> How old is Gandalf? I recall in the recent Two Towers movie, he makes a comment something like "for 300 lives of men I have walked the earth." But what exactly does that equate to? If we were to take a typical medieval lifespan to be 30 years, that'd make Gandalf about 900 years old. If we assume a modern lifespan of about 80 years, that makes him 2400 years old. But it is my understanding that the men who lived before the fall of Numenor were quite long lived, and those still with strong Numenorian blood such as Aragorn lived quite a long time--I believe Aragorn lived to be 300 or so, if I'm not mistaken. So if the "average" lifespan of a Numenorian is 300 years, that makes Gandalf 9,000 years old.

Gandalf is older than the world. He is a Maia, which is something akin to a minor angelic being in Tolkien's mythos. When Eru Illuvatar gave life to the song of the Ainur, and thus created the world, several of his "children" chose to enter the world - these are the valar, or major powers, and the maiar, or minor powers. Gandalf belongs to the latter group.

If you mean "how long has Gandalf been walking around in Middle-Earth in human form," that would be since around the thousandth year of the third age (Appendix B), making his mortal form around two thousand years old during the events of The Two Towers.

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