20 years later, Ian McKellen's Lord Of The Rings filming blog is still charming as a hobbit's home

As social media has become the de facto way for celebrities to interact with their internet fans—for whatever definition of “interact” they deem comfortable or sufficient—it’s left some fascinating alternatives behind it in the rubble. None moreso than the celebrity blog, a now-mostly-defunct artform that saw famous people (or their assistants) often penning hundreds of words at a time in order to reach out to and connect with the people, and project their public image.
Most of these instances of blogging solipsism are gone now, of course, sunk like so many LiveJournals beneath the sands of the internet. But one of the first has just been pushed back into the sun, courtesy of its author: Actor Ian McKellen, who gently nudged his Twitter followers toward the journal he maintained, 20 years ago, while filming Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings.
Divided into The Grey Book and The White Book—to denote the status of pre- and post-Balrog Gandalf, of course—the blog is a fascinating, warm, and supremely charming thing to read through, collecting McKellen’s thoughts on the wily wizard, his time in New Zealand, and everything else that seems to filter through his thoughtful and inquisitive mind.
Here he is in the very first post, for instance, dropping a non-sequitur that then links back to the then-upcoming challenge of embodying one of literature’s favorite mages:
I am aware of the high expectations of Tolkien’s fans—like myself. But, never having imagined that I would ever play any sort of wizard, I am ill-prepared. I just worked with a witch, however, a white one, whose spells are formidable. Her energy is impressive. I shall have to come to understand the nature of Gandalf’s energy—what keeps him going. What keeps any of us going?