Are artists illustrating Gandalf wrong?

D

duats

Grey Havens
So I finally got a copy of The Nature of Middle-earth and something caught my eye:

"If I had known that Pauline Baynes was going to make a picture of Gandalf, I could have shown her a sketch I made long ago, showing him coming up the path to Bilbo’s hole with his (“battered”) blue hat more or less so. Or better: the picture from which my personal vision of him was largely derived. This is a picture postcard acquired years ago – probably in Switzerland. (...) He has a humorous but also compassionate expression – his mouth is visible and smiling because he has a white beard but no hair on his upper lip." - J.R.R. Tolkien

There's also an image comparing Der Berggeist with Tolkien's own illustration of Gandalf.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.c...zpk7lF0eRCTx4Z3duwyz_RZIPFWKVnP_eDQ=w400-h400

Pretty striking similarities in the face. So does this basically mean that Gandalf is meant to have a beard without a moustache? I've NEVER seen Gandalf depicted as such.
 
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...within the past year, and the evidence seems pretty solid as far as Lore debates about character appearances go. But I won't complain if this never catches on in the wider world of Tolkien illustrations. [:P]
 
Was the fact that Tolkien said that he imagined many of his characters beardless. This is not quite the hippy look which the movies portrayed!
 
It might be odd that JRRT should describe the visible mouth slash no-hair-on-the-upper-lip found in the Der Bergeist picture . . . if he didn't intend this to hold for his Gandalf.

That would mean he just chose to describe the picture regarding this!

On the other hand, Tolkien wrote "largely" derived, noting that the beards of the two characters are not the same, considering length!

Or . . .

"The Berggeist has a green hat, and a scarlet cloak, blue stockings and light shoes. I altered the colours of hat and cloak to suit Gandalf, a wanderer in the wild, but I have no doubt that when at ease in a house he wore light blue stockings and shoes."
Click to expand...

Here again JRRT appears to say, even the shoes and stockings of the Mountain Spirit can fit . . . and yet the shape of the hat doesn't. Then again, the picture Tolkien drew, despite it being not very detailed (possibly given the size of the character in the original) does seem to suggest "no moustache".


Isn't there a Tolkien rendering of Gandalf (and the Trolls) -- if I recall correctly, with a shorter beard than this Hobbiton version you linked to?

Although the text says Gandalf's white beard hung below the waist!

As to "wrongness", hmm. Well, JRRT refers here to his "personal vision" of Gandalf, and no doubt he wanted to show one of these pictures to Pauline Baynes, but could Tolkien claim that an artist who envisions Gandalf with a moustache is wrong?

Granted, he never said (that I'm aware of) that Gandalf had a moustache!


In short, another post by me that has words in it [;)]
 
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although Tolkien said somewhere (I can't remember exactly where, it might have been in the Carpenter biography, but don't hold me to it) that he'd welcome artists of all kind to expand on his groundwork.

But then he seems to be very protective of his work.

I for one don't give a flying figwit about what JRRT meant for Gandalf to look like, or Bakshi or PJ or Lee or Howe or...

I *know* what he he looks like -- in my head. Your mind is the only benchmark.
 
But as David Bratman notes here, Tolkien also said in the same letter that the notion was "absurd."

Hmm, I see that another TORN member also noticed Bratman's assessment.
 
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