I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
The black needle of Orthanc rises above the broken circle of Isengard like a fang left in an old wound, four hundred feet of dark stone polished by ages and untouched by the fires that consumed everything around it. Long before Saruman set foot inside it, the tower had stood as a watchtower of Gondor. Tolkien uses architecture as moral compass, and few structures in Middle-earth carry such concentrated meaning as this single shaft of stone. The tale of Saruman's fall is inseparable from the tower that housed his ambition.
To speak of Saruman the White without speaking of Orthanc is to read half a sentence. The wizard arrives at Isengard as head of the Istari, welcomed by the guardians of the tower, and over many patient years he allows the place to become an extension of his will. The polished walls reflect his pride, the sealed chambers cradle his palantír, and the deep foundations hold the machinery that will, in time, pour smoke across Fangorn. The story of how this proud Maia becomes the petty tyrant of the Shire is, in great part, the story of what happens inside those dark, indestructible walls.
This essay follows the arc of that fall through the stones of Orthanc itself, tracing the tower from its Númenórean origins to the moment when Gríma Wormtongue's knife ends the long shadow it cast across the world. Through Tolkien's own writings and a long tradition of Australian readers who have treasured his work, the tower emerges as more than a fortress. It is the architectural shape of betrayal, the still-standing skeleton of a will that thought itself wiser than the world.
| Tower | Built By | Function in Narrative | Symbolic Weight | Final Fate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orthanc | Númenóreans of Gondor | Seat of Saruman's corrupted authority; forge of war | Pride that hardens into self-deception; intellectual arrogance | Unbroken but emptied; its palantír lost |
| Barad-dûr | Sauron, with Mordor's slaves | Dark throne and command post of the Lord of the Rings | Power openly claimed; the tower as extension of will | Cast down with the One Ring |
| Minas Tirith | Followers of Elendil | Capital of the Reunited Kingdom; bastion against Mordor | Steadfast loyalty; the tower as civic duty | Still standing; renewed in the Fourth Age |
Long before the wizard ever crossed its threshold, Orthanc was already one of the great works of Númenórean engineering. Raised in the early centuries of Gondor's expansion into the western lands, its black stone was brought from distant quarries and shaped with a precision the later ages could not match. At its summit sat one of the seven seeing-stones. The Ring of Isengard around it was a green and pleasant land, watered by streams falling from the Misty Mountains.
Australian readers who grew up with Allen & Unwin's Sydney editions find a particular pleasure in the pre-Saruman Orthanc. There is something of the granite country of the Warrumbungle Ranges in its aloofness, or a touch of the lonely volcanic cores that rise above the plains of western Victoria. Orthanc stood above a strategic meeting point of the Gwathló and the Isen, controlling the ancient road to the Gap of Rohan.
What mattered most about the tower in those elder days was its function rather than its appearance. Gondor used Orthanc as a remote eye and an outpost, where the southern defences could be monitored and a key pass guarded. As long as the line of kings held firm, the tower remained a quiet instrument of vigilance. The air around it was not yet thick with smoke, and the name of Saruman was unknown on the tongues of men.
When the Istari came at last to Middle-earth, the wisest of them, Curumo whom the Elves called Curunír, was drawn to Isengard by reasons Tolkien only partly reveals. Saruman took up his dwelling in Orthanc as one having authority, and Radagast, who had originally invited him, soon faded into the wild. Over years of patient study, Saruman came to love the tower as an extension of his own thought. The polished walls became the mirrored surface of his mind, the sealed chambers the locked rooms of his pride.
His corruption is the central event in the story of Orthanc. He was, by all accounts, the strongest of the Istari, the one most given to study of the Enemy's devices. He learned the making of rings and the lore of the palantíri, and at last he set himself to discover the secrets of the One Ring itself. The tower became his laboratory and his prison all at once. Australian Tolkien societies have often noted how his corruption mirrors a wider human tragedy: the scholar who mistakes knowledge for wisdom, the leader who mistakes solitude for safety.
This is also the moment when the white robe changes its meaning. The White Hand of Saruman, that ancient sign of healing, becomes instead the heraldry of a petty tyranny. The tower, no longer a watchman's lantern, becomes a beacon of his private war against the Free Peoples. Tolkien tells us Isengard began to look like a great black furnace, with Saruman walking alone within its walls. The tower that once connected Gondor to its realm now connects Saruman to the Dark Lord through the palantír within its highest chamber.
None of the secrets held within Orthanc is more dangerous than the palantír in its high chamber. The seeing-stones were designed for communication between the faithful, but once Sauron possessed the master stone in Barad-dûr, every other palantír became a potential snare. Saruman, in his pride, believed he could match his mind against the lidless eye of the Dark Lord. He used the stone of Orthanc to gaze westward into the doings of the West, not aware that Sauron gazed back.
The result is the central moral turning point of the wizard's fall. Tolkien shows how the palantír acts as a dark mirror, reflecting what the gazer is and magnifying his hidden lusts. For Denethor the stone brings despair. For Aragorn it brings mastery and self-knowledge. For Saruman, it brings the slow erosion of every softer feeling, until he becomes a creature of plots, his will bent always toward the East. Australian discussions have often read the palantír as a metaphor for surveillance, and the tower as the apparatus through which a distant eye reaches into the home.
Inside Orthanc the seeing-stone sits upon a pillar of its own, and around it the wizard weaves his plans for war. The tower becomes almost an antenna, its walls tuned to the will of its master and of the distant eye he serves. Even when Saruman begins to dream of replacing Sauron rather than serving him, the palantír keeps him tethered to the Dark Lord. The tower is no longer a place of study; it is a place of infection.
Isengard under Saruman becomes a vision of industrialised destruction. The ring around the tower, once a green valley, is torn up and replaced with pits, forges, and great furnaces. Tree after tree is felled in Fangorn to feed the fires of the wizard's war. Saruman's industry is the shadow side of the Ring of Isengard, an empire of slag and smoke.
Tolkien's description of the pits of Isengard has acquired local resonances over the decades. The smelting works of Port Pirie once formed a similar contrast with the wide pastoral landscapes around it; debates about forestry in Tasmania have given Saruman's axes a fresh familiarity. To walk into a Melbourne bookshop is to enter one of the central myths of our age.
Yet Tolkien never lets us see this industry only as metaphor. The destruction of Fangorn is a real destruction within the story. Trees die. Birdsong ends. The Huorns, the half-alive trees of the old forest, begin to move with intent. When Treebeard at last leads his host to Isengard and finds it already wrecked by its own furnaces, the moment has the awful quality of a man confronted by the ruin he had been too slow to prevent. The tower stands untouched above it all, a reminder that the destruction was the work of the one who dwelt within.
The Ents' assault on Isengard is the central turning point in the story of Orthanc. The wizard's gates, the iron doors that had once kept out every casual foe, are broken by the sheer strength of the forest. Merry and Pippin, who had fled into Fangorn with the orcs at their heels, stand at the edge of the devastation and watch as Saruman stands upon his tower, his voice echoing from its parapets, his staff raised in vain. The wizard who had commanded armies now stands alone. Treebeard allows him to remain in Orthanc, choosing mercy over vengeance, and Saruman sits imprisoned in the very place that had been his throne.
The scene carries an unmistakable biblical weight. Saruman on his tower is a kind of inverted prophet, still speaking, still commanding, but addressed only by wind and stone. Australian readers have long noticed how the landscape lends itself to such scenes; the dry stone silence of the Flinders Ranges suggests the long fall of a voice into a place where nothing will answer. There is something of the Australian outback in Treebeard, who has wandered in the patient certainty that the day of reckoning will come.
For all the grandeur of the moment, Tolkien keeps it strangely quiet. The wizard's defeat is mostly the collapse of his machinery, the emptying of his forges, the departure of his slaves. The one sound that troubles the silence is the slow hiss of the surviving furnaces. The tower itself endures, untouched by fire or stone, a lasting witness to the pride of him who made it his home.
Even after his defeat at Isengard, Saruman does not vanish from the story. He lingers in Orthanc until Gandalf, Aragorn, and the rest of the Company come to him and release him, allowing him to walk abroad as a free wizard once more. He takes Wormtongue and a bitter heart. The journey down from Isengard to the Shire, where the wizard will eventually set himself up as Sharkey, is a slow descent from the proud tower to the petty fief of the hedgerows.
The Scouring of the Shire is where the meaning of Orthanc finally completes itself. The tower at Isengard was the stage on which the wizard had played at being a lord of Middle-earth. The Shire becomes the stage on which he plays at being a lord of a much smaller world. Australian bookshops long devoted to Tolkien, from Dymocks to
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading