history of - Did Tolkien popularize the generic description of a wizard?

Nowadays when we think of a wizard, the most common image we conjure up is:

• A wise old man with a long white beard


• Dressed in a long cloak and pointy hat (usually same colour as even old men have some fashion sense)


• Equipped with a staff used as both a weapon and walking stick

My most iconic image of a wizard is this re-edited image of a Lord of the Rings book cover:

Did Tolkien popularize this basic description of a typical wizard (mage, magi etc) or was there another famous piece of work which also described a wizard in a similar way?

The earliest I found was based on the Arthurian legend, Merlin which was written in the 12th Century. The following is an image from the 13th-century of Merlin by Robert de Boron:

I am not asking for a list, only for one piece of work which had a similar description of a wizard as I don't think the fantasy genre was very popular before Tolkien.

Answer

Tolkien, by his own account, had traditional images of the norse god Odin in mind when creating Gandalf, as we can see from his letter to Sir Stanley Unwin 7 December 1946 (107 in the collection)

[On the subject of a German edition of The Hobbit..]

I continue to receive letters from poor Horus Engels about a German translation. He does not seem necessarily to propose himself as a translator. He has sent me some illustrations (of the Trolls and Gollum) which despite certain merits, such as one would expect of a German, are I fear too 'Disnified' for my taste: Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of. ….

We can see from popular images of the wandering Odin that Gandalf is very similar:

Humphrey Carpenter gives an account in his biography of a postcard of a mountain spirit that Tolkien possessed on which he had written "Origin of Gandalf":

So while Gandalf has popularised this image of the wizard for today's generation, he is in a tradition of representations of Odin and wandering spirits/deities in the form of old men that go back for many hundreds of years, and can be found in a huge variety of literary and visual sources (particularly in Northern Europe).

If you want a specific example, go to the Eldar Edda from which most of our depictions of Odin can be traced (and which Tolkien used for inspiration).