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Saruman is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy story The Lord of the Rings. He casts himself as a rival of Sauron, the main antagonist of the tale, but is later revealed to have been serving him. Much of the action in the second volume of the book, The Two Towers, is driven by his schemes. In the appendices to the book, he is described as the leader of the Istari, angelic beings sent to Middle-earth in human form by the godlike Valar to challenge Sauron. The meaning of names was important to Tolkien: Saruman means "man of skill". In the book, Saruman is one of several characters illustrating the corruption of power; his desire for knowledge and order has led to his fall and he rejects the chance of redemption when it is offered. He serves as an example of technology and modernity being overthrown by the forces of nature. The character appears in almost all adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, having a particularly large part in the first two films of Peter Jackson's film trilogy (2001–2003) in which he was played by Christopher Lee.
[edit] Appearances[edit] The Lord of the Rings
Saruman first appears in 1954's The Fellowship of the Ring, which is the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings describes a quest to destroy the One Ring, which is 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). Early in the The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf notes Saruman's great knowledge of the magic rings created by Sauron and by the Elven-smiths and describes him as "the chief of my order".[1] Shortly afterwards, Gandalf breaks an arrangement to meet the hobbit Frodo Baggins, who bears the Ring lost by Sauron thousands of years earlier. After Frodo and Gandalf are reunited at Rivendell midway through The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard explains why he failed to join Frodo: he had been summoned to consult with Saruman, who proposed that they ally themselves with Sauron, whose victory Saruman believed inevitable. 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". [2] At the start of The Two Towers, the second volume of the story, orcs from Saruman's army in search of the Ring attack Frodo and his companions.[3] Having betrayed Sauron by attempting unsuccessfully to seize the Ring for himself, Saruman's ruin is completed when the Rohirrim defeat his army and the Ents destroy Isengard.[4] Saruman himself is not directly involved, and only appears again in chapter X, The Voice of Saruman, by which time he is 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, and breaks Saruman's staff. [5] Saruman's final appearance is at the end of the last volume, 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. Here, his agents—both Hobbits and Men—have already started a destructive process of modernisation. Saruman governs the Shire in secret under the name of Sharkey until Frodo and his companions return and lead a rebellion, defeating the intruders and exposing Saruman's role. He is set free, even after attempting to kill Frodo, but is murdered by his servant Gríma Wormtongue.[6] [edit] Other booksConsistent accounts of Saruman's earlier history appear in Appendix B to the The Lord of the Rings, first published in The Return of the King (1955), and in the posthumously published The Silmarillion (1977) and Unfinished Tales (1980). All were written in the mid-1950s. 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. They are Maiar, envoys of the godlike Valar sent to challenge Sauron by inspiring the people of Middle-earth rather than by direct conflict.[7] Tolkien regarded them as being somewhat like incarnate angels.[8] Saruman initially travelled in the east; he was later appointed head of the White Council and eventually settled at Gondor's outpost of Isengard. Fifty years before The Lord of the Rings, after his studies revealed that the One Ring might be found in the river Anduin near Sauron's stronghold at Dol Guldur, he helped the White Council drive out Sauron in order to facilitate his search.[9] Unfinished Tales also contains various drafts not included in The Lord of the Rings that describe Saruman's attempts to frustrate Sauron's Nazgûl in their search for the Ring during the early part of The Fellowship of the Ring; in one version he considers throwing himself on Gandalf's mercy. There is also a description of how Saruman became involved with the Shire and of how his jealousy of Gandalf grew.[10] Another brief account describes how the five Istari were chosen by the Valar for their mission.[11] [edit] Creation and developmentTolkien started writing The Lord of the Rings in late 1937, but was initially unsure of how the story would develop.[12] Unlike some of the other characters in the book, Saruman had not appeared in Tolkien's 1937 children's tale, The Hobbit, or in his then-unpublished Quenta Silmarillion and related mythology, which date back to 1917.[a] Writing of Gandalf’s failure to meet Frodo, Tolkien later said: "Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as concerned as Frodo at Gandalf's failure to appear".[13] Tolkien's son, Christopher, has said that the early stages of the creation of The Lord of the Rings proceeded in a series of waves, and that having produced the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien rewrote the tale from the start three times.[14] Saruman first appeared during a fourth phase of writing in a rough narrative outline dated August 1940. Intended to account for Gandalf's absence, it 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.[15] The full story of Saruman's betrayal was later added to the existing chapters.[16] Several of Saruman’s other appearances in the book emerged in the process of writing, rather than being foreseen. Christopher Tolkien believes that the old man seen by Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli at the edge of Fangorn forest is in the original drafts intended to be Gandalf. In the finished version he is Saruman.[17] Similarly, in the first drafts of The Scouring of the Shire, Sharkey is successively a ruffian met by the hobbits and then that man’s unseen boss. It is only in the second draft of the chapter that, as Christopher Tolkien puts it, his father “perceive[d]” that Sharkey was in fact Saruman.[18] [edit] 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 referred to as 'Saruman the White' and is said to have originally worn white robes, but on his first entry in The Fellowship of the Ring they instead appear to be "woven from all colours [, they] shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered" and he names himself 'Saruman of Many Colours'.[19][20] The power of Saruman's voice is noted throughout the book. Jonathan Evans calls the characterization of Saruman in the chapter The Voice of Saruman a "tour de force".[21] Roger Sale says of the same chapter that "Tolkien valiantly tried to do something worth doing which he simply cannot bring off."[22] Tom Shippey writes 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'?"[23] Shippey contrasts this modern speech pattern with the archaic stoicism and directness that Tolkien employs for other characters such as the Dwarven King Dain, which Shippey believes represent Tolkien's view of heroism in the mould of Beowulf.[23] After the defeat of his armies, having been caught in the betrayal of Sauron, Saruman is offered refuge by Gandalf, in return for his aid, but having chosen his path, is unable to choose to turn from it.[24] Evans has compared the character of Saruman to that of Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost in his use of rhetoric and in this final refusal of redemption, "conquered by pride and hatred."[21] [edit] Involvement in themes
Tolkien writes that The Lord of the Rings was often criticised for portraying all characters as either good or bad, with no shades of grey, a point to which he responds by proposing Saruman, along with Denethor and Boromir, as examples of characters with more nuanced loyalties.[25] Colin Manlove adds that these are all secondary characters who are killed before the story ends.[26] Paul Kocher identifies Saruman's use of a palantír, a seeing-stone, as the immediate cause of his downfall, but also suggests that through his study of "the arts of the enemy", Saruman was drawn into imitation of Sauron.[27] According to Jonathan Evans and Spacks, Saruman succumbs to the lust for power,[21][24] while Shippey identifies Saruman's devotion to goals of knowledge, organization and control as his weakness.[28] Tolkien writes that the Istari's chief temptation (and that to which Saruman fell) is impatience, leading to a desire to force others to do good, and then to a simple desire for power.[29] Kocher, Randall Helms and Shippey write that Saruman's actions, although evil in intent, in fact lead to his own downfall and that of Sauron: his orcs help split the Fellowship at Parth Galen, and in carrying off two of the hobbits set off a chain of incidents that lead to his defeat. In turn this frees the Rohirrim to intervene at the battle of the Pelennor Fields and then together with the men of Gondor to assault Sauron's stronghold of Mordor and distract him from Frodo's final effort to destroy the Ring. Kocher and Helms see this as part of a pattern of providential events and of the reversed effects of evil intentions throughout the book;[30] Shippey writes that it demonstrates the value of persistence in the face of despair, even if a way out cannot be seen.[31] Evil in The Lord of the Rings tends to be associated with machinery, whereas good is usually associated with nature. Both Saruman's stronghold of Isengard and his altered Shire demonstrate the negative effects of industrialization and Isengard is overthrown when the forests, in the shape of the Ents, literally rise against it. This opposition is called simplistic by Edmund Wilson; Patricia Meyer Spacks says that it is "redeemed by the philosophic complexity of its context".[32] Patrick Curry says Tolkien is "hostile to industrialism", linking this to the widespread urban development that took place in the West Midlands where Tolkien grew up in the first decades of the 20th Century. He identifies Saruman as one of the key examples given in the book of the evil effects of industrialization, and by extension imperialism.[33] Shippey notes Saruman's distinctively modern association with Communism in the way the Shire is run under his control: goods are taken "for fair distribution" which, since they are mainly never seen again, Shippey terms an unusually modern piece of hypocrisy in the way evil presents itself in Middle-earth.[34] Marjorie Burns writes of a pattern of "doubles" in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman is an "imitative and lesser" double of Sauron, reinforcing the Dark Lord's character type. He is also a contrasting double of Gandalf, who resists the temptation of the Ring as Saruman did not and goes on to become Saruman as he "should have been".[35] Kocher says that nothingness is a theme used consistently throughout The Lord of the Rings for the fate of evil.[36] Like Kocher, Shippey notes that when Saruman dies his spirit "dissolved into nothing". Shippey identifies Saruman as the best example in the book of "wraithing", a distinctive twentieth-century view of evil that he attributes to Tolkien in which individuals are "'eaten up inside' by devotion to some abstraction".[28] [edit] NamesShippey has noted that Saruman, "man of skill", is a word in the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon used by Tolkien to represent the Language of Rohan in the book.[37] The Anglo-Saxon root word searu means "clever", "skillful" or "ingenious" and has associations with both technology and treachery that are fitting for Tolkien's portrayal of Saruman. Saruman's names in Elvish are Curunír (in Sindarin) or Curumo (in Quenya) and have the same meaning. Another name, Sharkey, is used by Saruman's henchmen for their diminished leader towards the end of The Return of the King and is said to be derived from an Orkish term meaning "old man".[21] The name is used in the early drafts, but did not initially refer to Saruman.[18] [edit] AdaptationsSaruman 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.[38] In Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, which corresponds to The Fellowship of the Ring and part of The Two Towers, Saruman is voiced by Fraser Kerr. He has only one major scene — his attempt to persuade Gandalf to join him. He appears again briefly before the battle of Helm's Deep, speaking to his army. 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'.[39] The 1980 Rankin/Bass TV animated version of The Return of the King begins roughly where Bakshi's film ends but does not include Saruman's character.[40] 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."[41] 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 Tolkien's work. In the films, Saruman is depicted outright as a servant of Sauron. Smith and Matthews suggest that Saruman's role is built up as a substitute for Sauron—the story's primary antagonist—who never appears directly in the book. Jackson confirms this view in the commentary to the DVD.[42] 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.[43] Despite this increased role in the first two films, the scenes involving Saruman that were shot for use in the third film, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, were not used in the cinematic release, 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.[44] The cut scenes, which are based on parts of the chapters The Voice of Saruman and The Scouring of the Shire, end with Saruman falling to his death from the top of Orthanc after being stabbed by Wormtongue. They are included at the start of the Extended Edition DVD release of the film. [edit] Notes
[edit] Citations
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. [edit] References
[edit] External links
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