My copy of A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger arrived today, so I turned immediately to the essay by Tom Hillman, Simon Cook, Jeremiah Burns, Richard Rohlin, and Oliver Stegen about dreams, memory, and enchantment. This is good stuff. Section 3 points out the many ways that Elvish dreams are described in LotR, which rang a bell with other things I’ve been reading lately.

As the consortium of essayists puts it, “we would seem to be justified in identifying Elvish dreams with a ‘clear vision’ generated from the memories and also the imaginings of Elves…” (p.132). This derives from an etymological extract from Unfinished Tales, where the name “Olórin” is glossed as coming from a word that means not-exactly “dream”, rather something that ‘included the vivid contents of their memory as of their imagination”.

So an old man cloaked in grey, wearing a big hat and carrying a staff, is associated with two kinds of mental activity that don’t translate easily into modern English. We’ve heard that before. All this time I’d thought of Gandalf as having a strong streak of Odin in his character, but it had never occurred to me to include Hugin and Munin in the package.