"What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!": Gandalf the Wandering Deconstructionist in The Hobbit

In The Lord of the Rings, the wizard Gandalf is a font of wisdom, a brave and self-sacrificing guide, and a kind of earthbound angel. His original appearance in The Hobbit, however, does not foreshadow the angelic origin he is later given or his reserves of wisdom; while he serves as a deus ex machina who gets Thorin and Company out of a number of tight spots early in the novel, he is a comic figure with limited powers and knowledge. For example, he cannot or will not read the Elvish writing on the blades found in the trolls' cave, and his spells are unable to keep the wolves and goblins at bay for very long in the Misty Mountains. In The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth, Timothy O'Neill claims that the Gandalf of The Hobbit is "merely an old conjurer with much dignity who could not bear looking ridiculous" (O'Neill 73). The implication in O'Neill's description is that Gandalf is somehow ridiculous, and indeed, despite his capacity for getting his friends out of the occasional scrape, he is often clownish. Much of the humor in Tolkien's characterization of the wizard comes not from actions or, as O'Neill would have it, affronts to his dignity, however; it comes instead from Gandalf's frequent soliloquies on the ambiguities of spoken language. In his approach to language as an ever-shifting play of signifiers in which the signified is never quite stable, Gandalf pioneers an approach to the analysis of language that would be taken up thirty years later in the late 1960s by Jacques Derrida and his deconstructionist acolytes.

Deconstructionists, like their structuralist forebears, deny that there is any natural relationship between signifier and signified, averring instead that signifiers are distinguished from one another only by their difference, and that the meanings of words, due to the lack of any external guarantor of meaning (logos), are ambiguous and can be resolved only through the intervention of something outside the text. In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man argues apropos of rhetorical questions that

A perfectly clear syntactical paradigm… engenders a sentence that has at least two meanings, of which the one asserts and the other denies its own illocutionary mode. It is not so that there are simply two meanings, one literal and the other figural, and that we have to decide which one of these meanings is the right one in this particular situation. The confusion can only be cleared up by the intervention of an extra-textual intention.

(de Man 10)

Essentially, in order to choose between multiple alternative meanings of an utterance, we need some clue as to the speaker's intent, whether from the speaker or from some other agent. It is largely through his tendency to interrogate the utterances of others to resolve (or to point out) ambiguities in meaning that Gandalf behaves like a deconstructionist.

As Tolkien was a professional philologist, it is unsurprising that some of his characters share his interest in the bizarre twists and turns that language often takes. The early 1920s, when Tolkien was finding his footing as a young scholar at the University of Leeds, were a particularly fertile period for theorizing about the nature of language, and many scholars were especially interested in the history and grammar of the English language. Arne Zettersten notes that

structuralism had made its entry into linguistics via the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose principal work, A Course in General Linguistics, appeared in 1916 and was considered a milestone in linguistics…

Scholars in English language such as the place-name expert Eilert Ekwall in Lund, or the grammarian Otto Jespersen in Copenhagen, were therefore highly respected in England and in particular by Tolkien.

(Zettersten 139–40)

Saussure's ideas, which provide the basic framework that makes Derrida's deconstruction possible, caused a sensation in departments of what was then called philology and would revolutionize the study of language and culture, particularly when adopted by anthropologists...