Laying Waste our Powers

“I Am Saruman, One Might Say, Saruman as He Ought to Have Been.” We Meet Gandalf The White.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 644, 645

We can be sure that if the mysterious old man who climbed up the hill upon which Merry and Pippin first met Treebeard was indeed Saruman we would now be subjected to a very long speech. It would be a speech about his greatness, one intended to fill his hearers with awe, but all Gandalf says about himself and his transformation is to say:

“Yes, I am white now,” said Gandalf. “Indeed I am Saruman, one,might almost say, Saruman as he should have been. But come now, tell me of yourselves!”

When Gandalf was imprisoned by Saruman in Isengard he was subjected to such a speech. “We must have power,” Saruman said, “power to order things as we will, for that good that only the Wise can see.” Saruman was anxious, not only to subject Gandalf to his will but to convince him that he had the right to be the Lord of the Rings and thus Lord of Middle-earth.

From the beginning of the mission of the Istari, the wizards, to Middle-earth, Saruman was anxious that he should be its leader. And when with Gandalf, Galadriel and Elrond he formed the White Council, a council of the Wise to oppose Sauron, he insisted that he should be its leader even though Galadriel argued that the leader ought to be Gandalf.

Although Gandalf never sought power for himself Saruman was always jealous of him and looked for ways to undermine the one who he believed to be his rival. So he made fun of Gandalf’s affection for hobbits and the Shire while beginning to forge links between the Shire and Isengard; and he mocked Gandalf’s enjoyment of pipe-smoking and of pipeweed, while secretly learning the art himself and purchasing the best of Longbottom leaf from Lotho Sackville-Baggins who became his agent in the Shire.

But most importantly of all Saruman believed that Gandalf was his rival in seeking to find and to take possession of the Ring. Like Sauron he was convinced that if anyone of sufficient strength were to find the Ring they would claim it for themselves and use it to become the ruler of all. And he became convinced that Gandalf was trying to find the Ring just as he was so that he should become lord of all and that when he began to suspect that the Ring was hidden in the Shire that the same hobbits who he had despised were being used for some obscure purpose in Gandalf’s plot.

All Saruman’s suspicions were, in his mind, confirmed when he and Gandalf met once again in Isengard after the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Gandalf demands that Saruman surrender the Key of Orthanc to him and his staff as pledges of Saruman’s good conduct and to be returned later to him if he should once again merit them. Saruman responded to Gandalf’s demand with undisguised rage.

“Later!” he cried, and his voice rose to a scream. “Later! Yes, when you also have the Keys of Barad-dûr itself, I suppose; and the crowns of seven kings, and the rods of the Five Wizards.”

Saruman was utterly convinced that Gandalf desired what he himself did, that Gandalf was his rival and therefore his enemy. And perhaps he feared that he was his enemy’s inferior, that Gandalf possessed a power that he himself lacked, and that he needed to surround himself with a fortress, an army and all the trappings of power in order to be what Gandalf was, in himself, alone, vulnerable and homeless in the world. And so he became unsatisfied with his white robes and made a coat of many colours for himself. There is a sense in which he gave up his white robes quite voluntarily having become unsatisfied with what they represented, that is that he was an emissary of the Valar in Middle-earth. That these robes should be given to Gandalf, the very one that he feared and hated most, only confirmed what he always believed, that Gandalf desired to rule just as he did.

What he had forgotten, indeed despised, was that his power and status did not belong to him but had been given to him in order that he might be an emissary of the Valar in Middle-earth. His task was to do the bidding of his masters and so when he proved unfaithful in doing that task his masters stripped him of his robes and gave them to one who would do their bidding. Gandalf is now the White, Saruman as he should have been.

Saruman’s Long Years of Death are Finally Revealed in His Corpse.

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Tolkien offers us two different ways of responding to Saruman’s end at the door of Bag End.

The second is the simple anger of the hobbits who have just fought their first battle and lost friends and family to Saruman’s bandits. They seek that form of justice which is retribution.

The first is Frodo’s, his pity and his horror.

“I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare raise our hands against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.”

Frodo’s own story has been one of profound self discovery and he has learned the pity of which the 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich speaks when she tells us of the God who “looks upon us with pity, not with blame”. He remembers the horror of Boromir’s transformation through his lust for the Ring, of the first encounter with Gollum when he realises what he would become if he gave into it and the journey through Mordor in which he tastes the endless living death that is the hopeless end of all its slaves.

Perhaps it is this last experience that he sees revealed in Saruman’s body when he gazes upon “the long years of death” that Saruman’s existence has become. It is Frodo’s eyes through which we look upon the corpse, not Sam’s and certainly not the hobbits who are veterans of just one battle. Sam faithfully walked with his friend through the valley of the shadow of death but even he did not taste it as Frodo did and learned the pity that comes from that taste. And when Frodo speaks of his hope for a cure for Saruman it is because he hopes for one himself.

That is the difference between Frodo and Saruman. That among many. Frodo longs for a cure and for rest. Saruman no longer has hope for a cure, for mercy, and has learned even to hate it. Frodo will not find a cure in Middle-earth, and Saruman knows that, but he will pass into the West, the true home from which Saruman once came but now despises and Saruman can no longer see even the possibility of the journey that Frodo will take. Frodo’s body will be healed in the West and even more than this he will find peace. He will be at peace with himself.

The poet William Wordsworth once looked out over the sea and wrote unhappily, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers”. The long dead, yet still existing, Saruman, is, in his entirety, the complete expression of one who has laid waste his powers. When Treebeard described him as a man with “a mind full of metal and wheels” it was more than a metaphor. Saruman has become that about which he has long thought. He is as lifeless as his machinery.

And what of the powers that he has laid waste? Perhaps here lies the greatest warning to the digitally obsessed minds of our own times. Compare Saruman to Gandalf. Gandalf has lived out his long sojourn in Middle-earth at the pace of its peoples. In his going out to each of them he has never sought to force them to his own will and he has waited for the inner and truest life of each to be revealed. Gandalf never goes beyond the power that is his gift. Neither should we. We do not have the power that is Gandalf’s but we have our own and it is far greater than most of us know and can only be found through years of humble self-discovery and sheer hard work and perseverance.

Saruman soon lost patience with the slowness of the Divine Spirit in Middle-earth just as Sauron did and he gave his life to the getting and to the spending that seeks the enslavement of others. Next week we will think about one who discovers his power through the time and work he gives to clearing up after the mess that Saruman has left.