Hey Gandalf, fuck off. We're you literally there 3,000 years ago? Or are you just going "You're younger than me, so you know fuckall"?
Fuckin boomer
Doesn't matter. While that amazon shitshow tells a different story, Gandalf (as Radagast and Saruman) only arrived in the third age, long after the War of the Last Alliance. Gandalf might be infinitely older than Elrond yet wasn't there.
Am I wrong or do the wizards not remember their lives before they were sent to middle earth?
I don't think the original books ever told anything about it.
Iirc the books themselves didn't say, but Tolkien's letters say something to the effect of the Istari only having vague memories of their time as Maia, with the exception of things that they were explicitly meant to remember, e.g. Olórin's memories of being sent back after his physical death while fighting Durin's Bane.
They know that they are, in our parlance, embodied angels or minor gods, but they don't remember a ton of where they came from
Do the balrogs have the same memory issues?
That's a very good question, and one that I don't know the answer to. I would guess no, as the point of the Istari losing their memories was to make them more like the people they were sent to save; it's not something about being embodied that made them lose their bodyless memories, it was part of their mission. The balrogs had no such mission
Small nerd gripe. Maia is the singular form of Maiar. "I am a Maia," or "I am one of the Maiar" get you there
Maia who?
Maia he
Maia ha ha
something-something Núma Númenor
God, I love this community.
"Well I read in a book that I was there. I can't actually remember more than a few hundred years back."
Ashildr from Doctor Who was brilliant.
I'm wondering now, how our little brains would adapt to living like for thousands of years. Would we really start forgetting things that are waaaay back?
I've already forgotten most of my childhood and I'm only around 30. So I'd assume, yes.
Yes and no, probably. You will remember important bits and will reconstruct/imagine other things just like you do now. Even with our short lifes not all the things you "remember" actually happened.
You would forget most everything. Even big events would become fuzzy. Do you remember what you had for lunch on this date when you were 5?
It's Friday. Rectangle pizza
A breadtangle of pizza
"The Man from Earth"
Such a gem of a movie
This is a really interesting part of the Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
I SEEN IT!!
Perfect casting, too
I mean, sure he was alive. But he wasn't physically there.
Is Middle-earth juxtaposed between Top-earth and Bottom-earth or Right-earth and Left-earth?
The serious answer is it's juxtaposed with East and West. West being the Undying Lands of Valinor, and East being the much less well-explored Land of the Sun.
What's north and south?
More Middle-earth. South is Harad, and north is Forodwaith. Both of which are regions of Middle-earth.
Beginning-earth and End-earth
Guess where we are
So there were five godlike beings sent to fight Sauron. Only one of them did his job.
I need to reword it.
You are the big cool powerful god. One of your servants, a minor much less powerful god does bad things to the world. So you send five your other servants just as powerful as the bad one to deal with him.
A lot of time passes. Three of those spend their time chilling. One joins the bad one. The last one turns out too weak. Who solves the problem? Four hobbits.
You really should reconsider your politics after that.
But in the end, the task was successful, so everyone did what they were supposed to... Right?
Nice try, Saruman.
Wait till you learn about Melkor! He's a Vala, or one of the Valar, which is a higher order than the Maiar, and was basically super-Sauron from the before times
And he was scared of Ungoliant, and we don't know what she is, besides nasty, and hungry, and shaped like a huge spider (well, spiders are shaped like her, probably).
(He also got his foot almost cut off by an elf in single combat and walked with a limp ever after — well, at least until he got his hands and feet cut off by the rest of the Valar, I suppose —, but elves were mighty back then.)
Isn’t much of the power of the Maiar in diplomacy and setting events in motion? Gandalf was as much of an interloper and manipulator as he was anything else, and his hiring Bilbo as a thief was the penultimate piece of his mission, as inadvertent as I’m not entirely sure it was. Right? No, really, I’m kinda asking, I don’t know for sure.
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