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edemption, but the Wizard angrily
scorned it, so Gandalf dismissed
him from the Order of Wizards,
and broke his staff.
Escaping from Isengard after the
destruction of the One Ring, Saruman
and Gríma fled to the Shire. So great
was his fall, and so petty his wrath,
that there Saruman plotted to avenge
themselves on Gandalf ’s beloved
Hobbits. Even the Shire rose against
him, though, and in the end a knife
stroke from Gríma Wormtongue
ended the great wizard’s life.
Then King Elessar came to
Isengard and scoured the tower, discovering
many treasures that Saruman
had stolen and acquired over the ages.
He gave Isengard to the Ents, who
planted a wood around Isengard to
watch it. Thereafter, Isengard became
fairer than it had ever been, a spike
of jet-black set in rich green, a place
where eagles nested on the parapets
and watched as the younger races took
control of the world.
l i f e i n
i s e n g a r d
‘[W]hat he made was naught, only a little
copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery
. . . the Dark Tower . . . suffered no
rival, and laughed at flattery. . . .’
— The Two Towers
Isengard at the very end of the Third
Age is a very different place than
it had been during most of its history.
Before 3018, the vast majority
of the inhabitants of the tower
were humans, either Dunlendings or
half-Dunlending healfblod, and those
few Orcs in Isengard lived underground,
connected via tunnels to a
vast network of Orc-holes beneath
Methedras. The majority of Orcs
to be found in Isengard were either
snaga slaves who operated Saruman’s
1
The History and Life of Isengard
engines, or Uruk-hai used as breeding
stock for Saruman’s Half-orcs. Most
of Saruman’s human servants didn’t
understand the full extent of their
master’s designs, and believed only
that the great Wizard had enslaved
a few Orcs to perform his most dangerous
labours (a practise which the
Dunlendings themselves had done on
numerous occasions). This allowed
Saruman to maintain the deception
that he was still a friend to Men
(though he was far more concerned
about the Council’s reaction to his
Orcs than the Rohirrim’s). Orc-traffic
greatly increased throughout the
region after 3010, but this was blamed
on the Orcs of Sauron, an excuse that
seemed quite plausible at the time,
and the White Hand was not openly
displayed on Orc-banners until just
before the first battle of the Fords of
the Isen in 3018.
Long before Saruman openly
declared himself, however, Isengard
was on a war footing. Large supplies
of grain were purchased from
farming villages on the outskirts of
Isengard. To facilitate this, Saruman
employed an extremely clever piece
of deception—he prophesied massive
starvation due to Orc-raids and
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