Isengard

• 1. Introduction

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  Isengard is a fortress in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth that rises more than 500 feet into the sky, ending in four sharp peaks, built from four many-sided columns of rock joined by an unknown process so durable that no known weapon could harm it. The tower at its heart was old before Saruman ever arrived, a relic of the Númenóreans and a vessel for one of the ancient seeing-stones. Yet when the Wizard finally came and received its keys, something changed. The valley slowly filled with pits and machinery, its trees were felled, and smoke replaced the fruiting orchards that had once grown there.

  What turned one of the most formidable structures in Middle-earth into what scholars have called an industrial hell? How did a place built to guard a river crossing become a symbol of everything Tolkien feared about modernity? And what does it mean that its destruction came not from armies of Men or Elves, but from trees?

• 2. Stone and Iron

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  The Númenóreans in exile built Isengard during the Second Age as a walled circular enclosure. It lay just outside the north-western corner of Rohan, guarding the Fords of Isen from enemy incursions into the region called Calenardhon, alongside the fortress of Aglarond to its south. The river Isen, known in elvish as Angren, began on Methedras, the southernmost peak of the Misty Mountains. Methedras stood directly behind Isengard, forming its natural northern wall.

  The rest of the perimeter was a massive constructed wall called the Ring of Isengard. Two gaps broke its circuit: the inflow of the river at the north-east, passing through a portcullis, and the gate at the south on the river's edge. For most of its history, the interior was a green and pleasant place filled with many fruiting trees.

  The name Isengard itself comes from Old English: ísen, meaning "iron", and geard, meaning "court" or "enclosure". In Tolkien's invented Sindarin language, the fortress was called Angrenost, a compound carrying the same meaning. Tolkien's source for the name of the tower, Orthanc, is equally grounded. Both Orthanc and the word for Ents appear in the Old English poem The Ruin, which describes Roman ruins as orþanc, meaning "skilful work", and enta geweorc, meaning "the work of giants". The historian Casper Clemmensen has proposed a more unexpected source: the Danish manor house Isgård on the Djursland peninsula, suggesting Tolkien may have drawn on Norse mythology and the Danish landscape as well.

• 3. Slow Abandonment

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  During the Third Age, the region of Calenardhon around Isengard became depopulated. The last official warden of Orthanc was recalled to Minas Tirith. A small company remained, led by a hereditary captain, but contact with Minas Tirith gradually decreased and then ceased altogether.

  When Cirion, Steward of Gondor, gave Calenardhon to the Éothéod, creating the land of Rohan, Isengard became the sole fortress Gondor retained north of the Ered Nimrais. The small guard intermarried heavily with the Dunlendings until the fortress became Dunlending in all but name. The tower of Orthanc, however, remained locked. The Steward of Gondor alone held the keys in Minas Tirith, and the Dunlendings could not enter.

  The line of hereditary captains eventually died out. During the rule of Rohan's King Déor, Isengard turned openly hostile to the Rohirrim. The Dunlendings used it as a base for continuous raids until, during the reign of Helm Hammerhand, the Dunlending lord Freca and his son Wulf came close to destroying the Rohirrim entirely. The Rohirrim eventually fought them off and blockaded Isengard, taking it back. Gondor could not garrison it but was unwilling to give up its claim to the tower. The solution arrived unexpectedly: the Wizard Saruman reappeared from the East, offering to guard Isengard. The Steward Beren gave him the keys to Orthanc gladly.

• 4. Saruman's Transformation

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  Saruman first resided at Isengard as Warden of the Tower on behalf of Gondor. The valley became known as Nan Curunír, the Wizard's Vale. On Sauron's return to Mordor, Saruman declared himself Lord of Isengard.

  The Orthanc palantír, one of the ancient crystal seeing-stones housed in the tower, became his undoing. Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull note that Gandalf described it as forming "some link between Isengard and Mordor": Sauron had used the stone to ensnare Saruman and, through him, direct his forces. In The Two Towers, Tolkien described Saruman's Isengard as "only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery" of Sauron's vast fortress Barad-dûr.

  The scholar Tom Shippey draws attention to Treebeard's remark that Saruman "has a mind of metal and wheels", and notes that Isengard itself means "Irontown". Shippey connects Saruman's corruption to what he calls "wanton pollution... by something corrupting in the love of machines", linking it to Tolkien's own childhood memory of industrial ugliness at Sarehole Mill, with what Tolkien remembered as its bone-grinding owner. David D. Oberhelman, writing in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, notes that the prototype for Isengard's industrial degradation was the fallen Vala Morgoth's underground fortress, Angband, whose name meant "Iron Prison" or "Hell of Iron".

  Orcs bearing a White Hand on black shields and an S-rune on their helmets drilled in the pits Saruman had dug. A carved White Hand of stone on a black pillar stood at the gates. The machinery hummed in underground workshops. The trees came down.

• 5. The Ents Strike Back

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  Treebeard, leader of the Ents, watched the Orcs destroy the forest of Fangorn. He led an army of Ents and Huorns to Isengard, destroyed it, and flooded it, leaving Saruman isolated in the tower of Orthanc. The Ents could not break Orthanc itself. The tower remained standing in the wreckage.

  The hobbits Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took, installed as the new "doorwardens", received Théoden King of Rohan, Aragorn, and Gandalf at the wrecked gates. Gandalf then spoke with Saruman and broke his staff. During the encounter, Gríma Wormtongue threw the Orthanc palantír down from the tower; both Pippin and Aragorn later used it, and Aragorn used it to deceive Sauron about the Fellowship's true intentions.

  Saruman was locked in Orthanc with Treebeard as his guard. He later exploited Treebeard's unwillingness to keep any living thing caged, most likely using his skill with persuasive speech, and Treebeard eventually set him free. Saruman then handed the tower's keys to Treebeard and left with Gríma.

• 6. Vichy and the Quisling

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  Isengard carried a specific political meaning beyond its role in the story. The Mouth of Sauron, at the Black Gate, named Isengard as the promised reward for the nameless lieutenant who would govern it once Gondor and its allies had surrendered. In his words: "West of the Anduin as far as the Misty Mountains and the Gap of Rohan shall be tributary to Mordor, and men there shall bear no weapons, but shall have leave to govern their own affairs. But they shall help to rebuild Isengard which they have wantonly destroyed, and that shall be Sauron's, and there his lieutenant shall dwell: not Saruman, but one more worthy of trust."

  Tom Shippey reads this directly against the Vichy treaty imposed on France after its surrender in 1940. He identifies what he calls "sovereignty over the disputed territory of Ithilien, the Alsace-Lorraine of Middle-earth", and in the lands to the west "a demilitarized zone, with what one can only call Vichy status, which will pay war-reparations, and be governed from Isengard by what one can again only call a Quisling". The Mouth of Sauron himself carries the character of the collaborator rather than the conqueror.

  The scholar Brian Rosebury adds a structural reading to this political one. He argues that Tolkien built a deliberate contrast between Isengard and the free societies of Middle-earth. Good government in places like Gondor, the Shire, the Dwarven halls, and the Elvish kingdoms leads to diversity. Evil, by contrast, tends toward homogeneity. Saruman had become, in Rosebury's reading, "more like Sauron than he realizes", sharing his belief in supremacy through absolute power, having studied too deeply the arts of the enemy against Elrond's explicit advice.

• 7. Aftermath and Adaptation

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  During the Fourth Age, after Aragorn was crowned as King Elessar, he visited Orthanc and found heirlooms of Isildur inside, including the Elendilmir, the Star of Arnor, and the small gold case on a chain that Isildur had used to carry the One Ring. The presence of these objects was evidence that Saruman had found and apparently destroyed Isildur's remains. Isengard was restored and the entire valley granted to the Ents, who named their new forest the Treegarth of Orthanc. Orthanc itself became again a tower of the Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor.

  Tolkien made detailed sketches of both Isengard and Orthanc as he developed his conception of them. These were later published in J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator.

  For Peter Jackson's film trilogy, Isengard and Orthanc were based on Alan Lee's illustrations and modelled under the direction of Richard Taylor. Lee worked as the project's conceptual artist in New Zealand throughout the making of the trilogy. The physical model of Orthanc was a large miniature, cast and carved from micro-crystalline wax to resemble obsidian. It was built at 1/35 scale, standing roughly 15 feet high. The model of the walled circular area of Isengard was more than 65 feet wide. In post-production, long shots of the Orthanc model were combined through chroma keying with panoramic views of the Mount Earnslaw / Pikirakatahi region and Mount Aspiring National Park near Queenstown and Glenorchy in New Zealand. The Elendilmir found locked inside Orthanc remains one of the detail touches that points toward what Saruman had been doing in the tower during all those years of preparation.