: Tolkien uses the word "ensnared" in the LOTR, maybe "ensalved" is a bit strong. But I don't really think Saruman had much free-choice left - he may have thought he did, but he was really only serving Sauron.

: : Why not? That's exactly what Gil-galad and Elendil and co. did a few years later!

: Not really. Gil-galad and Elendil's seige of the Barad-dur was a stalemate, and only ended when Sauron came out and challenged them to single combat. Gil-galad alone certainly could not have captured the Barad-dûr.

: More importantly: My theory that Sauron left the Ring in the Barad-dur is taken from Akallabêth (Silm, p. 280): "yet his [Sauron's] spirt arose out of the deep and passed as a shadow and a black wind over the sea, and came back to Middle-earth and to Mordor that was his home. There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dûr, and dwelt there ..."

I'm with you on this, Stephen.

I've always thought that Saruman was bound to Sauron in a relationship similar to how Wormtongue was bound to Saruman, just not quite so snivelling. Neither was happy about their partnerships but they didn't see any other feasible options that would allow them to achieve their goals. And after a while both were in too deep to back out.

Sauron would have believed that the Ring would be quite safe in Barad-dûr during his sojourn in Numenor since Gil-galad didn't have the strength or urgency to attack Mordor. It took the combined might of the Last Alliance to do it and even that was only in response to Sauron making the first strike.

As it happened, it was for the best that he left the Ring behind because otherwise it would have been lost at the bottom of the ocean in the destruction of Numenor, out of reach from (probably) both sides but still intact; I don't think that the disembodied Sauron could have handled physical items. Then in the Third Age, even the Ringless Sauron would have been able to eventually conquer the West.