Returning to the idea of whether The Stranger could be Gandalf, I went down a rabbit hole from twitter to reddit to Tolkien’s Last Writings from The Peoples of Middle Earth. There’s a passage about Glorfindel and discusses his meeting Gandalf (posted below). This passage implies that Gandalf may have visited Middle-Earth earlier than is otherwise known, and even that he might have met “others deeper in Middle-earth.” This could suggest that Gandalf may have had early encounter with Hobbits/Harfoots. The big question, I suppose, is why no-one else would know about it, or at least not enough to “record” any of it in ME history. Could it be possible that Gandalf met the harfoots and had an inpact on this story large enough to justify all the screen-time, but in a way that the other peoples who recorded history wouldn’t know about it?
