Saruman

Saruman the White is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He is a key figure in the novel The Lord of the Rings, but only appears in a few chapters. He is described as the first of his order of Wizards (or Istari), who came to Middle-earth as emissaries of the Valar in the Third Age. He is introduced as the chief of the Istari, and the leader of the White Council. In The Fellowship of the Ring, he casts himself as a rival of Sauron, the main villain of the novel.

His name in Tolkien's fictional language of Sindarin is Curunír, which Tolkien gave variously as 'man of skill', 'man of craft' and 'the one of cunning devices' (Old English searu mann).

Concept and creation

Saruman first appears in 1954's The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of the fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. Unlike some of the other characters in the novel, Saruman had not appeared in Tolkien's 1937 children's book, The Hobbit, or in his then-unpublished Quenta Silmarillion and related mythology, which date back to 1917.² The Lord of the Rings describes a quest to destroy the One Ring, a powerful and evil talisman created by the Dark Lord Sauron to control Middle-earth (Tolkien's term for the world in which his story takes place). An important early plot point is the failure of the wizard Gandalf to arrive as agreed to accompany the hobbit Frodo Baggins, who bears the Ring lost by Sauron thousands of years before.

When he started writing The Lord of the Rings in late 1937, Tolkien had very little idea of the story ahead and Saruman's character did not emerge until several years later. Tolkien later wrote of this early phase: "Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as concerned as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear".³ Tolkien tended to write in waves, proceeding so far before returning to rewrite, sometimes significantly, from the start. He had in this fashion produced a fairly complete version of the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring before Saruman appeared. A rough narrative outline dated August 1940, intended to account for Gandalf's absence, describes how a wizard titled 'Saramond the White' or 'Saramund the Grey', who has fallen under the influence of Sauron, lures Gandalf to his stronghold and traps him.⁴ This character developed fairly quickly into Saruman the White, traitorous leader of the White Council that opposes Sauron, and the most powerful of the five wizards.

Appearances

The Lord of the Rings

Early in the The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf describes Saruman as "the chief of my order" and notes his great knowledge of the magic rings created by Sauron and by the Elven-smiths.⁵ After Frodo and Gandalf are reunited at Rivendell midway through Fellowship, the wizard explains why he failed to join Frodo: he had been summoned to consult with Saruman. Believing Sauron's victory to be inevitable, Saruman had proposed an alliance with Sauron. When Gandalf refused, Saruman imprisoned him in the tower of Orthanc at Isengard, hoping to learn from him the location of the Ring. Gandalf observed that Saruman was creating his own army of orcs and wolves, "in rivalry of Sauron, and not in his service yet." ⁶ This is an evolution from the earliest outline, in which Saruman was apparently directly serving Sauron. The knowledge of Saruman's treachery became a key point in the decisions taken on how to deal with the Ring.

Most of the action in the first half of the The Two Towers, is provided by the conflict between Saruman's forces and the Kingdom of Rohan. Orcs from Saruman's army attack Frodo and his companions at the start of the book, searching for the Ring.⁷ Having betrayed Sauron by attempting unsuccessfully to seize the Ring for himself, Saruman's ruin is completed when his army is defeated by the Rohirrim and Isengard destroyed by the Ents, who were outraged by his destruction of their forests to feed his forges.⁸ Saruman himself is not directly involved, and only appears again in chapter X, The Voice of Saruman, trapped in Orthanc. He fails in his attempt to make peace with the Rohirrim and with Gandalf, and rejects Gandalf's conditional offer to let him go free. Gandalf casts him from the White Council and the order of the wizards.⁹

Saruman's final appearance is at the end of The Return of the King, after Sauron's defeat. He persuades the Ents to release him from Orthanc, and travels on foot as a beggar to the Shire, the Hobbits' homeland, which his agents are already forcing through a wilfully destructive process of modernisation. In the chapter The Scouring of the Shire, the Hobbits rebel under the leadership of Frodo and his companions and defeat the intruders. Saruman is set free, even after attempting to kill Frodo, but is murdered by his own much-abused servant Gríma Wormtongue.¹⁰

Other books

Accounts of Saruman's earlier history appear in several places: Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings (1955), 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age' in The Silmarillion (1977) and 'The Istari' in Unfinished Tales (1980). For the most part, the material was written at the same time as the later stages of The Lord of the Rings (some of the material in Unfinished Tales is later, from 1972), and these sources generally agree on the details. Saruman, like Gandalf, was one of five 'wizards', known as the Istari, who arrived in Middle-earth 2000 years before the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. Although they appeared to be elderly men, they were Maiar, supernatural beings regarded by Tolkien as being somewhat like angels.¹¹ Like other Maiar such as Sauron and Melian, they assumed more or less human-seeming bodies. The Istari are said to have come "out of the Far West and to be messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron." Saruman was appointed head of the White Council, but eventually succumbed to the desire for the Ring. About 50 years before the start of The Lord of the Rings, Saruman helped the White Council drive Sauron from Dol Guldur, albeit to expedite his own search for the Ring; but he eventually fell under Sauron's direct influence. The expulsion of Sauron (called 'the Necromancer') is mentioned briefly in The Hobbit (1937), but Saruman is not named.¹²

Unfinished Tales details Saruman's obstruction of Sauron's search for the Ring. Further detail on the textual history of the books, including Saruman's development, can be found in the later books of the History of Middle-earth series edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher.

Characteristics

Tolkien described Saruman at the time of The Lord of the Rings as having a long face and a high forehead, "…he had deep darkling eyes … His hair and beard were white, but strands of black still showed around his lips and ears." His hair is elsewhere described as having been black when he first arrived in Middle-earth. He is said to have originally worn white robes, but on his first entry in The Lord of the Rings they instead appear to be "woven from all colours [, they] shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered." ¹³¹⁴ Saruman's resemblance to Gandalf is remarked on several times in The Two Towers; most notably, after Gandalf is resurrected, he is mistaken for Saruman by his former companions, and says that he is now "Saruman as he should have been".¹⁵

Saruman is most often described by other characters in the book as a traitor or treacherous; the terms are used by Gandalf, Elrond, Treebeard and even by Sauron's Orc Grishnákh. Gandalf describes him as proud, cold and scornful. Pippin Took, having witnessed the destruction of Saruman's stronghold of Isengard, thinks that he "had not much grit, not much plain courage alone in a tight place without a lot of slaves and machines and things…" ¹⁶ In response, Aragorn points out that "Once he was as great as his fame made him. His knowledge was deep, his thought was subtle, and his hands marvellously skilled; and he had a power over the thoughts of others."¹⁶

The Ent Treebeard gives a different view of Saruman in earlier times, saying that he was polite and always eager to learn, although providing nothing in return. However, in Tolkien's other writings on Saruman's background, he is again reported to be proud and jealous, in particular of Gandalf.¹⁷

After the defeat of his armies, having been caught in the betrayal of Sauron, he is offered refuge by Gandalf, in return for his aid. Saruman rejects the offer quickly and angrily, but leaves "the anguish of a mind in doubt, loathing to stay and dreading to leave its refuge" plain to see.¹⁸

The power of Saruman's voice is noted several times. It was "low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment … it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire woke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves … for those whom it conquered the spell endured while they were far away and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them."¹⁴ Shippey has said that "Saruman talks like a politician … No other character in Middle-earth has Saruman's trick of balancing phrases against each other so that incompatibles are resolved, and none comes out with words as empty as 'deploring', 'ultimate', worst of all, 'real'. What is 'real change'?"¹⁹ This speech pattern is contrasted with the stoicism and directness that Shippey believes represent Tolkien's ideal of heroism.

Saruman is also said to have a deep knowledge of "the arts of the Enemy" and of "ring lore"; when he imprisons Gandalf he wears a ring and calls himself "Saruman Ring-maker". Treebeard says: "He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except insofar as they serve him for the moment."²⁰ Machinery and engines characterize both Saruman's stronghold of Isengard and his altered Shire. The damage done to the Shire by Saruman and his agents is widely assumed to reflect the destruction of Tolkien's semi-rural home in the West Midlands.^{citation needed} Tolkien seemed to have negative feelings about the use of such power, writing in a 1954 letter to the author Naomi Mitchison that "I am not a 'reformer' (by exercise of power) since it seems doomed to Sarumanism."²¹

A frequent criticism of The Lord of the Rings is that all of its characters are either good or bad, with no shades of grey. Noting this, in the same letter, Tolkien proposed Saruman, along with Denethor and Boromir, as examples of characters with more nuanced loyalties.²¹ Tolkien later wrote that the Istari, although supernatural in origin, were incarnated in the bodies of men and were therefore subject to the same possibility of sin as men. (Tolkien was a Roman Catholic and although The Lord of the Rings contains almost no reference to religion of any kind, he felt that it was nonetheless a religious work.²³) In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond suggests that Saruman fell through studying the "arts of the Enemy" too closely; later, during The Two Towers Gandalf surmises that it was specifically the use of the palantír, a seeing stone, which brought Saruman under the dominion of Sauron.²⁴ Tolkien later wrote that the Istari's chief temptation (and that to which Saruman fell) was impatience, leading to a desire to force others to do good, and then to a simple desire for power; in Middle-earth both the Ring and the palantír are artefacts which confer power.²⁵ In J.R.R. Tolkien : Author of the century, Shippey identifies Saruman as the best example in the book of what he calls 'wraithing', of individuals "'eaten up inside' by devotion to some abstraction", a distinctive 20th century view of evil that he attributes to Tolkien. Saruman's devotion to the goals of knowledge, organization and control is his weakness.²²

Names and titles

Tolkien was by profession a philologist, and by inclination an inventor of languages. Like most of his characters, Saruman was given names in more than one of the languages Tolkien created or adopted for his purpose. Saruman, the name most often used in the book and films of The Lord of the Rings, is in the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon used by Tolkien to represent the Language of Rohan in the novel.²⁶ The Anglo-Saxon root word searu means "skill" or "cunning". Saru is the presumed Mercian form. It has associations with metal and treasure, but it also has ominous overtones: in the poem Beowulf, the hero denies seeking out 'cunning malices', searo-niþas, for example.²⁷

Elvish names for the character with similar meanings are used in the character's other appearances: Curunír is a name in the invented Elvish language of Sindarin. This was 'translated' variously by Tolkien as 'man of skill', 'man of craft' and 'the one of cunning devices'. In the essay The Istari, which appears in Unfinished Tales, the full name is given as Curunír Lân, which is equivalent to Saruman the White.²⁸ Curumo is another elvish name, this time in the Quenya language, and appears only in Unfinished Tales. Another name, Sharkey, is used by Saruman's henchmen in the Shire towards the end of The Return of the King. Its meaning is explained in a footnote as a corruption of the Orkish sharkû, which is said to mean "old man".²⁹ These other names do not appear in the film adaptations.

His original title as a wizard was "the White," and he wore matching robes. Later he declared himself to be "Saruman of Many Colours," and the colour of his robes changed accordingly. He also declared himself "Saruman Ring-maker".

Adaptations

Saruman has appeared in film, audio and stage adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. BBC Radio produced the first adaptation in 1956, which has not survived. Tolkien was apparently disappointed by it.³⁰

In Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings Saruman (voiced by Fraser Kerr) has only one major scene, his attempt to persuade Gandalf to join him. He appears again briefly during the battle of the Hornburg. The character is called 'Saruman' and 'Aruman' at different points. Smith and Matthews suggest that the use of 'Aruman' was intended to avoid confusion with 'Sauron'.³¹ The character wears red robes, rather than the white or many-coloured ones Tolkien describes.

BBC Radio's second adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, from 1981, presents Saruman much as in the books. Smith and Matthews report Peter Howell's performance as Saruman as "brilliantly ambiguous […], drifting from mellifluous to almost bestially savage from moment to moment without either mood seeming to contradict the other."³²

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy (2001–2003), Saruman is significantly more active in the first two films than in their equivalent books, and he appears in several scenes that are not depicted in the novel. Smith and Matthews suggest that Saruman's role is built up as a substitute for the story's primary antagonist (Sauron), who never appears directly in the book, and only once in the films. Jackson confirms this view in the commentary to the DVD.³³ They also suggest that having secured veteran British horror actor Christopher Lee to play Saruman, it made sense to make greater use of his star status.³⁴ Despite his increased role in the first two films, Saruman does not appear in the theatrical release of The Return of the King, a decision which "shocked" Lee. Jackson reasoned that it would be anticlimactic to show Saruman's fate in the second movie (after the Battle of Helm's Deep) and too retrospective for it to be in the third one.³⁵ Saruman, however, does appear briefly at the start of the Extended Edition DVD release of the film, in a scene at Orthanc in which he is stabbed by Wormtongue and falls to his death from the top of the tower.

Notes

^ In Tolkien's legendarium, the physical death of the body of a Maiar does not necessarily end that spirit's existence (cf. Sauron and Gandalf). However, Tolkien wrote no accounts of Saruman's existence after his death, described at the end of the The Lord of the Rings.
^ The volume published as The Silmarillion in 1977 contains four books in addition to the Quenta Silmarillion. The last of these—Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age—covers Saruman's earlier history, but was written after The Lord of the Rings.
^ Letters no.163 p.217
^ The Treason of Isengard Chapter IV p.70–71 The outline suggests that Saruman is assisted by the 'giant' Treebeard, an early and evil iteration of the Ent Treebeard from the finished book.
^ The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter II, p.63.
^ The Fellowship of the Ring Book II Chapter II pp.338-347
^ The Two Towers Book III Chapter I pp.6-9
^ The Two Towers Book III Chapters VII and IX pp.173-175 & 204-210
^ The Two Towers Book III Chapter X pp.222-230.
^ The Return of the King, Book VI, Chapters VI, VII, and VIII, pp. 311-312, 315-317 and 360-363.
^ Letters, No.156, p.202: "[of Gandalf] I would venture to say that he was an incarnate 'angel'-strictly an [angelos]: that is, with the other Istari, wizards, 'those who know', an emissary from the Lords of the West, sent to Middle-earth, as the great crisis of Sauron loomed on the horizon."
^ The Hobbit, Chapter 19, p.278.
^ ^a ^b The Fellowship of the Ring Book II Chapter II p.338–339
^ ^a ^b The Two Towers Book III Chapter X p.222
^ The Two Towers Book III Chapter V pp.112–113. Some of the confusion in the two arose in the process of writing, Christopher Tolkien guesses that the mysterious old man who appears to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli at the end of chapter 2 of Book 3, who appears to be Saruman in the published version, was in earlier drafts intended to be Gandalf. (Tolkien, C. (1989, 2002) pp.403 & 428)
^ ^a ^b The Two Towers Book III Chapter IX pp.207-208
^ Unfinished Tales Part Four Chapter II p.504 & Part Three Chapter IV p.451
^ The Two Towers Book III Chapter X p.226
^ The Road to Middle-earth Chapter IV 'The Council of Elrond' pp.135–136
^ The Two Towers Book III Chapter IV p.84
^ ^a ^b Letters no.154 p.197
^ ^a ^b Author of the Century Chapter IV 'Saruman and Denethor: technologist and reactionary' pp.121–128
^ Letters no.142 p.172 Tolkien wrote in 1953: "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously so in the revision."
^ Fellowship of the Ring Book II Chapter II p.347 & The Two Towers Book III Chapter XI p.248–249
^ Letters no.181 p.237
^ The Road to Middle-earth Chapter 4 'The horses of the Mark' pp.139–140 Shippey notes that Tolkien uses 'Mercian' forms of Anglo-Saxon, e.g. "Saruman, Hasufel, Herugrim for 'standard' [Anglo-Saxon] Searuman, Heasufel and Heorugrim" Footnote page 140
^ The Road to Middle-earth Chapter 5 'Just allegory and large symbolism' pp.193—194
^ Curunír is given as 'man of skill' in Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings. 'The one of cunning devices' appears in the index of names to the The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales. 'Man of craft' appears in The Istari, section II of Part 4 of Unfinished Tales.
^ Return of the King Book VI Chapter VIII p.360, footnote
^ The films, the books, the radio series 'Of the beginning of days' pp.15-16
^ The films, the books, the radio series 'JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings' p.54
^ The films, the books, the radio series 'An Unexpected Party p.83
^ Jackson, Peter. The Lord of the Rings : The Fellowship of the Ring (Director and Writers' commentary) [DVD]. New Line Cinema.
^ The films, the books, the radio series 'The Return of the King' (2003) p. 177
^ Hey, what happened to Saruman?cnn.com Retrieved 23 January 2008

Note: For ease of reference, citations of Letters include the number of the letter before the page number. Page numbers are for the editions given below, and will differ from other editions.

Contents