Isengard

The name Isengard is not native to any one tongue of Middle-earth but represents, in Tolkien's scheme of translation, the form taken by the fortress's name in the Common Speech as it passed through Rohirric usage. Following the convention by which the language of the Rohirrim is rendered in the narrative through forms echoing Old English, the name draws on elements meaning 'iron' and 'enclosure' or 'yard' — hence the sense 'Iron-yard' or 'Iron Fortress' that an English-speaking reader would recognize in the word's two halves. This is presented as a translation-equivalent rather than the fortress's original name, standing in for whatever the Rohirrim themselves called it in their own speech.

Behind this rendered name stands the older Sindarin name, Angrenost, given to the stronghold by the Dúnedain of Gondor who built it. Angrenost carries the same essential meaning as its later translation, combining an element for 'iron' with one for 'fortress' or 'stronghold', so that the Elvish and the Rohirric-derived names agree in sense even though they belong to different languages and different ages of the fortress's history. Angrenost appears as the name of record in Gondorian usage, while Isengard is the form that prevailed in the common speech of the Third Age and is the name by which the place is known throughout the account of the War of the Ring. The fortress was also spoken of descriptively as the Ring of Isengard, a phrase referring to its encircling wall rather than a separate name in its own right, and to be distinguished from Orthanc, the tower that stood within it and bore its own, unrelated name.

Isengard occupied a wide, nearly circular plain set within an arm of the Misty Mountains at their southern end, where the range curved inward before falling away toward the Gap of Rohan. This enclosed hollow was known as Nan Curunír, the Wizard's Vale, hemmed in by rock on the north and sides and opening only toward the south, so that the fortress stood athwart the passage between the mountains and the lands of Rohan beyond. Its position gave it command of one of the few ways through the mountain chain, a fact that had recommended the site to its original Gondorian builders and that later made it a base from which Saruman's power could reach out toward the Gap and the plains beyond.

The plain itself was girdled by a great wall of stone, unbroken save for a single gateway, so that the whole enclosure formed a ring within which the fortress's works were hidden from outside view. Within this ring the ground had once been green and well-watered, threaded by streams issuing from the mountains at its back, and shaded by trees before the land was given over to pit and furnace. At the centre of the plain, equidistant from the encircling wall on every side, rose the tower of Orthanc, so that the whole design of wall, vale, and tower formed a single fortified whole rather than separate structures.

The River Isen rose in the heights immediately above Isengard, drawing its waters from springs on the mountainside before running south and west through Rohan toward the sea, so that the fortress stood near the very head of one of the principal rivers of that land. This placed Isengard not merely at a gap in the mountains but at a kind of source-point in the country's geography, upstream of the fords and crossings by which the Isen was known further from its head.

Isengard was raised in the years of Gondor's strength as one of the realm's northern outposts, sited to command the Gap of Rohan and the fords by which an enemy might slip between the Misty Mountains and the White Mountains. Gondorian hands built both the encircling wall and the tower at its heart, works of a skill their makers themselves could no longer match by the waning years of the Third Age. As Gondor's power contracted southward and its garrisons in the north thinned, Isengard passed from an active fortress into a distant and lightly held charge, remembered chiefly as a key still held by the Stewards rather than a place of any strategic weight.

In the twenty-eighth century of the Third Age, the Steward Beren granted Isengard, together with the key of Orthanc, to the Wizard Saruman, who took up residence there with the goodwill of Gondor and the tacit approval of the White Council, then still concerned chiefly with watching Dol Guldur. For a long while afterward Saruman's tenancy drew little comment; he came and went, and the fortress remained formally a holding of Gondor entrusted to his care rather than a possession of his own.

That arrangement changed in the year 2953, when Saruman withdrew to Isengard for good and began to treat it openly as his own domain. He closed the Ring of Isengard to all comers, set watchers on the roads leading toward it, and turned the vale within the wall over to pit, forge, and furnace, breeding soldiers and hoarding weapons against a war he alone, among the White Council, seemed already to be preparing for. His long study of the lore of the Rings, pursued in secret from the pinnacle of Orthanc, hardened by degrees into rivalry with Gandalf and, unknown to the Council, into a covert understanding with Sauron himself.

Isengard's strength was put to the test in the War of the Ring, when Saruman's armies marched out to break Rohan, only to founder before the walls of the Hornburg. In the aftermath of that defeat the fortress itself was overwhelmed from within: the Ents of Fangorn, roused at last to war, threw down the outer gates, overturned much of the wall, and diverted the Isen to drown the pits and furnaces where Saruman's Orcs had labored. Gandalf and the Rohirrim found the ring of Isengard already reduced to a flooded ruin under Ent guard, and it was at the foot of Orthanc, the one work the flood could not touch, that Saruman was cast out of the order of Wizards and his staff broken before the gate.

Orthanc itself could not be taken from Saruman by force and was left sealed and watched, with Treebeard set as keeper of Isengard and holder of the tower's key on behalf of the absent lord of Gondor, pending the return of a King who might rightfully dispose of it. On his journey home from the war Aragorn duly received that key and granted the ring of Isengard to the Ents as a standing gift, so that the vale which Saruman had scoured for engines of war passed, in the fortress's last recorded turn, into the keeping of the oldest and least martial of Middle-earth's peoples.

Isengard was never a Rohirric holding. When Cirion granted Calenardhon to Eorl and his people, Gondor kept back the Ring of Isengard and the guard of the Gap for its own hand, judging the passage too important to the defense of the whole realm to be left to another people's keeping; the Rohirrim accepted this reservation as part of the settlement and never sought to garrison or people the vale themselves. In consequence Isengard stood, for most of the Third Age, as an enclave of Gondor's own men set down inside another realm's borders, held by a small and steadily diminishing garrison answerable to the Stewards rather than to the Kings of the Mark. Relations with its neighbor were correspondingly distant rather than close: Rohan tolerated the enclave as a fellow ward against common enemies from the west and north, but its affairs remained Gondor's own business until the Stewards let it pass out of direct control.

Once Saruman had turned the fortress wholly to his own purposes, its population changed accordingly. Alongside the Orcs gathered under his banner — among them the Uruk-hai, a stronger breed he raised that could endure sunlight and range far beyond Isengard's walls — he drew in companies of Men out of Dunland, a people who bore Rohan long-standing enmity and took readily to Saruman's wages and weapons against their neighbors. That alliance revived a hostility between Rohirrim and Dunlendings older than Saruman's own arrival, lending his war on Rohan something of the character of an old quarrel resumed rather than a wholly new conquest. Within Rohan itself his reach extended further still through Gríma, called Wormtongue, a councillor at Théoden's court in Edoras who served in secret as Isengard's eyes and ears, so that for a time the fortress's power over its neighbor worked through corruption at the king's own side as much as through open war.

With Saruman's fall the fortress passed from a garrisoned and peopled stronghold to a guarded ruin: no Orcs, Men, or Wizard remained within the ring, and its sole inhabitants thereafter were the Ents, who received it not by conquest or appointment but as a free gift from the returning King. Their tenancy marked a final reversal in Isengard's long history of rule — a place raised and held in turn by the Dúnedain, entrusted to a Wizard, and fought over by Orcs and Men, came at last into the keeping of a people who claimed no dominion over Rohan or Gondor at all, and who were bidden to make the vale green again rather than to guard or garrison it.

Isengard first enters the narrative not as a place seen but as a trap sprung: Gandalf, riding to consult Saruman after the Council of Elrond, is instead held captive on the pinnacle of Orthanc, and it is through his account of that imprisonment, and his rescue by the eagle Gwaihir, that the reader learns Saruman has turned traitor. The fortress thus functions in the story's early turns less as a location the protagonists visit than as an absence behind the plot, a captor's tower whose treachery redirects Gandalf's errand and, with it, the whole shape of the war to come.

When the company finally reaches Isengard in the flesh, the fortress has already been overthrown, and the episode is played as much for wonder and comedy as for triumph: Merry and Pippin are found seated amid the wreckage of the gate, smoking recovered pipe-weed and feasting on salvaged provisions, an incongruously domestic scene set against flooded ruin. The graver business follows at the foot of Orthanc, where Gandalf, Théoden, and their company confront Saruman in a battle fought with words alone, his voice tested against theirs before Wormtongue, in a fit of spite, hurls down the palantír that will itself carry the story onward.

Across these episodes Isengard comes to stand for a particular corruption within the story's moral scheme, that of a mind turned from growing things to gears and furnaces, and its fall at the hands of the Ents reads as nature's own answer to that betrayal. The ruin left behind, and the industry that produced it, anticipate in miniature the harm Saruman will later work on the Shire, so that Isengard functions in the tale as a dark rehearsal for a devastation still to come.

Peter Jackson's trilogy gives Isengard far more screen presence than the book allows it, and makes several of its best-known departures there. Where the novel keeps Gandalf's captivity as a retrospective account, the films stage his imprisonment on Orthanc directly, with Christopher Lee as Saruman; the vale's conversion to industry is likewise shown at length, and the breeding of the Uruk-hai in delvings beneath the ring is an invention of the films rather than anything described by Tolkien. The fall of Isengard is also shown as it happens, in the second film, instead of being reported after the fact by Merry and Pippin, and the Ents are brought to war by a different route: at the Entmoot Treebeard and his fellows decide against marching, and only turn on Isengard after Pippin steers them to the felled woods at its edge. The largest change comes at the end. The confrontation before Orthanc was cut from the theatrical release of the third film and restored only in its extended version, and in that version Saruman is killed at Isengard by Wormtongue and falls from the tower, so that the wizard's later return to the Shire — and the whole of the Scouring — disappears from the adaptation.

The older adaptations treat the fortress more sparingly. Ralph Bakshi's animated film, which breaks off after Helm's Deep, never reaches Isengard's overthrow at all; the Ents do not appear, and Saruman, voiced by Fraser Kerr, is left undefeated when the film ends, the planned continuation that would have covered the ruin of the vale never having been made. The film is also notable for renaming the wizard in part of its dialogue, out of concern that Saruman and Sauron would be confused by listeners. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, running to twenty-six parts, is the fullest of the earlier versions and follows the book's handling closely: Isengard's destruction is conveyed through the hobbits' account rather than dramatised as action, and the long verbal contest at the foot of Orthanc, with Peter Howell as Saruman, is kept substantially intact, along with the wizard's survival and his later reappearance in the Shire.