A Mistake by Gandalf's Actor, Ian McKellen, Led to One of The Most Iconic Lines in The Lord of The Rings

The Lord of the Rings is full of iconic scenes and lines that fans know by heart, and are known even by those who haven't had much exposure with the series. And certainly familiar to many is the line said in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by Gandalf in the scene when he faces the Balrog in Khazad-dum and says: "You shall not pass!"

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Viewers who watch in other language versions than the original won't notice this, but it was in this scene, and even in this line, that there was an error by Ian McKellen, playing Gandalf, which was let through to the final version of the film because the improvised line was liked by director Peter Jackson. It turned out that McKellen misremembered the sentence he was supposed to say here, so in the English version Gandalf says: "You shall not pass!", instead of: "You cannot pass!" as it is in the original, which is a book written by J.R.R. Tolkien.

This mistake doesn’t really change much, the meaning of the sentence remains the same and it is very similar to the original, so this is just a minor trivia for fans of the series who may be interested in it. Perhaps even some didn’t pay attention to it because of how accurately other lines are said here. Gandalf even says the correct "You cannot pass" the first time in the film, only the second time, when more emphasis is placed on the line, the error occurs.

Besides, it seems that this line in the film version trumped the book version, as it is the phrase "You shall not pass!" that can be heard repeatedly said by The Lord of the Rings fans. It was even noted by McKellen, who joked on the Graham Norton’s show in 2019 that he was "stuck with it."

So it looks like complete coincidence and human error helped create something that people have become so accustomed to that probably many of them don't even remember that this line might have sounded different in the original, and the film made a change to it that coincidentally came from Ian McKellen.

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