Orthanc

“You Have Become a Fool, Saruman, and Yet Pitiable.” Gandalf Breaks The Staff of Saruman and Casts Him From The Order of Wizards.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 751-762

Isengard lies in ruins and Saruman is a prisoner within Orthanc. His armies are defeated and now he is caught between two enemies. One, the mighty power that lies within Barad-dûr, knows now that he is a traitor, working only for his own purposes. The others, the King of Rohan who he sought to destroy, the Ents of Fangorn who he contemptuously ignored, and Gandalf who he had once imprisoned and would have sent to Mordor, stand before his doors.

Gandalf and Théoden ascend the steps that lead to the door of Orthanc while the rest of the company await their return below. The Ents remain hidden because Gandalf hopes to persuade Saruman to leave his prison and to come down and feels that if the Ents were present he would fear to do so.

Saruman comes to a window and engages in debate, first with Théoden and then with Gandalf, seeking always to turn things to his own advantage, but as Éomer says to Théoden, “so would the trapped wolf speak to the hounds, if he could.”

Saruman has great power in his voice but by seeking to divide his enemies, speaking singly, first to Théoden and then to Gandalf, he fails in his purpose. First Théoden recalls that Saruman went to war with him unprovoked and murdered children in the Westfold. Then Gandalf recalls his imprisonment within Orthanc. Saruman has done too much wrong to too many to be able to persuade them now that his intentions have been anything but malicious.

But in his speech to Gandalf Saruman reveals what he still believes.

“Much we could still accomplish together, to heal the disorders of the world. Let us understand one another and dismiss from thought these lesser folk! Let them wait upon our decisions.”

Of course, by now, Gandalf knows that when Saruman speaks of we what he really means is I. But even if he didn’t Gandalf has long been a servant and not a master. That is the fundamental difference between the two. Saruman has always regarded others as either more or less powerful than himself. If, like Sauron, they are more powerful, then he will seek to ally himself to them, although he will wait for an opportunity to betray them. It was for this purpose that he sent orcs to capture hobbits and so caught Merry and Pippin. He knew that a hobbit was bearing the Ring, probably taking it to Minas Tirith so that it could be used against the Dark Lord.

This is how Saruman treats the mighty. But for those who he regards as “lesser folk” he has only contempt. The House of Eorl is “a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs” and hobbits are “small rag-tag that dangle” at Gandalf’s tail.

And against Gandalf himself he bears almost uncontrollable fury. He has always regarded Gandalf as a foe. Right from the time when the Valar sent the Istari, the wizards, to Middle-earth to contest with Sauron and to encourage and organise resistance to him, Saruman insisted that he, and not Gandalf, should be the leader of the mission. And Saruman always knew that Cirdan of the Grey Havens had given Narya, one of the three Elven Rings, to Gandalf and not to him. When Gandalf demands Saruman’s staff and the keys of Orthanc Saruman replies in uncontrollable rage.

“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, and have purchased yourself a pair of boots many sizes larger than those that you wear now.”

Of course, apart from the rather pathetic reference to boots, we know that what Saruman has revealed here is what he desires. He is the one who has always desired power and domination. Like a seed growing to a mighty tree this desire has long lodged in his heart but its full extent, his desire to be Lord of Middle-earth, has only become something fully formed quite recently. Before that it may only have been revealed in jealousy of Gandalf, Galadriel and Elrond, and contempt for Rohan or Ents, his near neighbours.

And, at the end, not knowing the consequence, not just of betraying those who had been friends but of the Valar who gave him his mission, he is summoned by Gandalf to stand and hear his judgement and he has no choice but to obey. His staff is broken and he is cast from the Order. Gandalf has the authority to do this and Saruman’s power is broken. God cannot be mocked forever.

“Many Ents Were Hurling Themselves Against the Orthanc Rock; But That Defeated Them.” Why Couldn’t The Ents Destroy Orthanc?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 734-744

Last week we thought about how when the Ents destroyed the fortress of Isengard it was if the action of tree roots over a hundred years were “all packed into a few moments.”

But the Tower of Orthanc was different. After Saruman was able to make a hasty retreat into it, only just managing to escape the pursuit of Quickbeam, he got his machinery of war into action and Beechbone was killed by a kind of flamethrower. This threw the Ents into a terrible fury and they launched themselves into an attack upon Orthanc.

“Round and round the rock of Orthanc the Ents were striding and storming like a howling gale, breaking pillars, hurling avalanches of boulders down the shafts, tossing up huge slabs of stone into the air like leaves. The tower was in the middle of a spinning whirlwind. I saw Iron posts and blocks of masonry go rocketing up hundreds of feet, and smash against the windows of Orthanc. But Treebeard kept his head. He had not had any burns, luckily. He did not want his folk to hurt themselves in their fury, and he did not want Saruman to escape out of some hole in the confusion. Many of the Ents were hurling themselves against the Orthanc-rock: but that defeated them. It is very smooth and hard. Some wizardry is in it, perhaps, older and stronger than Saruman”s.”

But Orthanc was not built by wizards but by the Dunedain at the end of the Second Age when Elendil and his people escaped the destruction of Númenor and established the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor in Middle-earth. As the power of these kingdoms began to wane it fell into the hands of the Dunlendings who were later allies of Saruman at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Eventually Saruman offered to take possession of the fortress and his offer was gratefully received both by the King of Rohan and the Steward of Gondor and for years after he was a valuable ally to them both and Isengard was an important part of the defences of the West against the growing power that first began to arise in Dol Goldur.

Saruman inherited Orthanc but he built the fortress of Isengard; and it was this fortress that the Ents were able to destroy in a single night. But why did Orthanc remain impregnable? It was from a thought in the comments section following last week’s post that this question began to grow in my mind and I want to try to tackle it this week.

I think that there are two main themes in Tolkien’s thought at work here. One is that as a character begins to invest more and more of themselves, of their essence, into the things that they make, so that essence begins to waste away. A kind of entropy is at work. The greatest example of this is, of course, of Sauron and the Ring. Sauron puts so much of himself into the making of the Ring that when it is finally destroyed he falls with it. But the same principle is at work with Saruman and Isengard. When Merry and Pippin speak dismissively of the one who had them captured and who would have tortured them until he found out all they knew, Aragorn replies that “once he was as great as his fame made him. His knowledge was deep, his thought was subtle, and his hands marvellously skilled.”

The other principle is Tolkien’s sense that when we work in harmony with creation and not seeking mastery over it we are able to make something of real significance and of staying power. So we see the way in which Galadriel makes Lothlórien, a place that Sam Gamgee describes as like being inside a song. And we also listened to Gimli speak of the work that he would do in the glittering caves of Aglarond. Great sculptors speak of finding something within the material that they are working with; something that is essentially present. And in the city of Worcester in England near which I live we could contrast the difference between the gothic beauty of that city’s medieval cathedral and the modernist monstrosity that is the technical college next door to it. The conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton, was once asked to reflect on the unpopularity of new housing developments. His brilliant answer was that if a development were to have the quality of a city like Bath and its beautiful architecture then there would never be an objection to it.

The Royal Crescent in Bath. A beautiful example of Georgian architecture from the 18th century. And the interiors are just as beautiful as the facades.

Scruton, like Tolkien, makes beauty the centre of his thought on the things, and not functionality. When function is subordinate to beauty, in which something is made that is in harmony with the materials that are used and which has a transcendent purpose greater than the agrandisement of the maker then it will last. So Isengard is destroyed in a night and Orthanc is impregnable.

“It is Likely Enough… That We are Going to Our Doom: The Last March of The Ents.” The Ents Go to War at Isengard.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.623-635

The night that Merry and Pippin spend in Wellinghall is the first since they escaped from the Orcs and the first that they have had in a home, a place of safety, since leaving Lothlórien, and so they sleep long and refreshingly.

Treebeard takes them to Entmoot, the council in which the Ents will deliberate what course of action they must take.

“Deciding what to do does not take Ents as long as going over all the facts and events that they have to make up their minds about”, Treebeard says to the hobbits, and he estimates that this will take a couple of days or so. He sends Merry and Pippin off with a younger Ent called Bregalad or Quickbeam who has already made up his mind about what should be done and the hobbits spend those days in his company as the Moot continues.

It is on the third day, a bleak and windy day, in the afternoon, that all falls silent and then with a great crash and the quivering and bending of the trees that the Ents march towards them.

“We come, we come with roll of drum: ta-runda runda runda rom!”

The Ents are marching to Isengard and to war.

It is through Merry that we learn something about Isengard. Merry is the organiser of the four hobbits, the original company of the Ring that left the Shire some months before these events. He organised the purchase of Crickhollow in Buckland, and, as the real reason why Frodo is leaving Hobbiton became clear it is Merry who made secret preparation for leaving the Shire. He is rather proud that while Pippin spent his days in Rivendell idling away the time he tried to find out as much as he could about what might lay ahead.

“Isengard is a sort of ring of rocks or hills, I think, with a flat space inside and an island or pillar of rock in the middle, called Orthanc. Saruman has a tower on it. There is a gate, perhaps more than one, in the encircling wall, and I believe there is a stream running through it; it comes out of the mountains, and flows on across the Gap of Rohan.”

Orthanc is not Saruman’s work but much older having been built by the Númenorians in the days of Elendil. It was a sign of their decline that during the first part of the Third Age it became a lawless place far from the authority of Minas Tirith and a thorn in the side of the new kingdom of the Rohirrim who had settled in the plains of Calenardhon that lay between the southern end of the Misty Mountains to the north and the mountains of Gondor to the south. So it was that when Saruman took possession of Isengard in 2759 of the Third Age both the Steward of Gondor and the King of Rohan welcomed him gladly seeing him as a valuable ally who would watch over the strategically vital Gap of Rohan.

It would seem that Saruman was able to keep his true intentions secret right until the moment he took Gandalf prisoner during the time in which Frodo was making preparations to leave first Hobbiton and then the Shire, although Treebeard seems to have been aware of these intentions for some time and the presence of orcs in Isengard. Even after going to war with Rohan Saruman was able to keep Théoden from making a strong response through the efforts of Grima Wormtongue his chief counsellor who was able to convince Théoden that Saruman’s true wish was for peace.

It is with the arrival of Merry and Pippin in their pure, gentle and artless simplicity that the dam finally bursts and the slowly simmering anger of the Ents finally comes pouring out of Fangorn and down to Isengard. It is as if Nature herself finally rises up against the powers that would destroy her. But even as the Ents march upon Isengard and upon Saruman Treebeard is aware that Nature may fail, that it is “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents”. But, he adds, “if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later”. The possibility that disenchanted Nature could yet reawaken and rise against a world of “metal and wheels” was something that the Inklings pondered both through the character of Merlin in C.S Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and through Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien allows such a revolt to take place but recognises the heartbreaking fragility of Nature that may yet fall before the walls of Isengard and before technology.