It seems clear that Gandalf’s Maia name is Olórin, and possibly that he was reluctant to take up his Istari responsibility and was the last of them to arrive in Middle-earth. But we do have some hints from his notes, as compiled and published by his son and archivist, Christopher Tolkien.
Tolkien also never quite settled on all the details of what Gandalf was like as a Maia before he died. Those five Istari were Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagast the Brown, and the two “Blue Wizards.” Those two went east of Mordor and were never seen again, and Tolkien declined to give them names or even explain what happened to them, since it had nothing to do with the War of the Ring. Those emissaries were known as the Istari, and the Valar sent five particularly high-ranked ones - Tolkien calls them “chiefs” - to the northwest of Middle-earth in particular, because that was deemed the place where it was mostly likely that Men and Elves could be rallied to oppose Sauron. So with the blessing of Middle-earth’s creator god, the Valar assembled a large group of Maiar to secretly send to Middle-earth. Gandalf the Grey and Saruman the White in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. And since the Valar nearly had to destroy the world to stop Sauron the last time he rose to power, they decided to send some emissaries to Middle-earth to make sure he was kept in check this time around. But, in the Third Age (that is, sometime after Isildur got his hands on the Ring in the prologue of the Jackson movies), Sauron began to amass power again. The Valar, Middle-earth’s cohort of caretaker gods, retreated from the world thousands of years before the time of The Lord of the Rings, and they took all of their Maiar with them. (Yes, the monster and Gandalf are the same species.) Also, Elrond’s great-great grandmother is a Maia - his family is very complicated. Other Maiar who appear in the Lord of the Rings movies include Saruman, Sauron, and the Balrog. And they’re sort of like angels, in that they are fully divine in origin (not half-human, like a lot of Greek demigods) and can change their form at will. The Maiar are sort of like demigods, in that they serve a higher order of godlike beings, the Valar. In Middle-earth parlance, he’s a creature known as a Maia (plural: Maiar). Gandalf is a divine spirit clothed in a mortal form.
Is Gandalf human? Can anyone be a wizard? Read on for everything you were always afraid to ask about everyone’s favorite weed-smoking magic grandpa.
I can provide answers to all these questions, because I’m a giant Middle-earth nerd who thinks The Silmarillion is a more enjoyable read than The Lord of the Rings, and pillaged Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales to enhance the accuracy of my own Lord of the Rings Twitter account. Is he, like, human, or what? What happened when he died? What’s the difference between Grey and White? What can wizards do, anyway? And who appointed Saruman president of wizards?
But his role in the movies is still full of ambiguity. The real power of McKellen’s performance is that you believe wholeheartedly in Gandalf.
Gandalf, the wise, mercurial, mysterious, and occasionally terrifying wizard is arguably more the face of the Lord of the Rings franchise than Frodo, its hero, or Aragorn, its long-lost king. The lack of an origin story didn’t stop audiences from falling in love with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, who studied Tolkien himself in perfecting his award-winning performance, fixing himself in the hearts of millions of fans. Movies and books are different beasts, and the former can only support so much exposition. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.