Orthanc

Orthanc is the only name the narrative gives to the tower. It comes from the Men of Westernesse who raised it, and it describes its form. The chronicle of the Road to Isengard explains that in the Elvish tongue the word means Mount Fang. That fits the building as it is described there: a single dark peak of rock that divides into sharp, horn-like pinnacles near its summit, rising from the flat floor of the stone ring. The Elvish sense is therefore descriptive and concrete, the kind of name builders might give a structure that looks like a tooth thrust up from the earth.1

The same passage adds that the word has a second, unrelated meaning. In the old speech of the Mark, the language of the Rohirrim's forebears, orthanc signifies the Cunning Mind. The narrator does not say whether the overlap arose by design or by accident and leaves the question open. The convergence is linguistic rather than historical. An Elvish place-name and a native word of the horsemen happen to share one form, and the second meaning came to suit the tower's later master all too well. Appendix F explains that the language of Rohan is rendered throughout in forms modelled on Old English. The Rohirric reading of the name therefore belongs to that translated layer of the text, while the Elvish reading stands in its original form.2

Beyond its proper name, the tower is often called simply the Tower of Orthanc, or just the Tower, in scenes set within the ring of Isengard. Its name is also closely tied to that of Isengard itself, so that the two can stand in for each other in the speech of the West. Appendix E fixes how the name is spoken. The spelling th always marks the voiceless sound heard in English thin, and c always stands for k. The name is therefore said with a hard final consonant, and the th is never softened into the voiced sound of English then.3

Orthanc stands where the Misty Mountains come to their southern end, in the vale that runs down from their last great peak and is watered by the young Isen before the river bends away through the Gap of Rohan. The tower is not a freestanding building in open country. It rises from the exact centre of Isengard, a broad circular plain enclosed by a sheer wall of rock that nature and ancient craft together shaped into something like a ring of cliffs. The only way into that ring lies to the south, through a long tunnel cut into the wall and closed by iron doors. Whoever came to Orthanc therefore had to cross the whole enclosure first, and in Saruman's later years that enclosure was paved, pitted and honeycombed with shafts and chambers where it had once held lawns and trees.1

The tower itself is described less as masonry than as a natural outcrop that has been given purpose. Several great piers of many-faced black stone are fused into a single shaft, glossy and unyielding. The text gives the height of the platform at its summit, set among the pinnacles, as some five hundred feet above the surrounding floor. The door is reached by a broad flight of steps hewn from the same dark rock, and above it a window opens onto a balcony with an iron railing, from which the occupant could address those gathered below. The stone resists every tool and every blow. When the Ents overran the ring of Isengard, they could break the outer works but could not mark the tower, which is the clearest proof in the narrative that its makers worked with arts beyond those of the present age.2

Politically, Orthanc lay at the far northern edge of the lands Gondor once held west of the Anduin. Its position at the foot of the mountains let it watch over the Gap of Rohan and the river crossings below, so that whoever held it could overlook the road between the southern kingdoms and the north. As Gondor's reach shrank, the tower stood unmanned and far from any garrison. It was a Steward of Gondor who eventually handed its keys to Saruman, and from that point the place served as a wizard's fortress rather than a frontier outpost.3

Orthanc belongs to the early strength of the South Kingdom. The narrative attributes both the tower and the rock-ring around it to the Men of Westernesse, who built them long before the War of the Ring, when Gondor's rule still reached the western vales below the mountains. No year of construction is recorded in the chronicles, and the text says nothing more about who planned the work or why. Its purpose can be inferred from its later history. Orthanc was one of the places that held a palantír, one of the seeing-stones the exiles brought from Númenor, which bound the distant tower to the other seats of the realm. Gandalf's later remarks about the stone's origin make clear that it had lain there since the days of the Kings and had not been added by the wizard.1

As Gondor declined, the tower lost its garrison but not its legal owner. The keys stayed in the keeping of the rulers of Gondor after the ground around Isengard had ceased to be watched, and when the land to the east passed to the Rohirrim, Orthanc was not part of that grant. The decisive change came under the Steward Beren, who received Saruman and gave him the keys. The Tale of Years records this in the year 2759 of the Third Age, when the wizard settled in Isengard, just after the hard years of Helm's war and the Long Winter had left Rohan weakened. Gondor's reasoning, as the appendices present it, was that a powerful ally of the West dwelling there would guard the Gap better than an empty fortress could.2

For almost two centuries Saruman held Orthanc as a guest of the Stewards, at least in name. The Tale of Years marks the year 2953 as the point at which he treated Isengard as his own possession and fortified it. The chronicles then note that around the year 3000 he began to use the palantír of the tower. Through that stone his will came under the influence of Sauron, whose own stone lay in Barad-dûr. In these decades the tower's function was reversed. Built as an outpost of the realm that stood against Mordor, it became a place from which the wizard's ambition, and increasingly Sauron's, reached out over the lands around it. The ring below was dug out for forges and furnaces, and the tower stood over a stronghold of Orcs and Men of Dunland.3

In the summer of 3018 Orthanc became a prison. Gandalf came to seek counsel and was held captive on the high platform between the pinnacles after he refused to join Saruman. His release came from the air. The eagle Gwaihir carried him away from the summit, an escape the ring's gates and guards could do nothing to stop. Gandalf's later account to the Council of Elrond gives the fullest view of the tower from inside during these months. It is also the first open sign to the wise that the head of their order had fallen away.4

Saruman's power in Isengard ended in early March 3019. While his army was away at the Hornburg, the Ents of Fangorn and the Huorns fell on the stone ring, tore down its walls and works, and then turned the Isen into the enclosure until the pits and shafts were flooded. The tower itself held, as noted above, so the Ents settled for watching it. Saruman was left shut in, with nowhere to go and no army left. A few days later Gandalf and Théoden came to parley at its steps. Saruman refused the offer of freedom, and Gandalf broke his staff and cast him out of the order. In the same exchange Wormtongue hurled the palantír from a window of the tower. The stone came into Gandalf's hands and so passed at last to Aragorn, heir of the Kings who had first set it there.5

The tower outlived the war. That summer Treebeard, who disliked keeping any living thing caged, let Saruman and Wormtongue leave on the promise that they would go. The keys of Orthanc came back into the hands of the returning royal line. The Ents stayed in the valley and planted the old ring with trees, so that it became a walled garden known as the Treegarth of Orthanc, and the new King confirmed their right to that ground. Orthanc thus ends the tale neither ruined nor inhabited. It stands intact inside a forest, returned to the crown that built it and guarded by the folk who broke its last master's power.6

For most of its existence Orthanc had no lord of its own. It was a possession of the crown of Gondor, governed from afar first by the Kings and then by the Stewards, and the narrative names no captain or warden who held it in their name. When the plains to the east were given to Eorl and his people, the Rohirrim became the tower's nearest neighbours without ever owning it, a division of land and authority that the appendices treat as settled law. The chronicles of the Mark add that the wizard who came to dwell there in Fréaláf's day was at first counted a friend of Rohan, and the horsemen saw no threat in the stranger who now kept the old stronghold.1

Under Saruman the tower became the seat of a household unlike any the West had known. Its master ruled beneath the badge of the White Hand, and the folk who served him in the ring below were drawn from several peoples: Orcs, among them a larger and stronger breed that did not shun the sun, Men out of Dunland, and creatures that the hobbits and Treebeard describe as neither wholly one nor the other. Merry and Pippin, recounting the fall of Isengard, speak of these mixed ranks as the garrison that marched out against Rohan. In the last days before the Ents came, Gríma Wormtongue, driven from Théoden's hall, joined his master in the tower and remained with him there as the only companion he had left.2

The name is therefore said with a hard final consonant, and the th is never softened into the voiced sound of English then.

Relations with the neighbouring peoples soured as Saruman's ambition grew. Treebeard recalls that the wizard once walked in Fangorn as a courteous visitor, asking questions and listening, before his servants began to fell the trees along the forest's edge. Toward Rohan the tower's master turned from ally to enemy, stirring up the old grievance of the Dunlendings against the horsemen and sending his forces over the Isen. The Ents' siege, described in the earlier account, ended this rule, and the valley passed in the end to the keeping of Fangorn's folk rather than to any human lord.3

In the narrative, Orthanc is where the scattered threads of the Third Book come back together. The companions who parted at the Falls of Rauros, the riders of Rohan, and the two hobbits carried off by Orcs all reach the ruined ring along separate roads and meet again beneath the tower. The meeting is deliberately low-key. Merry and Pippin receive the King of the Mark amid the wreckage with food and pipes. Their store of Shire pipe-weed quietly hints that Saruman's dealings reach much farther west than anyone had guessed, a clue that pays off only at the very end of the tale.1

The tower also carries the book's reflection on how the wise are corrupted. Treebeard describes Saruman as a mind of metal and wheels, and the industry that fills the ring expresses that description in stone and fire. The narrator frames the wizard's work as an imitation, a lesser echo of the Dark Tower that Saruman believed he was rivalling while he was in truth serving it. The tower, however, stays what its makers built. Saruman could fill its surroundings with forges but could not reshape Orthanc itself, so the building stands as an inheritance of the old West that has fallen into the wrong hands rather than as a work of evil in its own right.2

Finally, Orthanc is where words become the chief weapon. At the parley the danger lies in persuasion, not assault. Each listener must resist a voice that turns every argument toward its speaker's advantage. What the tower gives up in that scene sets the next movement going. Pippin's secret look into the recovered stone at Dol Baran leads directly to his ride with Gandalf toward Minas Tirith and to Aragorn's later decision to use the stone himself.3

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy, Orthanc is one of the recurring settings, and Christopher Lee plays its master throughout. The films keep Gandalf's captivity on the summit and his rescue by an eagle, but they add a direct contest of power between the two wizards inside the tower before the imprisonment, which the book does not have. The films also move much of Saruman's industry below the tower. The pits of the ring become the place where his fighting Orcs are bred, a sharper and more literal image than the book's forges and shafts. The Ents' assault differs as well. Instead of turning the course of the Isen, they release the river by breaking a dam upstream. The largest change concerns the tower's last chapter. The theatrical cut of the third film leaves out the parley at the steps altogether, and the palantír is found in the floodwater. The extended edition restores a version of the parley but ends it with Saruman's death at the tower, at the hands of Wormtongue. The book instead lets both leave Orthanc alive and reserves their end for the Shire, an episode the films omit.1

Ralph Bakshi's animated film shows Gandalf's imprisonment at Orthanc as part of the account he gives after his escape, with William Squire as Gandalf and Fraser Kerr as Saruman. Because the film breaks off after Helm's Deep, it never reaches the fall of Isengard or the parley, and the tower's later history has no place in it. The BBC radio dramatisation of 1981, with Michael Hordern as Gandalf and Peter Howell as Saruman, covers the tower's whole arc, including the parley after the Ents' siege. It keeps the book's ordering of events, with the wizard shut in rather than killed at Orthanc.2