Nitpick, but I don’t think the books ever describe a meeting between Saruman and Galadriel or Elrond (at least at any time after the White Council scoured Dol Guldur.)
Now, sure, it’s extremely likely that they, two, would have been immune to his blandishments.
(Is it a coincidence that all three are Ringbearers? Cirdan gave up his ring… Something, by the way, that Gandalf said was extremely difficult to do. Maybe Cirdan has the greater strength of will, enough to give up a Great Ring…and maybe, lacking the ring he once bore, he’s weaker than the others, and Saruman might find his weakness. I concede it’s a longshot.)
Saruman might also have gone to the camps of the Rangers in the north, where the second-string guys would have been left behind, when the A-Team rangers went south to join Aragorn after Helm’s Deep. Saruman might sweet-talk these guys. “Left behind! How shameful! They didn’t think you could hold your own against the dangers in the south. They left you here to keep the hearths warm…like women!”
We were specifically talking about after, so this is kind of irrelevant and meaningless.
“The wise he could persuade, and the smaller folk he could daunt. That power he certainly still keeps. There are not many in Middle-earth that I should say were safe, if they were left alone to talk with him, even now when he has suffered a defeat. Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel, perhaps, now that his wickedness has been laid bare, but very few others.”
All but stated as fact.
Almost certainly.
Where did he say that?
That seems like a good bet. Make a little mischief for Aragorn.
By the by, where did they say the Eagles were Maiar? They were clearly not “normal” birds, but never thought they were anything other than a natural, if strange creature like the Ents.
When Gandalf lectures Frodo on the origin of the One Ring, he uses the plural when he says it is extremely difficult for anyone to give up possession of “The Great Rings.”
The Three, even if Elven-crafted, are, if Gandalf is to be trusted, also addictive in this way. We know that the nine and seven were: the three are of the same nature.
Can someone better informed than I am give the cite? I think it’s in one of the later works, or the Unfinished Tales, or Tolkien’s letters, or…somewhere? It is, apparently, Tolkien’s “official” word on the matter, but I don’t know where it is to be found.
ETA: from the Middle Earth Wiki: “Morgoth’s Ring, “The Annals of Aman”, p. 138”
