they understand that others do not adhere to the same impossibly high standards.

A homeless moral perfectionist might feel guilty for couch surfing even if his friends were happy for him to visit, as that couch might be given to someone in greater need. A moral perfectionist with leadership skills might be reluctant to act as a leader since a more perfect leader could exist. Important, time-bound decisions might take seventeen years of research to ensure that all possibilities had been explored, and the morally correct choice had been made. Once deciding, the choice might be defended with black-and-white thinking: the morally perfect path was taken, this path was meant to be, and all other paths were evil. The only way to break free of this rigid thinking is to accept ambivalence. In more Tolkienesque terms, perfectionists must embrace the ambiguity.

Conclusion

In “The Shadow of the Past”, Gandalf constructed a potential series of next steps based on his morally perfect path and gently broke this news to Frodo throughout his monologue. During the process, he showed remarkable empathy, what he referred to as “Pity”. He used the mid-13^th century definition of the word, meaning “compassion, kindness, generosity” rather than “pitiful...wretched”. Gandalf likely viewed “Pity” as a religious concept; in the Real World, the word would not be split from “piety”, meaning “devotion to God”, until the 17^th century. When speaking of Bilbo’s choice to spare Gollum from death, Gandalf remarked, “It was Pity that stayed his hand”, a combination of empathy upon seeing another hobbit in a reduced state, feeling that the creature was wretched, and being influenced by divine intervention. Because “he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity”, it could not influence Bilbo as it has influenced Isildur and Gollum.

At the same time, Gandalf’s “pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good” is both his most praiseworthy attribute and fatal flaw. His experience as a foster child following Nienna in his “youth” allowed him to become the greatest of the Istari, perhaps the wisest of the Maiar, yet his obsession with goodness trapped him just as evil corrupted Sauron, and he turned to addiction to cope. In this way, Gandalf is a complex character, not the stereotypical good and wise leader who can do no wrong, but one with a human ability to fail at what he most desires. Gandalf may feel pity for all of Arda, but the reader can feel pity for him.