Come Back, Saruman! - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 3 Ch 10

(0:00 - 4:53) Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today we are continuing our author's journey through Lord of the Rings and we have reached chapter 10 in The Two Towers, which is the chapter called The Voice of Saruman and it pretty much describes the main part of this chapter in that title. It's an unusual chapter because it's really dedicated to one single conversation with a very short top and tail. And there's also a couple of interesting things in this chapter revealing Tolkien's method as a writer, particularly the unexpected gift of the Palantir, but more of that later. Okay, so we start with the friends. So we are in the presence of Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Merry and Pippin going through the archway and looking out upon what is a post-battle landscape. No doubt familiar to many people in Europe at the time of writing, both from the First and the Second World War. I noticed, for example, the detail he picked out about being gloomy pools remained, covered with scum and wreckage, which sounds like the sort of landscape left by the Battle of the Somme. So again, that presence, the haunting behind Lord of the Rings of the Two Great World Wars continues in this chapter. And Gandalf is the one who sets out the agenda. He says, I must pay Saruman a farewell visit, dangerous and probably useless, but it must be done. So when you've got a chapter like this with a defeated enemy, where is the tension going to be? After a battle, the actual negotiations to conclude a war are less exciting, aren't they? So what do you do? And what Tolkien does in this case is he inserts some tension by saying there still is a risk. And Pippin is the one who puts the question. He literally says, what's the danger? And this is on page 182, if you're following in a three volume version. What's the danger? Would he shoot at us and pull far out the windows or can he put a spell on us from a distance? So that could be read in a number of ways. Maybe he's being a bit lighthearted because Gandalf immediately claps back by saying the last is most unlikely if you ride to his door with a light heart. But there is no knowing what he can do or may choose to try. A wild beast cornered is not safe to approach. The idea of him being a wild beast is picked on a bit later where Gandalf talks about him gnawing over the ends of his old plots. And he's also described as the serpent reeling to strike. And then there's another image of Wormtongue and Saruman gnawing at each other. So this idea of him turning feral, bestial is running through this chapter. And then Gandalf concludes, Saruman has powers you do not guess. Beware of his voice. So that's the main danger. So going forward, we've got the representatives of the nation to actually step forward to speak to Saruman. Merry and Pippin stay behind feeling out of it. And very often Tolkien does this so that you get a sense of spectators on the events of great people. That's really the stance of the hobbits in this whole drama. They are the little people looking at the events of the great people around them, though of course they have a key role to play themselves. But it's summed up in the sentence, Merry and Pippin sat on the bottom step feeling both unimportant and unsafe. Keep on playing that note of tension. Okay, so there's been a big build up to Saruman and his voice. So what do we actually get when Saruman comes on the scene? So this is the introduction to the voice. Suddenly another voice spoke low and melodious. It's very sound and enchantment. So there's a lot of space given to the effect of this voice on those around them. A whole paragraph. (4:54 - 7:59) I was reminded of a line in the film The King's Speech, the one starring Colin Firth, where Colin Firth is watching, the king in that case, is watching a newsreel with his family of Hitler speaking. And I think it's the young queen, the young Elizabeth says, what's he saying daddy? And the king says, I don't know, but he's saying it very well. And I think that's what's going on with Saruman. It doesn't really matter what he says. It's the he says it, that's hypnotic and powerful. So unfortunately we do have real world examples of people who have the voice that casts a spell, but here it's supercharged with magic, but there is a weakness in it. And this is explored in the introduction to the voice, which is when he turns his attention elsewhere, he becomes sort of, you can see through him. It's a juggler's trick. But the key thing is that none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will. And I think this is a major theme in Lord of the Rings that really the battles here aren't happening by people sacrificing themselves on the battlefield, though that is part of the greater picture. The most important victories are those where mind and will prevail. Most importantly, of course, over the ring. But here is another example of when it's important to stand up. So what does Saruman say? Well, he does that classic thing of someone who's in the wrong. He blames everybody else for causing that problem. Remember, he sent out his army, but now it's as though he was just, they were just taking a Sunday walk. Everybody else is fought. And he also pretends that he really wanted an alliance with Théoden. His speech here has a weird echo, actually. He says, much have I desired to speak to you, Théoden. And that much have I desired echoes Galadriel with the ring, strangely. But another thing going on here is Théoden is silent. So going back to that point about tension, we may have decided that Théoden is actually quite a good egg by now. But we need to plant some doubt. And how Tolkien does it is he shows the effect of the speech on the weaker men around Théoden. So other men in Rohan are falling under this spell. They are susceptible. And Théoden is silent. So we as a reader are left thinking, oh no, don't tell me he's going to fall at this last fence. And so we wait to find out his verdict. Before we hear his verdict, we've got two interventions. We've got Gimli's plain speaking. So Gimli is not at all interested or listening to these poisoned words. (8:00 - 8:19) And up he stands. It was Gimli the dwarf who broke in suddenly. The words of this wizard stand on their heads, he growled, gripping the handle of his axe. In the language of Orthanc, help means ruin and saving means slaying. And that is plain. But we do not come here to beg. (8:19 - 8:39) He's absolutely right. The words are standing on their head. And Saruman, you get this first hint of a crack. Tolkien is doing that rule of three where there's one intervention, then another, then Théoden. And see how it builds. There's a little crack here, but he pulls himself back. (8:40 - 9:32) So there's a fleeting moment when his voice was less suave. And then he flatters Gimli and turns back to Théoden. And Éomer, who is now proving himself to be the leader he's going to become, he also proves true hearted. He says, so would the trapped wolf speak to the hounds if he could. The idea of this Saruman turning into a beast is even found here in Éomer's words. And the crack is bigger now. So Saruman snaps back with an insult. Young serpent, obviously, insulting. It's that projection thing of insulting someone else with what you really are. (9:33 - 10:22) And he also adds in the Ents as a threat, saying, you better be friends with me because the Ents are on your doorstep. And then he goes on to say, you know, you're no better than me. In fact, you're worse because you come here stained with murder. You and your houses, you're always fighting. And so do many a politician who blame those who they have wronged. Just look around the world and you will see it happening even today. So we get here, Théoden's answer comes next. And it is heavy and deliberate. And you get the sense of the weight is shifting through the repetition of we will have peace comes three times. (10:23 - 10:28) And he says, we will have peace. Yes, we will have peace. And again, we will have peace. (10:29 - 14:02) You hold out your hand to me and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. He doesn't even add up to a single hand. He's just one claw. And that's when Saruman really loses his temper. He's no longer the great wizard in control of himself. He is afraid battered version of his old self. And he shows his colours and he sets off into this diatribe about what is the house of Eorl when he says it is a little band of gallopers and so on, where the brigands drink in the reek and the brats roll on the floor among the dogs, a thatched barn. I think that line reads really well. It's got some great sort of sounds in it. If you're insulting someone, listen to the sound of what you say as well as the content. Thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs. So he's quite good at coming up with insults, is Saruman. Gandalf is now Saruman's next target. And Gandalf's really not having much truck with this attempt by Saruman. He says, have you got things you want to unsay to me? And Saruman has only one throw of the dice left. If he can't persuade Gandalf to his side, he knows that his situation is dire. And so he gives this greatest exertion of the power. And how Tolkien conveys this because the actual words themselves are hard to wait with that. He tells you what the effect is on other people listening. And even Theoden is driven to doubts. Everybody else feels like they heard the gentle remonstrance of a kindly king with an airing, but much loved minister. Saruman is here still trying to assert he's the head of the council and Gandalf is in a way his supplicant. Final throw turns up. No, no dice. Because we get this classic thing, Gandalf laughed. Remember we were talking in other chapters about how the laughter of Gandalf, the laughter of the good is a very important power of its own. And it breaks the spell here. It's not a sneering laughter. It's a laughter founded on kindness and goodness. And we get Gandalf laughed the fantasy, the fantasy that he would give in Saruman vanish like a puff of smoke. He makes Saruman into the king's jester. So he's no longer the king. He's but a fool. And he reverses the offer rather than come up. He says, won't you come down? And we see here one of those key moments. Gollum has a moment where he pivots. Maybe he will choose the good. There is a brief moment here for Saruman. We see the anguish of a mind in doubt, and he hesitates. But unfortunately for him, the beam goes down on the other side. Pride and hate were conquering him. He is now unable to reach for self-control. That's all gone. That's shot. And the thing here is, which is what Gandalf is saying, because Saruman is unable to trust. (14:03 - 14:34) The good can imagine how evil feels about their situation, but the evil can't imagine that the good might be merciful. They can't send their mind that way. As Gandalf says, the treacherous are ever distrustful. And he tries to give reassurances. But Saruman, who would not stand by those reassurances himself, he refuses to believe it. This is where we see what he's actually thinking. (14:34 - 17:24) He says, oh, you're so very kind. Yes, Gandalf is actually being kind because Gandalf's key quality is mercy. And he goes so far as to tell Saruman, what I'm offering you is freedom. You can even go to Mordor if you want. And this totally sends, it's a heaping the burning coals on the enemy's head by being kind to them. If you're thinking about it in biblical terms, Saruman's voice becomes a scream. So it's lost all suaveness. And even in the screamed comments, he betrays himself because he mentions a small rag tag at Gandalf's back. He's been looking at the hobbits, trying to work out what they're doing there. So he's about to storm off. And then we get this very big moment for Gandalf, a moment of assuming power. He says, come back, Saruman. And he's still looking at the as if he is pitiable. He's still, even at this moment of command, he's pitying him. But he does give one of those sort of great statements, which is, I am Gandalf the White, who has returned from death. There is no getting away from it that this is a biblical echo, the great I am statements that go through John's gospel. Tolkien is well aware that he's doing this subcreator fragments of or reflections of what he regards as the true myth of the story of Christ. And of course, coming back from the death, there is a resurrection theme. He's been sent back to complete his work. Tolkien would explain this as being an echo of the truer story, which he believed in sincerely, but he's sort of reflecting those values throughout his work. And this is one of the things I found very helpful as a creative. So if you've got some kind of deeply held faith or belief or worldview, you don't have to do a sort of didactic version of it. You don't have to go even as far as C.S. Lewis where you're doing a sort of almost, he calls it a supposal, but it's clearly more closely plotted on the resurrection story with Aslan being a kind of Christ figure. Here, Tolkien is doing something similar, but it's further removed. He's still telling that story, but it's in a different echo chamber. It's a different version. So he's not trying to set up a new gospel at all, but he's just saying in this world, which is still ruled by the kind of God and mercy that I believe in, this is the kind of thing that would happen. (17:25 - 18:10) So you can put what you care for, dress it up in a new way, but it still fundamentally is holding to it the same hope and love and charity, all those things in the form of Gandalf, who is a new creation in Tolkien's world. So I found that really helpful for myself because being a person who has belief, that I didn't want to be stuck doing sort of, wanted to feel creatively free. And this is a way I found that opened that door to be creatively free to invent my own sorts of myths that reflect a true myth that I believe in. (18:11 - 19:04) Moving on from that, Gandalf cements everything. That's probably not a very wizardly word. He backs everything up by breaking the staff. The staff here is a signal of office, but it's also something he channels his power through. So the two things, it's like removing someone's weapon, breaking somebody's sword. It's a similar kind of thing, but in the wizardly world, of course, it is a staff. Now, this is where we get another little final flourish that's of interest in this chapter. Wormtongue throws an object out of the window, a palantir, which is notable. We get a sense of it being different from everything else because it manages to chip and damage Orthanc on its passage down, unlike the Ents who are barely able to do anything to that building. (19:05 - 19:28) So if you're thinking about what might be able to damage that building, it's sort of, maybe this comes from the same kind of people who built it or even an older generation. So that sort of thought might be planted. Also, we get a glimpse of it having a heart of fire. (19:29 - 19:41) Now, fire doesn't sound good, does it? That sounds hot. It sounds potentially wicked. Not a wicked object of itself, but it's been turned to wicked purposes as we later find out. (19:42 - 22:03) But the funny thing about this and the way that Tolkien's world seems terribly well worked out is that he allows ideas to come to him in the process of writing and he will fold it into the wider story so that it feels as though it should always have been there. And he goes back and he rewrites or threads it through so that it feels as though it was always there in the history. I find that when I'm plotting, if I'm plotting a murder mystery, for example, which I write quite a lot of, I will sometimes look back through the manuscript and find things which I hadn't thought of as a clue, but I turn them into a clue by reading back and looking for how they've been placed. So just picking up what Tolkien thought about the Palantir, he says in a letter to W. H. Auden, poet, I knew nothing of the Palantiri, though the moment the Orthanc stone was cast from the window, I recognised it and knew the meaning of the rhyme of law that had been running in my mind, seven stars and seven stones and one white tree. These rhymes and names will crop up, but they do not always explain themselves. So he's in a way, not exactly a passenger in his own story, but it is that wonderful moment in creativity where you do feel like you're riding a horse that's bolting away with you. And of course, that little ditty will come not long after it's in another book, but in terms of the timescale, it's a night or so later where Gandalf is reciting this little rhyme to Pippin when they're riding for Gondor. We also should just note that there is an off-note buried here, which bears fruit in the next chapter, which is Pippin is the one who picks it up. And Gandalf is quite quick to say, I didn't ask you to touch that. Pippin has been notable for dropping stones and doing things when he shouldn't. He is the curiosity that killed the character. So it is right that it's him and it sets up some problems for the next chapter. (22:04 - 24:04) Unusually here, Gandalf spends some time explaining himself. Do you remember that when he rode in a great haste to get the horns from Treebeard, when the hobbits ask him where he's been, he says, you know, I'm back. That's all you need to know. Where I've gone, now I'm back, and rides off. Clearly he was at haste, but here he actually stops and explains his strategy. And he also explains the mindset of Saruman. He says he will not serve, only command. So going back to Tolkien's Catholic faith again, a very important image about Christ is that he's a servant-king, the washing of the feet of his disciples and so on. Gandalf himself has come to serve, not to command. He says, I do not wish for mastery. So it's another reason why Gandalf is a fragment of a Christ-like figure in this book. And Saruman is like a fallen angel if we're looking for biblical parallels. He's like the Lucifer in this book, once was good and has fallen into evil. And then we get some other little notes as a way of winding up our sojourn with the Ents. We get quite a chatty Legolas. He doesn't say very much quite often, but he starts chatting to Treebeard and he makes a bargain that he will come back and visit Fangorn Forest after the end of these events. But with Gimli and there's this, obviously Treebeard isn't that keen on someone who carries an axe, but he's reassured when Legolas says his axe is not for trees, but for Orknex. So already, Tolkien is looking to be on the end of the story to have that friendship with its post end of the ring section, which we'll see in the final chapters. (24:06 - 26:27) And we get some comedy. So the atmosphere is lightening up. If you've watched the extended edition of Lord of the Rings, what they do here with Saruman, Saruman was a bit muffed in the film because they didn't have time for him. And I know that annoyed Christopher Lee greatly. But at this point, Saruman is pushed off the roof by Wormtongue and falls onto a device, a sort of wheel with spikes. And I don't like that. I mean, okay, you need to get rid of your bad guy if you're not going to go back to the Shire at the end. But how much better is it to have this idea of Saruman lurking behind his doors being a bit of a threat and we find out that he remains a threat and that his death is in a way the last of them. Anyway, so I can see why you do that as a filmmaker, but give me Tolkien's version of this. So going back to the, we haven't got somebody spiked on a horrible engine thing here. We've got Saruman going back indoors and his punishment being having to live with Wormtongue. Tolkien puts here a sort of sweet moment with the Ents where Treebeard worries that he's getting hasty because he's made friends. And he has very sweetly put his rhyme of lore about the Hobbits right next to the Ents. So you get the tall people, the tall creatures and the small creatures together, which sort of shows their bond, which is rather sweet. And the Ents are left as the jailers of Saruman. They're going to keep him contained for the moment. But of course, he still does have what his one tooth left. He does have his voice. And we'll see that that has a final bite in it at the end of the third part of, well, at the end of Return of the King. Anyway, so that's the end of that chapter. And we've got planted in here the seeds of what happens in the next because we have the Palantir on our hands and we'll find out what happens next very soon. (26:28 - 26:40) Thank you very much for listening. Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. (26:41 - 26:58) Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe, wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.