XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien
From: mr@sandman.net
In article ,
Troels Forchhammer wrote:
> In message
> Stan Brown spoke these staves:
> >
>
>
> > I agree with Igenlode on this one. In UT, "The PalantÃri", the
> > first paragraph contains this text: "only kings and rulers, and
> > their appointed wardens, had access to them, and they were never
> > consulted, nor exhibited, publicly."
> >
> > Saruman was a warden of the Stewards with respect to Isengard,
> > fully entitled to use all the facilities of Isengard and Orthanc.
>
> Nope. This was clearly not enough -- do read note 14 to the essay,
> which is an authorial comment quite unequivocally stating that Saruman
> "had himself no /right/ to the Orthanc-stone." (emphasis original).
>
> Quite clearly being allowed to take up residence in Orthanc did /not/
> transfer deputed authority to Saruman to use the Orthanc-stone.
Which requires that Beren either were aware of the stone and
explicitly stated that Saruman may not use it while letting him keep
it.
Or, Beren had forgotten about it, but some old law explicitly states
that Saruman needed to be authorized to use it by some means not
implicit in the ways that he was given rule over Isengard. In which
case it was just forgotten bureaucracy in Gondor.
And, given the timeframes we're talking about here, it's like saying
that Germany has no "right" to the Nefertiti bust based upon old
Egyptian law. Egypt is still there, but it's hardly the same laws as
3,500 years ago. And the "right" egypt is now using to make a case for
having it back is not based on the old laws of ancient Egypt.
All that said, I'm not claiming that Saruman had any "right" to use it
either way, just that the written law is ancient, and while "law" in
Middle Earth seems more constant than in the modern world, surely
ancient means something.
--
Sandman[.net]
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