RIVENDELL: GANDALF
There are other images hidden within this picture too. Below (fig. 1.4) is a schematic of a hidden image representing 
Gandalf in the right-hand cliff next to the crowned man. The brim of the hat is suggested by an overhang implied by the shading of the rocks underneath it. We’re told that Gandalf’s hat is blue, but you can’t have blue grass. However we do have an unusual sky blue patch of mountains next to the hat. This I’ve found to be one of Tolkien’s riddling methods. In the riddle of the hat he presents us with a large hat perhaps suggesting a pointed top, adjacent to the blue mountains. He is inviting the link between the blue mountains and the hat. In this way we can piece the pictorial riddle together using the text with which we arrive at a blue pointed wizard’s hat.
This is the same marriage between his drawings and text we saw in Ei Uchnem. Tolkien has a writing and riddling method of gradually and subtly building meaning across a text through association as “linking”. He speaks of linking and a “missing link” (Letters 527, #294), as if referring to links in a chain of argument. This idea is replicated in his “linking” within LotR. (Letters 147, #91). The relevant accompanying text is predictably the moment he describes Gandalf’s hat:
“All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff. He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which a white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots.
‘Good morning!’ said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat” (Hobbit 1.13).
The image tied to this moment of text is of the painting Rivendell Tolkien created after the text, which is very sunny, the grass on the hatted-hill is very green and we can see that the brim of the hat avoids Gandalf’s bushy eyebrows,— a visual illustration of the text that his eyebrows do indeed stick out beyond the brim of the hat. “Bushy” suggests plants. And “shady”, apart from the surface interpretation of shading him from the sun also means: ““disreputable” […] “of questionable merit, unreliable”“. Tolkien’s words on his own works, his “contrasistency” is exactly that: “unreliable”. This is supported by his words to Kilby:
“he said one day that, if I would hold it confidential, he would “put more under my hat” than he had ever told anyone. But as time went on I realized that any discussion of his most deeply private world was simply impossible for him. Indeed, for a period it seemed to me that the very idea generated its contrariety and modified the ordinary generosity of his conversation” (TatS 34).
As we’ll see, here in his hidden imagery, given the large brimmed hat, Tolkien has been keeping things under his own hat.
Bilbo, the crowned man is almost straining to be above Gandalf and is looking to the spire of Erebor which resembles the wizard’s hat. Bilbo aspires to become a wizard like Gandalf. His smoke rings and later interest in lore emulate Gandalf. Indeed, his Red Book of Westmarch is LotR. Bilbo begins as a very unwilling participant on the quest but Gandalf in his prescience sees something, a “spark” in Bilbo which is highly unusual. Bilbo finds the One Ring in Hobbit and Rivendell is the place he accepts the quest to save the world and destroy the Ring in LotR:
“Bilbo was specially selected by the authority and insight of Gandalf as abnormal: he had a good share of hobbit virtues: shrewd sense, generosity, patience and fortitude, and also a strong ‘spark’ yet unkindled. The story and its sequel are not about ‘types’ or the cure of bourgeois smugness by wider experience, but about the achievements of specially graced and gifted individuals. I would say, if saying such things did not spoil what it tries to make explicit, ‘by ordained individuals, inspired and guided by an Emissary to ends beyond their individual education and enlargement'” (Letters 510, #281).
“Emissary” is from: “Latin emissarius “a scout, a spy”“. So we see Foxrook again. Bilbo was chosen because he would make a good thief. One of the meanings of “shrewd” is “wicked” (from “witch”). The etymology of “wicked” gives “Old English “wicca“, “wizard”“, evidence that Bilbo aspired to be like Gandalf. But given Tolkien’s description of his aunt who accompanied him on the Lauterbrunnen adventure, as “shrewd” (Letters 438, #232), I think we can take the “evil” sense with humour. We might infer he is jesting that she almost got him killed in the famous rock fall.
At the head of letter #281 from 1965 concerning a later paperback edition of Hobbit, we get another clue about the hidden imagery in the Rivendell image. He refers to his Death of Smaug (Pictures 19) drawing which was produced at the beginning of the series of images which culminated in his painting Rivendell.
“I am still not very happy about the use of this scrawl as a cover. It seems too much in the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it. But perhaps there is a distinction between their productions and one by a man who obviously cannot draw what he sees” (Letters 509-510, #281).
These are two statements suggesting opposites, mirror images. In 1931 in ASV, six years before drawing Death of Smaug and Rivendell, Tolkien describes the little man as a philologist “There must be a secret hierarchy of such folk. Where the little man stood in this, I do not know” and the little man’s art, also in terms of drawings, the art of:
“hidden craftsmen, I can only surmise – and I surmise the range runs, if one only knew, from the crude chalk-scrawl of the village schoolboy to the heights of palaeolithic or bushman art” (8).
I’ve already pointed out the marriage between his narratives and its pictorial other half. “Scrawl” reveals: ““write or draw awkwardly and untidily”“. So, from the evidence I believe that Tolkien is referring to his own self when he speaks of Bilbo’s shrewdness. Bilbo is the “little man”—who is Tolkien, and the little man aspires to be a wizard, Gandalf, who is also Tolkien-Odin. Tolkien tells us in a letter about the German edition of Hobbit, that Gandalf is an “Odinic wanderer” (Letters 172, #107). The Hobbit after all initiated Tolkien’s rise to fame and success and is filled with riddles, both textual and pictorial: Odin’s “dark sayings”.
Tolkien described his Death of Smaug for Hobbit as scrawl and then speaks in terms of drawing and concealing and then drawing and seeing. Rivendell was based on the Lauterbrunnen valley. The Lauterbrunnen is a valley between limestone precipices. Limestone is commonly white to gray in colour and off-white. The cliffs in which the hidden Gandalf image appears are white. If we consider a link between the hidden art “chalk-scrawl” of the little man and the scrawl of his art for Hobbit we do find a connection in the chalk limestone cliffs of the Lauterbrunnen, Rivendell: “Old English cealc “chalk, soft white limestone“. Given that Tolkien was talking in the letter about the publication of Hobbit once again, his mind was surely cast back to that moment when he chose to compliment this narrative in Hobbit with this still undiscovered visual riddle from 1937. And my point goes further in that this riddling which took on a textual form seamlessly coupled with a visual form was something he had done all of his artistic life as evinced by Ei Uchnem, Undertenishness, Before, Eeriness, and I Vene Kemen. The author has discovered over fifty hidden images in Tolkien’s works.
Odin has many names relating to deceit such as: “Riddler”, “Wise One, concealer”, “the One who is many”, “Swift in Deceit, Swift Tricker, Maddener”, “Wise in magical spells”, “Changing, Fleeting (or shape-shifter)”, “Quarreller” (“List of Names of Odin”). Odin had two ravens. Old English “hroc” (“rook”) was used for raven. Consider “Fox-rook” and trickery and the ravens in Hobbit. The “One who is many” relates to why we can identify Tolkien with Gandalf, Bilbo, the Moon, Smëagol, etc. Odin is called “Quarreller” too. Both names describe Gandalf’s deceit in turning the trolls to stone in which he plays the quarrelling voices of all three trolls. We can link this to my point about Tolkien’s use of the pun on “row” to mean a “quarrel” because the trolls’ first quarrel is described as a “gorgeous row” (Hobbit 2.39), and the quarrels in Eeriness and I Vene Kemen. This of course is the source of the Alvismæl acrostic riddle in The Poetic Edda poem Alvíssmol (“All-wise’s Sayings”), identified by Roberts, in which Thor riddles with the deceitful dwarf Alvis (“all-wise”) delaying him until the sun comes up which turns him to stone. We observe that both trolls and dwarves are made from stone. Odin appears in the poem.
“Thor spake:
6. “Vingthor, the wanderer | wide, am I,
And I am Sithgrani’s son;”
[…]
“6. Vingthor (“Thor the Hurler”): cf. Thrymskvitha, 1. Sithgrani (“Long-Beard”): Othin]” (The Poetic Edda 185).
Odin is given at least four names pertaining to “wise”. Gandalf-Tolkien is the wise one who is many and who maddens the trolls into quarrelling.
From the list we can also see Odin’s names include: “Hatter, hat-wearer”, “Broad Hat”. Gandalf’s hat is described as “shady“. “Mirk” is essentially “murk” which means “dark”, “obscure”, “gloomy”. “Shade” relates to “gloomy”, “dark”. This again links Gandalf’s hidden, forested hat in Rivendell to Mirkwood. An “enigma” is a “dark saying, riddle”. The hat and other hidden imagery are riddles, dark sayings. Therefore we can link his hat to Mirkwood, the hidden imagery, and to his words to Kilby about putting secret things under his hat. We find more significant hints to the riddle. Tolkien creates meaning via word repetition across links, which might include word meaning and (sometimes hidden) etymology:
“they could see the forest coming as it were to meet them, or waiting for them like a black and frowning wall before them. The land began to slope up and up, and it seemed to the hobbit that a silence began to draw in upon them. […] By the afternoon they had reached the eaves of Mirkwood, and were resting almost beneath the great overhanging boughs of its outer trees. Their trunks were huge and gnarled, their branches twisted, their leaves were dark and long” (Hobbit 7.113).
The forest is personified which suggests a person,—here Gandalf. Gandalf is frowning in the cliff face (wall) image (frown: ““contract the brows as an expression of displeasure”“). His hat surely slopes up and up. Consisting of trees and vegetation it overhangs the cliff-face, shading (making dark), concealing as Odin the concealer, Gandalf’s face like his hat. Indeed “dark” like the “dark-sayings” of Odin-Gandalf-Tolkien, the riddler. Gandalf’s eyebrows can be linked to the “brow” of the hill they form via Thomas the Rhymer, the “ferny brae”, which Tolkien quotes in OFS. “Brae”: ““steep slope,” […] “the side of a hill,” […] Old English bræw “eyelid,” German Braue “eyebrow” […] cf. OE. eaghill ‘eye-hill’=eyebrow“. We’re told “the bonny road That winds about yon fernie brae? That is the road to fair Elfland” (29). They meet the Elvenking in Mirkwood which links the hat to this description of Mirkwood. Both “gnarl” and “wind” give “twist”.
It’s well accepted that Gandalf represents Tolkien. Tolkien told Resnick that his works and his interaction with researchers of it, was a game and he held the key. There are a few references to Odin in the cited list relating to him holding keys, in positive and negative senses: “Fetter Loosener”, “Fetterer”, “God of Prisoners”. Just before they enter Mirkwood Gandalf goes to the attack on Dol Guldur. As a result the company are imprisoned in the Elvenking’s dungeons. However, ninety years previously Gandalf freed the map and key to Erebor from Thrain imprisoned in Dol Guldur. In this we can see both senses. Gandalf is named “Láthspell” by Gríma in the Golden Hall passage in which he frees Théoden from bondage and puts Gríma in bondage, before casting him out. The element “lath” relates to “loathly” but also “lattice”. Tolkien leaves us a hint to Gandalf’s nature and identity on the floor of the entrance to the Meduseld in “branching runes and strange devices intertwined beneath their feet” (LotR 3.VI.512). This invokes the “knotwork” of Anglo-Saxon art and hints at the branches of Mirkwood’s trees.
