Thread: Saruman's ring
View Single Post
Old 01-29-2013, 10:13 AM   #27
Zigūr
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
 
Zigūr's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2012
Posts: 785
Zigūr is a guest at the Prancing Pony.Zigūr is a guest at the Prancing Pony.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendė View Post
RTD is a genius! I will agree that Moffat leaves a lot to be desired though...one day he will choose to focus on Sherlock instead and pass the baton to someone else *crosses fingers*
Oh dear! I'm afraid I find Moffat occasionally tolerable but RTD (and Tennant) not at all. And Moffat's Sherlock is in the same boat for me as the films of The Lord of the Rings and New Who - a modern interpretation which, to me, seems to miss the point of the source material in an effort to glam up for modern audiences. But I digress.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendė View Post
Saruman however attempts to work out what it is and use the 'base chemicals' to craft something new.
This comes across as reading into things a tad in my opinion. Gandalf's words, "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom" evokes to me the idea that Saruman was not breaking it down to understand it, but simply to make change for change's sake: "It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken." To me this disassembly of his whiteness is largely an effort to make himself seem progressive, more advanced, better, but to transform he can only destroy something complete and whole. All he could do was desecrate his own position and inspect the broken fragments, and so he lost what he had.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lalwendė View Post
he does not see it as good or evil, it is another path to him. But it is also a slightly different approach to those taken by both Morgoth and Sauron.
I agree that it is, perhaps, different in its means, but I feel the intentions are the same. I daresay Morgoth and Sauron did not consider themselves to be "evil" either. This to me is Saruman's delusion: he was "the White", the highest of the Order and the Council, but he came to convince himself that White was only a base from which to build rather than a summit which he was breaking underneath himself. It turns out he was wrong: being "the White" was promotion; he was effectively demoting himself on a spiritual level. To me this is the same self-deception as Morgoth and Sauron, convincing themselves that there was some property of existence about which they had insights beyond that of Eru, that Eru was wrong and they were right. To me it suggests not a genuine effort to understand light, but a fatuous act of arrogance. Saruman cannot improve on "White", so he shatters it and claims (to himself as well as others) that the broken wreckage is better than the original, unspoiled thing. I suppose what I feel like Gandalf is trying to say is that Saruman could have understood the White light had he tried, but he refuses to do so, because that would involve admitting it as being out of his control, and control is what he desires. The only control he can exert upon it is to break it down, just like Morgoth sought the ruin of Arda because he couldn't stand the notion that it was not solely his and that he could never have absolute power over it, or like how Sauron, fool that he was, convinced himself that Eru had "given up" on Arda and would let him do what he liked with it.
To me this deconstruction of the light is representative of villainous folly in general in Arda: the idea that finite, incarnate beings exerting their limited power over individual constituents of something to which they were themselves internal and a part were somehow capable of turning the ultimate control away from the external, infinite authority - it's completely delusional. They were part of the system; the system can't change itself. Only the person on the outside, Eru, has that power. Breaking things down gives the illusion, however, that they do have that power; the Shadow confounded itself just as readily as its enemies. This is how I read the breaking of the White light.
That being said, thank you for your insights, this has been an extremely illuminating (pun intended or not, your choice) discussion!
Zigūr is offline   Reply With Quote