The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  Island in sea. Take Frodo there in end.

  Radagast?

  Battle is raging far off between armies of Elves and Men v. Lord.30

  Adventures . . . Stone-Men [i.e., Men of Gondor].

  —HME VI.379.

  Unfortunately, in the absence of any development we cannot say what this episode would have been, nor how it would have fitted into the larger story. Radagast’s presence here was no doubt inspired by a desire to include all the elements possible from The Hobbit that had not already been explored; it is perhaps significant, given the absence of The Hobbit’s stone-giants from the sequel, that the ‘Adventure with [the] Giant Tree Beard’ appears in a similar list during this same period (HME VI.381).

  A second reference to Radagast, during one of the early texts of the Council of Elrond, adds his name to an account of what would happen if they tried to send the One Ring overseas rather than destroy it: ‘It would be too perilous – and [Sauron’s] war would come over the Shire and destroy the Havens. [added in margin:] Radagast.’ (HME VI.396–7) – but this is so allusive that there is no way to tell what Tolkien had in mind; whether it was Radagast who proposed the idea or voiced the objection (in which case he must have been one of those gathered in Rivendell to discuss the crisis), or what part he might have played in such a scenario.

  Within the published text, we learn from Gandalf’s words at the Council of Elrond that he considers Radagast

  a worthy Wizard, a master of shapes and changes of hue; and he has much lore of herbs and beasts, and birds are especially his friends

  —LotR.274

  but in the account that follows we also gain the impression that Radagast is somewhat careless of detail, if not a little dim, since he cannot get the name of the Shire right.31 He comes across as a good fellow but not overbold, since he seems prepared to wash his hands of the dire business once he has fulfilled his task and delivered Saruman’s message, riding off ‘as if the Nine were after him’ (as indeed they might well be) rather than accompanying Gandalf to Orthanc or taking direct action against the Nazgûl. More importantly, he comes across as gullible, since he is taken in by Saruman – but, to be fair, so too is Gandalf, who promptly rides into Saruman’s trap. In his original draft of this passage, Tolkien considered the idea that Radagast was working with Saruman and had also turned to evil, deliberately luring Gandalf into their trap, but quickly rejected it (HME VII.131–4 & 138–9). When contrasted with Gandalf, all these shortcomings seriously diminish Radagast’s stature. Yet Tolkien has a way of exalting the humble, and Radagast is no exception. Just as he undertook this errand for Saruman despite his aversion to travel and also pressing concerns of his own (see below), so he immediately promises his aid when Gandalf asks it. What’s more, he delivers on his promise: it is ‘honest Radagast’ whose messenger delivers Gandalf from bondage and so foils Saruman’s plot (LotR.278–9).32

  After this point, Radagast vanishes altogether from the narrative, and his fate is one of the very few loose ends in a tightly-knit story. In some slightly later notes [circa 1940?] Tolkien considered giving Isengard to Radagast after Saruman is cast out from their order (HME VII.212), but this idea disappeared from the story before that scene was written. He does not attend the Council of Elrond, but then we are told he was ‘never a traveller, unless driven by great need’ (LotR.274). More ominously, when messengers from Rivendell reach his home at Rhosgobel in Mirkwood to bring him word of Frodo’s mission they find it abandoned (LotR.291), and he does not appear at the Grey Havens to take ship back to the Undying Lands at the end of the story. While Rhosgobel is not shown on the Middle-earth map published with The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, we are told that it lay ‘near the Southern borders of Mirkwood’ (DAA.167; cf. also LotR.274), and it does appear on Tolkien’s original draft for that map reproduced in The Treason of Isengard (HME VII.305), near the Gladden Fields (cf. LotR.291) under the western eaves of the great forest roughly halfway between the Forest Road and Dol Guldur (here still known as Dol Dúghul).

  The explicit statement that Radagast failed in his mission comes not from the main text of The Lord of the Rings but the unused Index entry on the Istari:

  Indeed, of all the Istari, one only remained faithful [i.e., Gandalf], and he was the last-comer. For Radagast, the fourth, became enamoured of the many beasts and birds that dwelt in Middle-earth, and forsook Elves and Men, and spent his days among the wild creatures.

  —Unfinished Tales, p. 390.

  This view is reinforced by a scrap of alliterative verse on the sending of the Istari, which includes the passage:

  of the Five that came from a far country . . .

  One only returned.

  —Unfinished Tales, p. 395.

  In short, Radagast ‘went native’, and as such can be judged to have failed, but only if his mission is defined in the terms used in the Istari essay from the unpublished Index: to focus his attention on ‘Elves and Men’. Moreover, this judgement seems uncharacteristically harsh in light of what is said about Radagast within the actual published text of The Lord of the Rings. Radagast never supported Sauron in any way, and other indications suggest that defending birds and beasts against the earth-destroying Darkness that had ravaged the Brown Lands (once the Garden of the Entwives), desecrated the landscape before the Black Gate (‘Here neither spring nor summer would ever come again . . . a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing’ – LotR.657), and left Mordor a dying land (cf. LotR.956) was in fact part of Radagast’s mission – his special brief, as it were (see below). From ‘The Tale of Years’ (Appendix B, LotR.1127) and ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ (Unfinished Tales p. 338) we know that Sauron’s forces in Dol Guldur attacked the wood-elves’ realm in late June, or just before Radagast finally found Gandalf at Midsummer and hurried away homeward. In hindsight, it does not seem too much of a stretch to speculate that the cause of his haste to get Saruman’s and Gandalf’s business done was foreknowledge of the impending attack and concern over the denizens of the forest whom he had taken under his protection – a concern with which we would expect Tolkien to be altogether in sympathy, so long as it did not replace a concern for the greater world and its peoples (which, from the messengers he dispatched to Orthanc, it seems not to have done); cf. the sympathetic treatment of Treebeard, who transcends concern for his own forest into risking self-sacrifice for the good of others.

  It seems that we have thus in Radagast someone who insofar as he is able opposes Sauron and all he stands for, and rightly values those creatures who are Yavanna’s domain, but perhaps undervalues the children of Ilúvatar upon whom all the other Istari focus. His devotion to birds and beasts can be seen as parallel to Gandalf’s fondness for hobbits, and his friendship with Beorn suggests that he aids not just the bears and other animals but also the wood-men who later become the Beornings. Perhaps Gandalf’s words to Denethor can be applied more literally to Radagast:

  . . . for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task . . . if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come.

  —LotR.788–9.

  Tolkien’s later, post-Lord of the Rings writings on Radagast bear out this view. Thus his being foisted upon Saruman as a companion at Yavanna’s request in the account of the Valar choosing the Istari (date unknown; Unfinished Tales p. 393) need not be taken as a further diminishment of Radagast so much as yet another example of Saruman’s pride from the very beginning of his mission (one of the great Vala should not have to ‘beg’ a Maia to take a companion on a dangerous mission). Then too there is a curious passage in a meditation on Sauron’s motives written in the late 1950s, where Tolkien writes that Sauron believed others motivated wholly by self-interest like himself. The pronoun references in the following passage are unclear, but if I have interpreted them correctly then it casts both Gandalf and Radagast in a new light by closely associating them together in Sauron’s mind and contrasting them both with Saruman.

  His
[Sauron’s] cynicism . . . seemed fully justified in Saruman. Gandalf he did not understand. But certainly he [Sauron] had already become evil, and therefore stupid, enough to imagine that his [Gandalf’s] different behaviour [from Saruman’s] was due simply to weaker intelligence and lack of firm masterful purpose. He [Gandalf] was only [in Sauron’s view] a rather cleverer Radagast – cleverer, because it is more profitable (more productive of power) to become absorbed in the study of people than of animals.

  —‘Myths Transformed’, HME X.397.

  This closer association with Gandalf – in fact, a full circle returning to the days when he was Bladorthin’s only fellow wizard mentioned in The Hobbit – is reaffirmed in Tolkien’s last writings on the subject [circa 1972/73]. Here Tolkien discards the idea, traceable back to the essay on the Istari from the unused LotR Index, that all the other wizards except Gandalf had failed – e.g., where he said of the two Blue Wizards that

  whether they remained in the East, pursuing there the purposes for which they were sent; or perished; or as some hold were ensnared by Sauron and became his servants, is not now known.

  —Unfinished Tales p. 390.

  This idea had been most explicitly spelled out (albeit with no mention of Radagast, who once again proves the most elusive of all the wizards and the hardest to pin down) in Tolkien’s 1958 letter to Rhona Beare, where he says of the two unnamed wizards

  I think they went as emissaries to distant regions, East and South, far out of Númenórean range: missionaries to ‘enemy-occupied’ lands, as it were. What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and ‘magic’ traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron.

  —JRRT to Rhona Beare, 14th October 1958; Letters p. 280.

  In his final writings Tolkien reverses his earlier position, now suggesting instead that all four of the Istari except Saruman in some measure remained true to their missions. He affirms that Morinehtar [‘Darkness-slayer’] and Rómestámo [‘East-helper’], as he now names the two who journeyed into the East, were indeed sent into enemy-occupied territory [HME XII.384–5]. From what we now know of Radagast, we can surmise that the same must have been true of him, since he established his dwelling in southern Mirkwood, near the Necromancer’s lair in Dol Guldur. Furthermore, Tolkien no longer believes that the other two Istari, who may have come as early as the middle of the Second Age (circa S.A.1600; cf. HME XII.382), failed:

  Their task was to circumvent Sauron: to bring help to the few tribes of Men that had rebelled from Melkor-worship, to stir up rebellion . . . They must have had very great influence on the history of the Second Age and Third Age in weakening and disarraying the forces of East . . . who would . . . otherwise have . . . outnumbered the West.33

  —HME XII.385.

  Significantly, in these same notes Tolkien suggests that ‘[p]robably Gandalf and Radagast came together’ to Middle-earth (HME XII.384), once again closely identifying the two as essentially kindred spirits. Certainly Radagast’s close friendship with the Great Eagles (another characteristic he shares with Gandalf), depicted throughout the mythology as the noblest of all creatures and the representatives of Manwë the Elder King, speaks well of his overall character, as does his association with Yavanna, who along with Elbereth and Ulmo were the Valar whom Tolkien seems most to have admired. In the end Radagast should probably be viewed as a good fellow and a worthy wizard, but not an exceptional character like Gandalf, who transcends his original mission to become ‘the Enemy of Sauron’ (LotR.1007). A desire to stress Gandalf’s achievement seems to have led Tolkien to denigrate the other Wizards in the period immediately following the completion of The Lord of the Rings, while a retrospective view many years later recognized that their contributions, while less than Gandalf’s, were nonetheless worthy of praise.

  The Name ‘Radagast’

  As with many of the names in The Hobbit, Tolkien never provided a satisfactory gloss on the name Radagast: we do not even know for certain what language he intended it to be in when he invented it: Slavic (like Medwed), Celtic (like the Carrock), Gothic (like the real-world models for the Wood-men), or Elvish (like Bladorthin). We might assume that Bladorthin and his cousin would share names in the same language, which would make ‘Radagast’ Gnomish/Noldorin (i.e., Sindarin), but there is little support in the glossaries of that language to support this assumption. It is true that rada appears as a pencilled addition to the Gnomish Lexicon [circa 1917], as a word meaning ‘track, path, way’ (Parma Eldalamberon XI.64), but this seems to be a temporary borrowing from Old English rad (= ‘road’; see below) that was not, so far as I can tell, taken up in later forms of the language. In the Etymologies, which postdate The Hobbit, RAD- appears as a word-root meaning ‘to return, to go back’, with several derivatives meaning ‘east’: e.g., radhon ‘east’, Radhrost ‘East-vale’, Radhrim ‘East-march’ (HME V.382). Either of these might plausibly be applied to the wizard, who does live east of the Edge of the Wild, but I can find no satisfactory explanation of -gast in Elvish, and Tolkien’s hesitance to identify the name suggests it could not be accommodated within Sindarin as it developed, whatever its origin. When Tolkien does provide an Elvish name for this wizard many years later, Aiwendil (= ‘Lover of Birds’), it is in Quenya, not Sindarin.34

  Both times when Tolkien did address the name’s linguistic affiliation, he suggested a Mannish (i.e., human, as opposed to elven) tongue. The first of these occurs in the essay on the Istari from the unfinished LotR Index [circa 1954–5] – that is, almost a quarter-century after he invented the name – where Tolkien states that Radagast

  spent his days among the wild creatures. Thus he got his name (which is in the tongue of Númenor of old, and signifies, it is said, ‘tender of beasts’).

  —Unfinished Tales p. 390.

  However, by this point in the legendarium Tolkien had established that the spoken language of Númenor was Adûnaic (cf. Appendix F, LotR.1163), and the name ‘Radagast’ predates the creation of the Adûnaic language by more than a dozen years. Nor does the word (almost certainly a compound, like Gand-alf and Saru-man) resemble the Adûnaic language known to us from other sources, such as the names of the last few Kings of Númenor (Ar-Adûnakhôr, Ar-Zimrathôn, Ar-Sakalthôr, Ar-Gimilzôr, Ar-Inziladûn, & Ar-Pharazôn; LotR. 1072–3) or the presentation of fragmentary texts in that language in The Notion Club Papers (see particularly HME IX.246–7 & 311–12, and ‘Lowdham’s Report on the Adûnaic Language’, ibid.413–40).35 Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that an Adûnaic name would be given to a wizard in Rhovanion in the latter half of the Third Age.

  It is possible, however, that by ‘the tongue of Númenor’ Tolkien meant not what we might call classical Adûnaic as it was spoken in the Second Age but Westron, the Common Speech descended from it, represented by modern English in The Lord of the Rings. It is more probable still, given the linguistic situation of the region in which Radagast lived (as described in Appendix F), that the name is neither Adûnaic nor Westron but belongs to a different member of the same language family:

  Most of the Men of the northern regions of the West-lands were descended from the Edain [the Atani or Three Houses of the Elf-friends] of the First Age, or from their close kin. Their languages were, therefore, related to the Adûnaic, and some still preserved a likeness to the Common Speech. Of this kind were the peoples of the upper vales of Anduin: the Beornings, and the Woodmen of Western Mirkwood . . .

  —LotR.1163.

  Probably for this reason, Tolkien states in a very late note [circa 1972]:

  Radagast a name of Mannish (Anduin vale) origin – but not now clearly interpretable

  —HME XII.384.

  That is, ‘Radagast’ comes from one of the languages belonging to what we might call the Atani language family, just as Latin and English both belong to the Indo-European (or, more properly, Indo-Hittite). The question, then, becomes which
one. And, since Tolkien equated each of the Atani languages with a real-world European tongue, which real world language he used in this particular instance. The three primary candidates are Old English, Gothic, and one of the Slavic languages like Russian.36

  Of these, Old English fits best with Tolkien’s final conception of the language spoken in that part of the world in his legendarium at the time of Bilbo’s journey (or, if we take his system of parallels set down in Appendix F literally, the real-world language he chose to best represent the ‘Mannish’ language spoken in the Anduin Vale). It is the language spoken by the ancestors of the hobbits when they dwelt in that part of the world, it is the language spoken by the Eorlings, who also originated in that area, and best of all it is the language used in the (published) Hobbit itself for the werebear’s name, Beorn. And, as it happens, the name can indeed be parsed in Old English: rad is the name for one of the Old English runes (Rune 5 in the futhark); it stands for the letter ‘R’ and means ‘road’. And gast is the standard Old English word for ‘spirit’ (the direct ancestor of our modern ghost), with a range of meanings from ‘angel’ to ‘human being’;37 ‘Spirit of the Road’ is not unlike the meaning I have suggested for Bladorthin, ‘the Grey Traveller’ (see p. 53).

  However, despite the excellent fit in sound and etymology with Old English, there is the problem that Tolkien invented the name ‘Radagast’ before he changed Medwed’s name from the original Slavic to an Old English replacement, just as it predates the change from Noldorin Bladorthin to Old Norse Gandalf. We must therefore consider the possibility that the name is not Germanic at all but rather Slavic, and in fact the evidence for a Slavic Radagast is surprisingly strong, given how little role the Slavic languages played in Tolkien’s legendarium overall.38 Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum [‘Deeds of the Bishops of the Hamburg Church’; late eleventh century] mentions that the Wends, a West Slavic people who lived between the Elbe and Oder Rivers (in the area more recently known as East Germany), had a holy city named Rethra (Jacob Grimm calls it ‘the chief place of Slav heathenism’; Teutonic Mythology, vol II. p. 663) in which there was a great temple devoted to the god Radegast; in fact, Johannes Skotus, Bishop of Mecklebury, was supposedly sacrificed to the god there in 1066. However, an earlier chronicler, Thietmar of Mersebury (whom Grimm calls ‘Dietmar’; d. 1016), applied the name ‘Rethra’ to the people and gave ‘Radegast’ as the name of the town, not the deity worshipped there (who, from other evidence, was probably the well-attested Svarogich).