It occurs to me that with a minimum of rewriting you could tell almost the same story without the character of Saruman at all. It would have been easy enough to have some other trouble delay Gandalf, have Sauron be the evil influence in Rohan as it was in Gondor, have standard orcs rather than Uruk-Hai attack Helm’s Deep, etc. Now I do have a semi-answer to my own question, but it still begs what was Tolkien thinking when he chose to frame the story the following way.
The Big Bad of the story– Sauron– is an external menace, almost anonymous. We literally never see him, at most get a brief second-hand account of Smeagol’s seeing him in person. He’s as much an alien force of nature as a villain. But Saruman is another story. Far from being an outsider we see him up close and personal as a traitor, an internal menace. It is he who despoils both Isengard and the Shire in the name of “progress”. And he’s a peculiarly petty villain. A wretched more or less incompetent wanna-be overlord who when all is lost sinks to bitter self-pity. Sauron is a menace but Saruman is truly the villain, or should I say villein, of the story.
Tolkien explicitly denied that LotR was in any way meant to be based on World War Two, and in any case there’s no historical figure Saruman could plausibly be symbolic of (Quisling just wasn’t that important on the larger scale of things). So what was Tolkien’s point in plotting the story this way?
Is this your answer? Because I think that’s the answer. Sauron is quite an ur-villain, but he serves almost as a force of nature or cosmic evil. Saruman personifies things so that he can get into the personalized drama. In particular he gives Gandalf something to do, because otherwise Gandalf would just be romping over everything and it would be a short book.
Saruman also does a lot of the environmental terrorism that adds visceral revulsion, and gives the Ents something to do.
By showing that the Ring can corrupt even someone as powerful as the leader of the Istari without him even seeing it, it demonstrates how pervasive the temptation is and how powerful Sauron must be by extension.
It ties into Tolkien’s philosophical points about evil being petty and banal, and incapable of creation, only destruction and mockery.
Also as a compare/contrast between Gandalf and Saruman. Both are powerful wizards, named the Istari who are Maia, ie secondary level godbeings, below the Valar, Iluvatar’s 1st level gods & goddesses; Gandalf apprenticed under Manwe, the King of the Valar while Saruman worked with Aule, the Valar of metal-craft and smith-work, recrafting the Tower of Isengard along the lines of Saurn’s Dark Tower, Barad-dur.
Also after Gandalf emerges victorious from his battle with the Balrog, he is reborn and becomes Gandalf the White, the leader of the Istari that Saruman should’ve been. Those seem to me to be the main reasons for Saruman’s role, perhaps why Tolkien crafted the tale the way he did.
I’m sure other points will be brought up by fellow LOTR Dopers!
I think that stories in general benefit from having multiple villains, of multiple types and levels. Sauron is a villain, Saruman is a villain, the Balrog is a villain, the Watcher in the Water is a villain, Wormtongue is a villain, Gollum is a villain, the third Uruk-Hai from the left who gets gutted as Gimli’s #22 is a villain. They’re all very different, and you could still have the story without most of them, but they all contribute to the story.
In addition to the worth mentions above, and amplifying @Smapti’s point in a different direction, it, along with Boromir’s fall, shows the deadly temptation of the ring. It counters Bilbo’s (comparatively) weak reaction, and why any of the powerful characters refuse to make use of the ring or anything else under Sauron’s influence.
So we have a lot of “good” or formerly-good(ish) characters having to fight (and sometimes lose!) against the temptation of using the tainted powers: Saruman of course, but also Denethor (the palantir) plus Boromir, Galadriel’s and Gandalf’s moments with the ring.
It’s not just Sauron’s power being emphasized, but how the power and temptation of all these tainted works can only be overcome with the strongest of hearts and minds, and even those are at deadly risk. Saruman shows exactly what would happen if Gandalf or Galadriel had taken the ring - perhaps Sauron would have been destroyed, but what replaced him would have been just as malign a force to the free peoples of the world.
I always assumed the Saruman was “applicable"* to Stalin. It seems a stretch now, given how things went after 1941. But if he came up with that plotline between the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Nazi invasion of the USSR it makes a little sense.
‘*’ - Tolkien’s preferred term IIRC he hated allegory
Many excellent points have been raised in this thread. To add a strictly plot point, a secondary villain was needed respecting Rohan, so that this villain could be more-or-less thoroughly defeated, and Rohan could be freed to ride to the rescue of Minas Tirith. It was too soon for a major defeat for Sauron, if he were the one threatening Rohan.
On the point of Saruman being seduced by the ring without even having seen it: a significant part of that seduction was done by Sauron via the medium of the Palantiri, one of which Saruman had. Sauron manipulated Saruman, much as he did Denethor, although with a somewhat different purpose. While Saruman thought he was learning about Sauron, he was in fact being led by the nose. He was distracted by ideas of sharing ultimate power and lost his clarity of purpose, becoming even more vulnerable to thoughts of the ring than he would otherwise have been.
It provided some contrast too - Rohan thoroughly defeated Saruman’s army at Helms Deep and the Ents removed him as a threat by destroying Isengard. But even though Sauron’s army was thoroughly defeated at Pelennor Fields, it didn’t matter, the only way to remove Sauron as a threat was by destroying the Ring, strength of arms alone would never be sufficient.
I agree with much of the above, but something else to consider, the kind of story Tolkien was writing: a mythic history. He wasn’t trying to maximize the tightness of the plot, or the amount of action or melodrama. As in a real history, things exist and do stuff that may be inconvenient for particular storytelling purposes. And Tolkien wanted to capture that feel in the Lord of the Rings.
I think that’s what the movies fail to capture as well as Tolkien’s writings.
I would go a different direction with this. I don’t think Saruman was corrupted by the Ring. Saruman broke bad purely for his own naked ambition and advantage. He illustrates that abject depravity doesn’t require a magical corrupting force; some people are just assholes who are waiting to exploit certain situations and opportunities.
This, I don’t get this modern obsession of having to justify everything as “moving the plot” or “having a point”, do they charge you by the word when you read books?
What’s the point of Tom Bombadil? what’s the point of the Ents? what’s the point of Bill the Pony? who cares? do you enjoy reading about them or not?
Books, specially epic fantasy books are not programs to be optimized or supply chains to be streamlined.
He wasn’t. He never encountered the Ring, at least not since Bilbo recovered it. He was corrupted by using a palantir to try to monitor Sauron’s actions.
The text is pretty explicit in saying this isn’t true of Saruman. He was a respected and honored leader of the Istari for centuries, before he turned.
I care. I like thinking about how the different parts of a work of art function together to create a larger whole. Which sometimes involves identifying which parts don’t actually add to that function.
But then the answer is obvious, a good book needs good characters, Saruman is a good character, thus enhancing the book.
Could he be replaced by Sauron, probably, but then you lose a great character.
Another thing about Saruman that seems worth mentioning: he developed a more sturdy form of orc, who could function outdoors during daylight hours. In this, he seems to have outstripped Sauron, although I suppose Sauron was uninterested in trying this himself, being satisfied with quantity over quality. Did he also develop an explosive, like gunpowder? I’m not sure if that was only in the movie, or if it was also in the book. If he had acquired the ring, his engineering ability plus the ring could have made him a more serious threat to Sauron.
If it could be done without damage to innocent bystanders, such a war would have been something to read about. I can imagine a scenario where Saruman’s and Sauron’s armies (and Saruman’s tech) fight to such a standstill that the two of them end up in hand-to-hand combat inside Mt. Doom, and they both fall in. The ring is destroyed, Sauron is likewise destroyed, and Saruman’s physical form is destroyed while his spirit ends up like Voldemort curled up under a bench. Or wisped away, like it ended up later in the story. What fun!
It was in the book, though the whole kamikaze Uruk-Hai running into the culvert was pure Jackson:
Even as they spoke there came a blare of trumpets. Then there was a crash and a flash of flame and smoke. The waters of the Deeping-stream poured out hissing and foaming: they were choked no longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall. A host of dark shapes poured in. ‘Devilry of Saruman!’ cried Aragorn. ‘They have crept in the culvert again, while we talked, and they have lit the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet.
…
‘But the Orcs have brought a devilry from Orthanc,’ said Aragorn. ‘They have a blasting fire, and with it they took the Wall.
And while searching for that, I found this excellent quote:
Aragorn and Legolas went now with Eomer in the van. On through the dark night they rode…
Yup, identified by his adversaries simply as “some devilry” or maybe a “blasting fire”. [ETA: ninja’d by @muldoonthief! we hates it forever ]
(Tolkien sidestepped a lot of chemistry issues in his worldbuilding by having the books nominally derived from source texts written by technologically-incurious hobbits.)
Another way in which Saruman couldn’t be replaced as sub-villain by Sauron is by running off to Hobbiton with a few of his half-orcs and becoming Sharkey, and providing a foil for the returning hobbits in the Scouring of the Shire.
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