Posted: April 06, 1998 at 12:08:08: by Hugh Toner
It is likely that the fall of Saruman began long before he was trapped by Sauron when using the Palantir of Orthanc. We know that his knowledge/obsession with the rings of power was in full flow when Sauron was still based in Dol Guldur and that he was already working counter to the wishes of the White Council at this stage. I presume Sauron did not have access to the Palantir of Minas Ithil until he returned to the Barad Dur.I too find the Palantiri an interesting topic. The fact that Gandalf would have been able to use them to see the hand and mind of Feanor at work, in other words not just to see far away but also deep into the past, opens all sorts of possibilities. They are the oldest artifacts in Middle Earth having been made by Feanor himself. There seems to have been some way of ‘fixing’ them so that they focused on one image in particular, one looked out eternally to Tol Eressea and the Palantir of Minas Anor eventually ended up displaying the hands of Denethor enveloped in flames. Why was the Palantir of Osgilliath referred to as the master stone? What were it’s properties? If it was so large that it took several men to move, it surely could not have moved very far when it was lost in the fall of Osgilliath. There are plenty of loose ends here.
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