The name Saruman (pronounced [ˈsɑrumɑn]) means "man of skill or cunning" in the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon;[1] he serves as an example of technology and modernity being overthrown by forces more in tune with nature.

Early in the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf describes Saruman as "the chief of my order"[T 1] and head of the White Council that forced Sauron from Mirkwood at the end of Tolkien's earlier book The Hobbit.

Shortly afterwards, Gandalf breaks an arrangement to meet Frodo and guide him out of the Shire to Rivendell to keep the Ring safe from Sauron's agents.

Saruman initially had proposed that the wizards ally themselves with the rising power of Sauron in order to eventually control him for their own ends, revealing himself as a traitor.

When Gandalf refused both options, the traitorous Saruman imprisoned him in the tower of Orthanc at Isengard, hoping to learn from him the location of the Ring.

Whilst on the summit of Orthanc, Gandalf observed that Saruman had industrialized the formerly green valley of Isengard and was creating his own army of Half-Orc/Half-Man fighters and Wargs to rival Sauron.

[T 3] Gandalf's escape from the top of the tower on the back of a Great Eagle left Saruman in a desperate position, as he knew he would now be known as traitor to his former allies, but was unable to procure the Ring directly for himself and therefore could not hope to truly rival Sauron.

[T 10] Saruman initially travels in the east; he is later appointed head of the White Council and eventually settles at Gondor's outpost of Isengard.

[2] Unlike some of the other characters in the book, Saruman had not appeared in Tolkien's 1937 novel, The Hobbit, or in his then-unpublished Quenta Silmarillion and related mythology, which date back to 1917.

Christopher Tolkien believes that the old man seen by Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli at the edge of Fangorn forest near the beginning of The Two Towers is in the original drafts intended to be Gandalf.

[T 17] Similarly, in the first drafts of the chapter "The Scouring of the Shire", Sharkey is successively a ruffian met by the hobbits, and then that man's unseen boss.

[T 18] The name used by Saruman's henchmen for their diminished leader is said in a footnote to the final text to be derived from an Orkish term meaning "old man".

[T 19] John D. Rateliff and Jared Lobdell are among those to write that the scene shows similarities to the death of the 2000-year-old sorceress Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She: A History of Adventure.

Tolkien described Saruman at the time of The Lord of the Rings as having a long face and a high forehead, "...he had deep darkling eyes ... His hair and beard were white, but strands of black still showed around his lips and ears.

[14] Shippey notes that Saruman's name repeats this view of technology: in the Mercian dialect of Old English used by Tolkien to represent the Language of Rohan in the book, the word saru[b] means "clever", "skilful" or "ingenious".

In turn this frees the Rohirrim to intervene at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and then together with the men of Gondor to assault Sauron's stronghold of Mordor and distract him from Frodo's final effort to destroy the Ring.

Shippey says that this demonstrates the value of persistence in the face of despair, even if a way out cannot be seen;[17] Kocher and Helms write that it is part of a pattern of providential events and of the reversed effects of evil intentions throughout the book.

[18][19] After the defeat of his armies, having been caught in the betrayal of Sauron, Saruman is offered refuge by Gandalf, in return for his aid, but having chosen his path, is unable to turn from it.

[10] Evans has compared the character of Saruman to that of Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost in his use of rhetoric and in this final refusal of redemption, "conquered by pride and hatred".

He identifies Saruman as the best example in the book of "wraithing", a distinctive 20th-century view of evil that he attributes to Tolkien in which individuals are "'eaten up inside' by devotion to some abstraction".

[23] The 1980 Rankin/Bass TV animated version of The Return of the King begins roughly where Bakshi's film ends but does not include Saruman's character.

[24] Saruman is played by Matti Pellonpää in the 1993 television miniseries Hobitit produced and aired by Finnish broadcaster Yle.

Smith and Matthews suggest that Saruman's role is built up as a substitute for Sauron—the story's main antagonist—who never appears directly in the book, a theory which Jackson confirms in the commentary to the DVD.

[26] They suggest that having secured the veteran British horror actor Christopher Lee to play Saruman, it made sense to make greater use of his star status.

In the first film, Saruman, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond gather at a meeting of the White Council in Rivendell, loosely based on material from the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings.

[30] Lee posthumously reprises his role as Saruman in the 2024 anime film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim through archived voice recording.