In Defence of Radagast the Brown | Character Breakdown Video

in 1954 professor tolkien wrote that of all the istari one only remained faithful gandalf for radagast the fourth became enamored of the many beasts and birds that dwelt in middle earth and forsook elves and men and spent his days among wild creatures so did vadagast fail i mean there's no doubt that sariman failed and no doubt that gandalf didn't but what of radagast the brown maya govan and melanine are menix we laid my name's rainbow dave and welcome to another tolkien untangled lore video today i will be focusing on the mystery that is the brown wizard radagast and i'll try to get to the bottom of why tolkien implied him to be a failure and why radagast is still an awesome character nevertheless but let's begin with a quick overview of who exactly radagast is where he came from and what he got up to during the third age so just like all five members of the istari the wizards radagast was not always an old man robed in brown and he was not always known as radagast at some point in the early third age marnway the king of the valar so kind of like the king of the gods summoned a council in the uttermost west and he invited a number of the other most powerful valar from among their pantheon and some of the maya who are sort of like angels or demigods in tolkien's writings and manaway summoned this divine council to discuss the growing threat of sauron's return in middle earth now i talked about this in great detail in my last video about the istari so check this out if you haven't already to learn more but the long and short of it is that the valar decided to send five of them maya to middle earth to aid the three peoples in their resistance against sauron but they were not sent as warriors or as sorcerer kings they were simply to act as guides and helpers who would aid the free peoples but not rule them and they would not challenge sauron themselves and so these five maya were stripped of most of their powers they were stripped of most of their memories and they were bound in the limited bodies as of men subject to the fears and pains and weariness of earth able to hunger and thirst and be slain and so these five former maya became the five estari the five wizards but very interestingly the wizard who became known as radagast was not originally intended to be one of them back in the uttermost west there was once a maya called iowan deal which means lover of birds or friend of birds and he served a great lady of the valar called yavana the queen of fruits and trees and all growing things and javana was the wife of a guy called owlet the smith the craftsman of the valar and it was owle who chose a maya called kuromo to be the first of the istari the white wizard who would become known in the middle earth as saruman and the reason that this is relevant to radagast is because there is a fascinating little connection between radagast and saruman that goes back to the very very beginning kuamo was chosen by aolai and iowan deal was chosen by aolai's wife but we are told that javana didn't just ask kurimo to take iowan deal with him she had to beg kumo which means i guess either yavana really wanted to be rid of iowan deal which i hope isn't the case because both irvana and iowa deal seem like lovely people or more likely it means kuromo really didn't want to take iowan deal with him and i think this is worth pointing out this is very important in what i'm going to talk about later in this video because even from the very beginning there seems to be some sort of a reluctant link between saruman and radagast and yet in most ways they are complete opposites anyway after iowan deal arrived in middle earth bound in the body of an old man he became known as radagast the brown and the first thing to say about radagast after arriving at the grey havens is that he pretty immediately journeyed over the misty mountains and came to the vast forest of greenwood which would shortly become known as murkwood and there he stayed perhaps for the rest of middle earth's history settled in his woodland home called roskobel as his name implies radagast was a lover of birds and beasts and while the other wizards concerned themselves with men and elves and in gandalf's case dwarves and hobbits vadagast preferred the company of animals we are told that he did have some dealings with the woodsman of merkwood and baon of the skin changer did state in the hobbit that he was not a bad fellow but generally most of radagast's friends were wild animals and by far the most iconic of all of radagast's friends are the great eagles the servants of manway so the next question is what do we know about vadagast's actions before and during the lord of the rings well the answer to that is not much his name is mentioned once in the hobbit where gandalf refers to him as his good cousin but until the lord of the rings he is like a ghost of middle earth he is a mighty character who we know existed for over 2 000 years but beyond that we know next to nothing about him however in the lord of the rings radagast does appear pretty early on months before frodo goes off on his quest to mordor radagast journeys once more across the misty mountains in order to find gandalf and to deliver to him a message on mid-summer's day gandalf finds radagast just outside of bree and radagast warns him that the nazgul are abroad and they are searching for a place called the shire however radagast also has another message to deliver to gandalf and this is a message from saruman radagast tells gandalf that he must go to orthanc for saruman wishes to speak with him now as i imagine we all know this turns out to be a trap and when gandalf arrives at all thank he is imprisoned by his former friend sarah mann and at this moment in the story gandalf doesn't really know what to make of radagast is he a traitor who knowingly deceived gandalf on saturday man's orders or was he unknowingly manipulated by sarriman well the answer to this question comes in the form of a great eagle why hear the wind lord to be specific in the final chapter of the silmarillion of all places we are told that radagast the brown inadvertently aided sarriman in his hunt for the one ring but he did not do so knowingly sarriman gathered a great host of spies and many of these were birds for radagast lent him aid divining naught of his treachery and deeming that this was but part of the watch upon the enemy and so while saruman was revealing his treachery to both sauron and the free peoples and while gandalf was captive in orthanc after uncovering the truth of the one ring's location radagast was just kind of plodding on with his own thing befriending birds and beasts and sometimes sending those birds to sarah man and gandalf as messengers however it is in this part of the story that we see radagast's most important contribution to the war of the ring because despite gandalf's concerns radagast never was in any way a willing ally of sarimans after his turn to treachery he did not send gandalf into ceremony's trap knowingly he just did as he was told and then he did as he was told again before gandalf left radagast on midsummer's day to ride off to warfrank he told radagast to send out messages to all the birds and beasts that are your friends tell them to bring news to sarah mann and gandalf and this is a massive part of why saruman's plan to capture the one ring right at the beginning of the story failed saruman underestimated radagast now i'll talk more about this radagast sarriman connection in just a few minutes but i think it's very interesting to note that saruman the wise has a really low opinion of radagast the simple sorry man believed that radagast was just too stupid to be an outright accomplice and so he concealed his mind and deceived his messenger and to be fair this probably was actually the right choice from sariman's perspective we are told that gandalf caught no hint of anything wrong in radagast's voice or in his eye and if he had he would not have gone to eisenguard also talking tells us that it would have been useless to try and win over the honest radagast to treachery but because sariman made no attempt to deal with radagast beyond that the undoing of his plot was begun radagast saw no reason not to do as gandalf had asked and so he sent one of his bird friends aka gwy here the freaking wind lord to eisengaard to deliver the information to gandalf and sarah man that gandalf had requested eight days after gandalf's imprisonment in orthanc guy here came to isengard with tidings of gathering wolves and mustering orcs and the movements of the black riders and the escape of gollum but when gwyhere arrived he found that there were already orcs and wolves in the service of sariman and that gandalf was his prisoner and so the great eagle rescued gandalf and he bore him to edoras where gandalf would then go on to befriend shadowfax and together they would ride way back up into the north which means radagast serves as both the source of gandalf's imprisonment in isengard and also the reason for his rescue but then radagast completely disappears from the story after the council of elrond we are told that elephant scouts of rivendell journeyed over the misty mountains to merkwood to find radagast but when they came to roskobel radagast was not there he simply vanishes from the entire narrative never to be mentioned in the lord of the rings again i guess we could speculate that perhaps radagast played some sort of a role in getting gwy here and the other eagles to the black gate you know towards the end of the return of the king and maybe he remains in middle earth long into the fourth age but we just don't know radagast is one of the great dangling threads that tolkien never tied up however there is still an awful lot to be said about this character and from the story that i've just told it is kind of hard to see how radagast is a failure i feel like in some cases radagast is sometimes portrayed as being a bit of a lesser wizard whose power and knowledge isn't quite on par with gandalfs or sarimans and he's a bit of a lackey or a sidekick and although there may be some truth in this i certainly don't think radagast is a joke in fact i think his relative lack of you know showy grandeur is part of what makes him so fascinating and we know that he is not without at least some might again during the council of elrond gandalf tells us that radagast is of course a worthy wizard a master of shapes and changer of hue and he has much law of herbs and beasts now master of shapes and change of hue is a very cool little detail but it's pretty open to interpretation on the one hand master of shape sounds to me a little bit like shape shifting right but as cool as that would be i don't think this is what tolkien intended it's true that bayonne and his people are skin changers but i don't think radagast has the power to turn into an animal the whole point of the istari is that they are bound inside incarnate bodies if radagas could change his form at will then he wouldn't really be a wizard so the way i imagined this instead is that radagast is a master of camouflage he can walk unseen through the woods and blend in almost perfectly with his environment but i suppose it is possible that radagast could maybe cast some sort of an illusion that might change the appearance of his shape honestly all we can do here is speculate however when we think about radagast it is pretty impossible not to also think of the other two wizards that he rubbed shoulders with gandalf and sorry man and i'm not mentioning the blue wizards here just because whichever version of their story you choose to go with it has nothing to do with like radagast or the other much more famous third age wizards anyway in tolkien's own writings radagast is very directly compared to gandalf but honestly the comparison is not particularly flattering to radagast in that istari essay from the unfinished tales tolkien implies that just like sorry man radagast failed in his mission although he failed in a very different way to sariman of all the istari one only remained faithful for radagast iv forsook elves and men and in a section of morgoth's ring we are told that sauron considered gandalf to be nothing more than 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 and lastly in the lord of the rings reader's companion we are told that gandalf differed from radagast and sarriman in that he never turned aside from his appointed mission now if you're a massive radar guest fan as i myself am then this can be quite difficult to read you know i don't want to think of radagast being lumped in the same category as saruman sorry man sucks but to get to the bottom of why tolkien once considered radagast a failure we need to take a look at what exactly this appointed mission was what was it that radagast supposedly failed at well the short answer is guiding the free peoples in their resistance against sauron you know that is the purpose that he came to middle earth with that's the point of why the wizards even exist in the first place it's why the valar sent them and in this task yeah you know what fair enough radagast did kind of fail i can't really disagree with talking on that if we look at the mind-boggling number of ways in which gandalf aided the free peoples and the hundreds of strings that he was pulling at the end of the third age to ensure sauron's downfall and then we compare that to radagast's contributions which were basically just unknowingly providing the information that got gandalf captured and then unknowingly providing the eagle that allowed him to escape it's not a close contest the task was to help bring about sauron's ultimate ruin to befriend the free peoples and guide them to victory against the dark lord in that task gandalf succeeded spectacularly and radagast well he succeeded in befriending some birds and also some beasts but not like you know the dunadine or the noldor or even hobbits or any of the real movers and shakers in middle earth we can i guess speculate perhaps that he had some sort of relationship with thrandwheels elves but there is no evidence to support this thranduil lived in the north of merkwood radagast lived in the south and talking gives us no reason to believe that these two characters had any sort of a significant relationship what he does tell us however is that radagast was fond of birds and beasts and found them easier to deal with he did not become proud and domineering but neglectful and easygoing and he had very little to do with elves and men although obviously resistance to sauron had to be sought chiefly in their cooperation so if we agree that radagast appointed mission was to aid the elves and men of middle earth then yeah it is hard to argue that he didn't fail however i think there might be a little bit more to this than initially meets the eye because if we go all the way back to the beginning of the wizard story to that divine council of the valas the one where king manway chose to send maya emissaries to middle earth in the limited forms of the istari then we'll see an interesting detail the original number of istari was intended not to be five but three sorry man the white alatar the blue and gandalf the grey radagast was not originally one of them and it was not manway who originally sent him it was javana the giver of fruits and the lady of all growing things and radagast or iowan deal as he was known back then joined the three istari as a bit of an afterthought he was wizard number four and so perhaps we can speculate that radagast was to an extent exempt from the appointed mission that was given by manway to sauriman alatar and gandalf and instead radagast went with a mission from yavana in the unfinished tales tolkien writes about yvana's evident desire that the istari should include in their number one with particular love of the things of her making and he says that this could only be achieved by imposing radagast's company upon saruman and if radagast were given an extra mission by javana to help protect the trees and growing things of middle earth as well as guide its free peoples then certainly i think we can say that radagast was not an absolute failure he did i imagine exactly what yavana would have wanted him to in a 1962 letter that tolkien wrote to one of his aunts he said that every tree has its enemy few have an advocate within the fiction of his legendarium this exact sentiment is what prompts ivana to create the first ants way back in the beginning as a type of protection for her beloved forests and so maybe she sent radagast as another kind of protector a friend to all the growing things that have so many enemies and so few advocates and this may also explain why radagast is never mentioned again after the beginning of the lord of the rings the war of the ring is not his story it's not his purpose obviously if sauron ended up winning and taking control of middle earth then radagast's animal friends in the woodlands would surely be in dire need of his protection but if the free peoples win then the forests will still come under threat when sauron fell gandalf's task was done but perhaps radagasts wasn't we all know that gandalf sailed west after the downfall of the dark lord but radagast's fate that is never ever mentioned except that one year before the end of his life tolkien wrote a little 16-line illiterate of this poem in which he mentions quite a few different middle-earth topics but the first three lines of that poem went like this wilt thou learn the law that was long secret of the five that came from a far country only one returned others never again now these five that came are pretty unambiguously the wizards and the one only who returned is clearly gandalf but this fairly explicitly states that neither radagast nor any other wizard ever sailed west with him sarri man was obviously killed in middle earth and his spirit was blown away on a westerly wind as he deserved the blue wizards are a complete mystery and so too is radagast he failed to accomplish the mission of gandalf and saruman but perhaps he did not stay in middle-earth as a punishment for this failure perhaps he stayed because he still had a task to do i guess it's very easy to think of radagast as being a bit like gandalf light you know a sort of gandalf sidekick but that is absolutely not what he is he may have been first introduced in the hobbit as gandalf's cousin but by the end of his life i think tolkien had a much more nuanced opinion of the character than that and to be honest if radagast is anybody's lackey i would say he is closer to being sarumans than gandalf or at least he had the potential to be i talked at the beginning of this video about that complicated connection that exists between sarriman and radagast from the very beginning and i actually think radagast is at his most interesting when he's being compared to the other wizard that failed instead of the one who didn't remember radagast or iowan deal was chosen to be one of the estar because lady yavana begged for him to be taken along with the other three but she didn't beg gandalf to take vadagast with him she begged saruman radagast went to middle earth as saruman's companion and during his only real role in the lord of the rings he serves as saruman's unwitting messenger and yet sarriman seems to have an incredibly low opinion of radagast he describes him as radagast the bird tamer radagast the simple radagast the fool and this very mean spirited language reminds me a little bit of how sorry man talks to grima wormtongue perhaps sariman originally intended for radagast to be his servant and for radagast to fulfill the role that wormtong eventually went on to do but because radagast simply did not care enough about the task he'd been sent to do or perhaps because he'd been sent to do a different task he lacked the ambition or the pride that sarriman required to corrupt him maybe radagast's failure as talking puts it is actually what stopped him from becoming sorry man's henchman in the end middle earth really only needed one gandalf but two sarumans would have been disastrous all three of the third age wizards were sent to middle earth with a purpose but they all ended up doing very different things you know gandalf's take on the whole mission was yeah you know what actually i will help the free peoples like i'm supposed to saruman was more like nah i'm gonna rule the free people but radagast was of the opinion that both of those choices sounded like a lot of hard work and honestly i think he would just rather take it easy in murkwood gandalf succeeded in doing what he had to say man failed in doing what he wanted to and radagast just sort of disappeared to hang out with his animal friends but i respect that that's the point i'm trying to make perhaps if radagast had taken a more active role in the story and he had done a better job at guiding the elves and men of the third age then when gandalf fell fighting the balrog in moria he might never have been sent back as gandalf the white instead radagast might have just taken gandalf's place but without all his knowledge of western middle earth and without the friendships that he'd forged over the span of that age radagast would not have been enough to guide the free peoples to victory or perhaps if you'd taken the whole sauron ringlore thing way more seriously like saruman did radagast may have been corrupted by it and middle earth may have been stuck with two dark wizards but as it goes radagast did neither of those things he was just a friend to birds and beasts and he presumably remained with his friends long into the fourth age where i guess he would have lived forever as an old man of the forest free from ambition or great responsibility or any of the trappings of power i think the reason that i like radagast so much is that unlike many of my other favorite characters radagast is pretty easy to relate to i mean obviously he's a magical wizard who's lived for thousands of years and i'm not but his personality is something that i can definitely recognize in myself like you know it would be very nice to be as wise as gandalf or as incredible as galadriel or as wonderfully pure-hearted as frodo but at least i have the self-awareness to know that i'm not but radagast a guy with a fondness for animals who finds them easier to deal with than the constantly shifting politics of elves and dwarves and men yeah i can understand where he's coming from there he's nowhere near as heroically epic as gandalf but he's also nowhere near as arrogant and domineering as saruman pride and ambition our character traits that tolkien explores a great deal throughout his middle earth writings and we see the negative effects of these traits over and over again in melkor in sauron in feyenoor in our farazon in saruman in denathor even to an extent we see it all over the place but not in radagast he is the complete opposite if radagast has a character flaw it's that he's too laid back and easy going and perhaps he does fail because of it but he is never corrupted he never does anything harmful he just makes friends and lets his metaphorical cousin gandalf deal with the rest of the heavy lifting and honestly i cannot condemn him for that i think if we are going to fail in life you know if you have to fail then fail like radagast there are so many worse ways for us to live our lives anyway there are my thoughts and findings on radagaster brown i hope you enjoyed them and if you want to learn more about the wizards of middle earth then make sure you check out last week's video all about the other four wizards of the astari and if you want to go into more detail on a specific one then check out these lore videos about gandalf sorry man and the super mysterious blue wizards and the reason i'm suggesting these older videos is because this will have to be the last video that i released for a little while i will absolutely return but i've been releasing a new video every week now for the past six months and i do have other things that i need to work on but i promise i will not be gone from youtube for too long and when i do return i will continue with my first age still in my really on explained series where i will talk about the greatest battle yet the fifth battle for balleriand and after that i'll give the epic tale of the children of whorin the full tolkien untangled treatment so to make sure you don't miss any of those future videos hit subscribe and hit like and leave a comment on this video if you want to and if you're a fan then be sure to share this channel with your friends but as always until next time my dear friends much love stay groovy and nevia melanine [Music] you

Channel: Tolkien Untangled

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Id: lVFq9sHpClo

Length: 30min 44sec (1844 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022