Gandalf Looking Through Scrolls

About

Gandalf Looking Through Scrolls or Gandalf Reading Scroll is a reaction meme format based on a The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring clip of Gandalf (played by Ian McKellen) looking through a pile of scrolls in Minas Tirith. In May 2023, the clip gained virality as a video caption format with jokes about people seeking obscure and forbidden knowledge.

Origin

On December 10th, 2001, the epic fantasy adventure film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released in the United States.^[1] In one scene, the character Gandalf visits The Old Archives in Minas Tirith, where he finds and reads the Scroll of Isildur, learning the identity of Bilbo’s magic ring.

On May 13th, 2023, TikToker^[2] @alwaysinattentive posted a video caption meme based on the clip of Gandalf looking through scrolls, setting it to Cornfield Chase from the Interstellar soundtrack and captioning it “The kid who first discovered the 15 minute teacher rule The post (shown below) received over 2.6 million views and 510,000 likes in two months.

Spread

On May 17th, 2023, TikToker^[3] @peanutgaym posted a video caption meme referencing the Slaves Should Be Free meme that received over 2.6 million views and 465,000 likes in two months (shown below).

Following the viral TikTok posts, the caption format saw further spread on Reddit, Twitter and iFunny. For example, on June 19th, 2023, Redditor^[4] D3sk4ri posted a GIF caption meme that received over 11,600 upvotes in three weeks (shown below, left). On July 3rd, iFunny^[5] user brongulus posted a meme that earned over 980 smiles in four days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References