Saruman

• 1. Introduction

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  Saruman the White arrives in Middle-earth as one of five angelic emissaries, dispatched by the godlike Valar to challenge the dark lord Sauron without resorting to direct force. His name, drawn from the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon, translates as "man of skill or cunning". He is given the highest rank among his order, appointed head of the White Council, and trusted with the deepest knowledge of the Rings of Power. Yet J. R. R. Tolkien did not even know Saruman existed when he began writing The Lord of the Rings in late 1937. The character emerged gradually out of a plot problem the author could not solve. Who had detained Gandalf, and why? The answer, when it came, was Saruman. That answer unlocked one of fantasy fiction's most studied portraits of corruption: a being who begins as a guardian of the free peoples of Middle-earth and ends as a petty tyrant murdered by his own abused servant in a quiet rural corner of the world he once aspired to rule.

• 2. Born From a Plot Problem

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  Tolkien started work on The Lord of the Rings in late 1937, and for a long stretch he could not explain why Gandalf had failed to meet Frodo as arranged. He later wrote: "Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as concerned as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear." The confession is striking: the author of the book and its protagonist were equally in the dark.

  Christopher Tolkien has described the early drafting as proceeding in waves, with his father rewriting the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring three full times before breaking through. Saruman first appeared during a fourth phase of writing, in a rough narrative outline dated August 1940. In that early sketch, the character was called "Saramond the White" or "Saramund the Grey" and was described as having fallen under Sauron's influence rather than acting as a free agent plotting his own path to power. The full story of his betrayal was layered in later.

  Other appearances grew out of drafting accidents. Christopher Tolkien believes that the mysterious old man glimpsed by Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli at the edge of Fangorn forest was originally intended to be Gandalf. In the finished text he is Saruman. Similarly, the figure called Sharkey, who rules the Shire in secret during "The Scouring of the Shire", was in the first draft simply a ruffian and then that ruffian's unseen boss. Only in the second draft did Tolkien, in his son's words, "perceive" that Sharkey was Saruman. The name itself, a footnote in the finished book explains, derives from an Orkish word meaning "old man".

  Even Saruman's death scene was not part of the original manuscript. The moment in which his body shrivels to skin and bones, revealing "long years of death", and a pale shrouded figure rises from the corpse, was added when Tolkien reviewed the page proofs of the completed book. John D. Rateliff and Jared Lobdell have both noted that the scene echoes the death of the two-thousand-year-old sorceress Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She: A History of Adventure.

• 3. The Istari and Their Mission

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  Roughly two thousand years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, five beings known as the Istari began arriving in Middle-earth. They were Maiar, a category of divine spirit that Tolkien regarded as "somewhat like incarnate angels". Their mission was not to fight Sauron directly but to inspire the peoples of Middle-earth to resist him, because Sauron was regaining strength after his defeat at the end of the second age and the Valar judged that a direct confrontation would cause too much destruction.

  Saruman, along with Gandalf and Radagast the Brown, was among the five. He was the most distinguished: he had initially traveled in the east, was later appointed head of the White Council, and eventually settled at Isengard, an outpost of the kingdom of Gondor. His particular expertise was the Rings of Power, the instruments through which Sauron had sought to bind and dominate the other peoples of Middle-earth. That expertise proved to be the mechanism of his ruin. Studying Sauron and the lore of the rings made him want the One Ring for himself.

  Fifty years before the main action of The Lord of the Rings, his studies led him to conclude that the One Ring might be recoverable from the river Anduin near Sauron's stronghold at Dol Guldur. He helped the White Council drive Sauron out of Dol Guldur at that point, but not out of any desire to protect Middle-earth. He wanted to clear the area so he could search the river himself. The guardian had become a rival predator, moving in secret while wearing the robes of the order he led.

• 4. Betrayal at Isengard

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  When Gandalf arrives at Isengard at Saruman's summons, he finds the formerly green valley already transformed. The trees are gone. Saruman has industrialized the place, raising an army of Half-Orc fighters and Wargs to challenge Sauron's forces on his own terms. From the tower of Orthanc, Saruman proposes that the wizards ally with Sauron's rising power in order, eventually, to control him. When Gandalf refuses, Saruman offers a second option: seize the One Ring together and challenge Sauron directly. When Gandalf refuses again, Saruman imprisons him at the top of Orthanc.

  Gandalf's escape by Great Eagle puts Saruman in a corner from which he never fully recovers. He is now known as a traitor to his former allies but cannot seize the Ring himself, meaning he cannot credibly threaten Sauron. His solution is to pursue a parallel strategy: sabotage the kingdom of Rohan by placing his servant Gríma Wormtongue at the side of King Théoden, weakening the king with what the text calls "subtle poisons".

  Saruman's downfall in The Two Towers comes from two directions at once. Gandalf frees Théoden just as Saruman's army is about to invade, and the Riders of Rohan defeat that army. At the same time, Merry and Pippin, captives of Saruman's Orcs who had escaped into Fangorn Forest, persuade the Ents to destroy Isengard. The Ents are furious at the mass felling of their trees by Saruman's forces. By the time Saruman appears in chapter 10, "The Voice of Saruman", he is trapped in the ruin of his own stronghold, attempting and failing to negotiate his way free. Gandalf breaks his staff and casts him from the order of the wizards.

• 5. The Voice and the Modern Villain

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  Saruman's most noted weapon is his voice. Scholar Tom Shippey writes that "Saruman talks like a politician". No other character in Middle-earth, Shippey argues, shares Saruman's habit of balancing phrases against each other so that incompatibles are resolved, and none deploys words as empty as "deploring", "ultimate", or "real". Jonathan Evans calls the chapter "The Voice of Saruman" a "tour de force" of characterization. Even a 1968 critic, Roger Sale, who thought Tolkien had not quite pulled off the scene, conceded that it was "worth doing".

  Tolkien himself described Saruman's physical appearance at the time of The Lord of the Rings as a long face with a high forehead, "deep darkling eyes", and white hair and beard with strands of black still showing around his lips and ears. His hair had been black when he first arrived in Middle-earth. The change in his robes is equally legible: he was originally Saruman the White, but by the time he appears in The Fellowship of the Ring his garments shimmer and change color continuously, and he renames himself Saruman of Many Colours.

  Shippey contrasts Saruman's modern rhetorical style with the archaic directness Tolkien gives to other characters, such as the Dwarven King Dáin, whom Shippey reads as embodying the Northern heroic tradition of Beowulf. Where Dáin speaks with stoic directness, Saruman deploys euphemism and indirection. Tolkien responded to critics who argued The Lord of the Rings portrayed characters as simply good or bad by pointing to Saruman, along with Denethor and Boromir, as examples of nuanced figures. Marjorie Burns reads Saruman as a double of both Sauron, whose lesser imitation he becomes, and Gandalf, who steps into the role Saruman should have filled.

• 6. Industry, Nature, and Ruin

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  Treebeard, the eldest of the Ents, sums up Saruman in a single phrase: he has "a mind of metal and wheels". Evil in The Lord of the Rings is consistently linked to machinery and industry, while good is aligned with living nature. Saruman's two domains make the contrast explicit. Isengard, once a green valley, is converted into a forge and barracks. The Shire, the most domestic and natural of Middle-earth's regions, is subjected to a similar transformation when Saruman's agents take it over, running it under the name Sharkey in a process of what the text calls industrialization.

  Patrick Curry connects Tolkien's hostility to industrialism with the urban development he witnessed growing up in the West Midlands in the early decades of the 20th century. Curry identifies Saruman as a key example of the evil effects of industrialization and, by extension, of imperialism. Scholar John R. Holmes traces a philological thread: the etymological roots of English "magic" and English "machine" both lead back to the Old Persian word maghush, meaning "sorcerer", by way of Proto-Indo-European *magh, meaning "to have power". Tolkien, Holmes argues, was following an ancient cultural connection when he made Saruman equate sorcery with mechanical power.

  Shippey adds that Saruman's behavior in the Shire echoes Communist practice: goods are collected "for fair distribution" but, since they mostly disappear without reaching anyone, this represents what Shippey calls an unusually modern piece of hypocrisy in the presentation of evil in Middle-earth. Tolkien himself identified impatience as the chief temptation of the Istari and the one to which Saruman succumbed: a desire to force others to do good that slides, step by step, into a simple desire for power.

• 7. Providence and Nothingness

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  Critics Paul Kocher, Randel Helms, and Shippey have each observed that Saruman's actions in the first half of The Two Towers, intended to advance his own interests, instead accelerate his enemies' victory. His Orcs split the Fellowship at Parth Galen and carry off Merry and Pippin. Those two hobbits reach Fangorn, meet the Ents, and set in motion the destruction of Isengard. The liberation of Rohan that follows lets the Rohirrim ride to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. That battle, in turn, frees Gondor to assault Mordor, drawing Sauron's attention away from Frodo at the moment Frodo destroys the Ring. Kocher and Helms read this chain as part of a pattern of providential events throughout the book, in which evil intentions consistently reverse into their opposite.

  Jonathan Evans has compared Saruman's final refusal of Gandalf's conditional offer of freedom to Satan's refusal of redemption in John Milton's Paradise Lost, finding the same combination of rhetorical power and self-destructive pride. Having chosen his path, Saruman cannot turn from it even when a way out is offered.

  In the end, the diminished figure who has shuffled north on foot, apparently reduced to begging, is murdered in the Shire by Wormtongue, the servant he continued to beat and taunt. When he dies, his spirit, in Shippey's reading, "dissolved into nothing". Shippey describes Saruman as the clearest example in the book of "wraithing", a distinctively 20th-century conception of evil in which a person is "eaten up inside" by devotion to an abstraction until there is nothing left. Kocher sees in his death the book's consistent motif: nothingness as the fate of evil. Evans has noted that Saruman's comparison to Satan in Paradise Lost places him in a literary tradition of corrupted greatness stretching back centuries before Tolkien put pen to paper.

• 8. On Screen and in Sound

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  The BBC produced the first radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in 1955, in which Robert Farquharson played Saruman. That production has not survived, and Tolkien was disappointed by it. The BBC's second radio adaptation, from 1981, presents Saruman closer to the books. Smith and Matthews describe Peter Howell's performance in that version as "brilliantly ambiguous... drifting from mellifluous to almost bestially savage from moment to moment without either mood seeming to contradict the other".

  In Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated film, covering The Fellowship of the Ring and part of The Two Towers, Fraser Kerr voices Saruman. The character appears in red robes rather than white and is called both "Saruman" and "Aruman" at different points. Smith and Matthews suggest that the alternate name was introduced to avoid confusion with "Sauron". The 1980 Rankin/Bass animated version of The Return of the King picks up roughly where the Bakshi film ends but leaves Saruman out entirely. In 1993, Finnish broadcaster Yle aired the television miniseries Hobitit, in which Saruman was played by Matti Pellonpää.

  Christopher Lee portrayed Saruman in Peter Jackson's film trilogy from 2001 to 2003. In those films Saruman is considerably more active than in the books, presenting himself openly as a servant of Sauron. Smith and Matthews suggest he was built up as a visible antagonist to compensate for Sauron never appearing directly, a reading Jackson confirmed in his DVD commentary. The scenes filmed for the third installment, The Return of the King, were cut from the theatrical release, a decision that Lee described as having "shocked" him. Jackson's rationale was that showing Saruman's fate after the Battle of Helm's Deep would feel anticlimactic in the second film and too retrospective in the third. Those scenes, in which Saruman falls from the top of Orthanc after being stabbed by Wormtongue, appeared in the Extended Edition DVD release. Lee reprised the role in Jackson's Hobbit trilogy from 2012 to 2014, and posthumously provided archived voice recordings for the 2024 anime film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.