Gandalf’s Reference Desk Query

A little refresher. Having seen Bilbo’s Ring, Gandalf immediately suspected it was the One Ring. He had previously been assured by Saruman that the Ring was lost forever and went into the ocean. The only historical figure associated with the Ring, besides Sauron, was Prince Isildur of Gondor, whose story appeared at the beginning of the first movie. No one else had ever reported seeing it for themselves, and about 3000 years had passed. So, Gandalf went to Gondor.

In former days the members of my order had been well received there, but Saruman most of all. Often he had been for long the guest of the Lords of the City. Less welcome did the Lord Denethor show me then than of old, and grudgingly he permitted me to search among his hoarded scrolls and books.

"If indeed you look only, as you say, for records of ancient days, and the beginnings of the City, read on!" he said. "For to me what was is less dark than what is to come, and that is my care. But unless you have more skill even than Saruman, who has studied here long, you will find naught that is not well known to me, who am master of the lore of this City."

So said Denethor. And yet there lie in his hoards many records that few now can read, even of the lore-masters, for their scripts and tongues have become dark to later men. And Boromir, there lies in Minas Tirith still, unread, I guess, by any save Saruman and myself since the kings failed, a scroll that Isildur made himself. For Isildur did not march away straight from the war in Mordor, as some have told the tale.

From this we may understand that Minas Tirith did not have an archivist, and the scrolls of the city had not been properly categorized. However, Denethor, Steward of Gondor, informed Gandalf that Saruman had already been through the papers. Presumably, this made Gandalf suspicious and encouraged him to look closely at everything. (It’s not clear to me how Saruman was so sure he could gain useful information from ancient archives. Saruman sounds a bit like one of Lovecraft's occult antiquarians.)

These were unsorted papers written in ancient languages. So basically, Gandalf had to go through them all, ensuring he was able to read every page in every language, until he recognized one that had been written by or about Isildur. Gandalf reported that the Scroll of Isildur had probably not been read by anyone but him and Saruman. It sounds like it must have taken a lot of work and knowledge to find this in an unsorted pile written in multiple ancient languages. In Tolkien's time philologists would have jumped at such a challenge, but today historians are lucky if we can accomplish such a thing even for our PhD dissertations.

10th-17th century archival tools

Denethor reasonably explains to Gandalf that he didn’t have time to waste on old documents, as was probably the case with many medieval secular authorities. But what if his regime placed importance on old things, or if the texts had some kind of religious importance? He would have to assemble a team of philologists able to recognize what each document was about. Then he could simply make a list of every title he owned, as in medieval and early modern bibliographies. (Early modern European libraries numbered their lists, but Arabic and East Asian libraries did not.) This would make it easier for Gandalf as he could simply read through a single list; I guess a large one, since the library was quite ancient, but still better than having to look at each page. However, such lists are sometimes incomplete, and Gandalf might have to go to the stacks eventually if he didn’t find what he was looking for.

18th-20th century archival tools

You asked what a “professional historian” would do to find the Scroll of Isildur, and we are living in the 21st century now. It is rare that we have to look through handwritten lists of documents anymore. If there was a high demand to see the catalog, for instance a renaissance of antiquarian fascination in Gondor, some work would be put in to make more rational categories sorted by subject matter or author’s name. Such rationalized catalogs might also be distributed to other areas: maybe Denethor wanted to share his archival information with his brethren in Arnor, or with his branch libraries in local fiefs. Historians do use these print catalogs still, if they have not been digitized yet. If we stumble upon a brand new pile of very important papers (which I have done once before), it is often our first instinct to sort them and catalog them, before we do any actual research. I suppose if we were worried about the possibility that the One Ring had appeared in the Shire, we might skip this step, but such urgency is rare in our profession.

If Denethor had a lot of new manuscripts coming in — perhaps Orcish “movable type” is taking off in Gondor — he might want to make a card catalog, which would allow him to make frequent updates to his complete catalog while keeping everything sorted by author, title or subject. This would require him to hire full time library staff to ensure that the catalog was correctly matching all the new titles, which could conceivably put a strain on the limited financial resources of Gondor. Anyway, either of these systems would make it extremely easy to find the Scroll of Isildur.

21st century archival tools

To get really silly, a lot of historical research these days is done with metadata and digitized documents. Besides the obvious technological hurdles to getting the library online, given the diversity of Gondor's collection we would also need some software engineers and digital humanities experts, so that we could OCR the Scroll of Isildur and make the full text accessible to search engines. But just think, if Denethor had done this, Gandalf wouldn’t have had to travel to Minas Tirith at all. He could sit in the Hobbiton public library and type in the word “Isildur” in the Minas Tirith system, and most likely the scroll would pop up, assuming that the bibliographer had entered the metadata correctly. This seems to me like the most reasonable way that Gandalf would have gotten his hands on some forgotten 3000-year-old lore, if he were a 21st century historian (I am avoiding the counterfactual route of immortal elves remembering their time with Isildur).

This would have certainly removed a lot of the tension from the story, not just because Gandalf would have popped off down the street to the library, but also because Frodo would be long gone by the time the Black Riders arrived (or the Black Riders would have had to have been much speedier and less mysterious). One of many reasons why we can say Tolkien makes great use of his medieval setting.

I would imagine that his journey would be similar to one a historian takes in modern times. You're hunting and verifying sources. Specifically, primary sources.

Now, Mithrandir is lucky in that he has at least one living primary source for the initial action in Elrond, but a single source doesn't resolve your issue. Elrond can verify that the One Ring a) was not destroyed and b) was last seen by him in possession of Isildur. What happened afterwards, Elrond can't (so far as we know) help us. Your people that you can interview after the fact are nice, but cannot be wholly trusted (at least in cases of merely human recollection) because memory is imperfect.

After we exhaust interview primary sources, we are going to search for reports, journals and other documents from either Isildur or the people immediately around him. Fortunately, these were literate people as well as socially important so they had large numbers of people around them and they wrote stuff down. If you can locate those (which gets glossed over in the books, but considering that Gondor had shifted capitols due to warfare, its a miracle Gandalf found anything) then you're into historiography where you're trying to run down verifying documents on who wrote whatever it is you're reading and make sure that they are legit (i.e. were they where they said they were, could they reasonably know stuff about what they wrote about, etc.). Today, you can make things easier by starting with well-regarded publications and look at their sources. Gandalf might not have had that luxury (unless the authors of the scrolls he looked through cited their sources) but he did have the benefit of a) being immortal and b) being able to montage it in the movie, or just take about ten years in the book.

From there, you do your best to verify what you found.

Tosses the ring into the fireplace.

A historian would mostly do the same thing Gandalf did and experience very similar obstacles to discover the provenance of Bilbo's ring.

First, he sought the knowledge of someone more educated on the subject, Saruman. There weren’t any lengthy texts written by Saruman on the subject like we would expect of a historian today, so he had to question the person directly. Saruman assured him the ring had fallen into the Anduin River and swept out to sea never to be found again, however, Saruman never shared much more information than this about the ring even though he was considered an expert. Gandalf had his doubts about this story as the ring’s effect on Bilbo became increasingly worrisome.

Gandalf decided to seek out primary documents at Minas Tirith. There was some difficulty gaining access to the documents as they at first declined and said Saruman had already pored over them. Getting access to a collection of primary documents or even old accounts, especially some that are so old, is a real difficulty you can face today. Sometimes they belong to a person’s descendants who may have stipulations for viewing them. They could be owned by an institute that publishes several volumes each containing select documents from their archives, so you’d need to acquire the specific volume somehow. However, Gandalf was able to talk his way into the archives where he found entries in Isildur’s journal about the ring, how it affected him, and how the lettering vanished as it cooled.

He then contacted the previous owner, Gollum, for an in-depth interview about his personal history and everything he knew about the ring. Granted, most historians would not do this by asking a royal friend to capture and interrogate the subject first. It’s much more polite to ask for an interview when you’re not holding someone captive. Not to mention the legal and ethical issues that arise these days. He made as much sense out of Gollum as he possibly could to determine what likely took place. One of the things he learned is that Gollum lived in the Gladden Fields and that’s where he found the ring.

Here is a good time to point out that people get facts wrong or could purposefully deceive you. You can’t take what one person said or what they said the first time as the absolute truth as other accounts could contradict what was stated. It’s normal to find such problems and historians tackle the problem in different ways depending on the focus of their research. So far, we have an expert on the subject who is purposefully withholding information from Gandalf, a very old journal supposedly written by Isildur, and the ramblings of a deceitful creature struggling to maintain its sanity.

Gandalf then returns to the Shire and has the ring cast in a fire to test Isildur’s entry about the lettering being visible while the ring was warm thus proving Frodo is in possession of the one ring and strongly suggesting Saruman’s betrayal. Events diverge quite a bit here as historians don’t typically advocate for the destruction of an artifact and outright refusal to return it to the rightful owner once provenance is proven. Unless they are British during the colonial period.

Edit: Adjusted to reflect u/xSuperstar's input the ring was lost in the Anduin and not the Gladden. Note the Gladden Fields was very much a marsh rather than open fields as the name might suggest and Isildur lost the ring in the reeds and muck.

Folks have already touched on some key points here.

The most important here is that Gandalf has a resource that no historian in our world might have, which is he has an unimpeachable witness to an event thousands of years old, namely, Elrond. This is one way in which many fantasy worlds are very different from our own. (Cirdan saw some of what befell the Ring in the same battle, so he actually has two witnesses.)

(As an aside, the interesting thing about the Istari is that they plainly don't have the same kind of memories that Elrond and Cirdan have: their memory is, by Gandalf's own admission, not infallible. Whereas we are more or less told that Elrond never misremembers for political or self-interested reasons nor because of cognitive failure.)

The second point that's come up already is that Gandalf has failed to investigate the One Ring for tangible reasons, e.g., he is part of a History Department, as it were, where a senior colleague has assured him that any further investigation of the history in question is fruitless. In effect, Gandalf has a chair who is warning him to study other subjects at risk of creating professional rivalry. So in setting out to research, he is already challenging an established historiography, which is that the Ring was claimed by Isildur (apparently the Council of the Wise all knew this much, based on Elrond's testimony) and that when Isildur was slain, the Ring passed down Anduin and to the Sea. A professional historian who sets out to challenge a strong consensus defended by senior historians in the academy knows they're doing something professionally provocative. In this case, it very much turns out that Saruman has been quite deliberately discouraging Gandalf from further inquiry precisely because he knows his own theory is inaccurate. The question is almost more "So wait, why hasn't Saruman done the work that a professional historian ought to do, especially given how strongly motivated he is to find the truth?" The archives in Minas Tirith are right over there, Saruman! But if I can be catty, a senior historian who knows there's a big problem with a favored theory important to their intellectual reputation can sometimes be reluctant to be seen working in an archive which demonstrates that even they have doubts.

edit: as u/Dirichlet-to-Neumann points out in response, Saruman has been in those archives, which Gandalf discovers through a chance remark by Denethor. My bad! The interesting question that follows is, "What other archives has he consulted?"

Sort of a short answer, but the LOTR universe features ageless primary sources (Elves) who have great memories. Much of our historical practices exist because humans do not have long-living primary sources. One cannot, for instance, acquire detailed information about the assassination of Julius Caesar from a passing elven merchant who happened to be selling wares in the forum on the Ides of March.

I think what you'd see is our modern historian conducting interviews with the Elves that lived through the creation of the One Ring, and then searching for secondary source material in Gondor's archives or that of the Dwarven kingdoms to trace its passage through time. Possibly they'd go Indiana-Jonesing around in abandoned forts and towers looking for other obscure references and artifacts to match up against Elven (possibly false) infornation.

The secondary information would contain hunches about the One Ring. That'd include increased sightings of the Ring Wraiths, stories of people going mad or reclusive, stories of invisibility, or sightings of known ring-bearers.

Now for the very adventurous historian one could also go east of Minas Morgul and begin systematically killing everything in sight until you just stumble into the One Ring through a combination of plot-magic, dumb luck, or intervention by local mythos (Shelob, Sauron, etc).

Another thing that occurs to me is that Middle Earth historiography might pose unique problems for a modern historian because of the presence of magic. A modern historian can choose to be skeptical about accounts of events that violate the laws of nature. The modern historian can also assume certain constants in human behavior: that multiple independent witnesses make an event more likely, that memory tends to erode over time rather than get better, that written accounts are unlikely to be made magically infallible, that ancient people didn't know the future, etc.

Without a clear understanding of what's actually possible, it might be harder to sift through documents. For example: Imagine encountering Herodotus's account of giant gold-collecting ants in a world where something sufficiently magical could actually create ants like that. Or reading the Alexander Romances where wizards might be able to actually do all of the things described. Some stuff can be dealt with using traditional methods (e.g., Michael Scot probably didn't create the Long Meg monolith with wizardry, since the monolith is more consistent with pre-Michael-Scot stuff...although maybe Scot had supernatural foresight and made the monolith look more ancient to mess with us...), but it seems like magic would complicate things.

Of course, Gandalf being a wizard helps enormously in the research enterprise. (Which makes me wonder whether we see so many wizards in fantasy being historians -- not because they're cleverer or better educated, but because they know what to look for...)

You've made my day, OP 💗, and so have everyone who answered. 🥰😊☺️