Isengard is one of the better described places of Middle-earth. We know about the Ring of Isengard, including its defences and its caverns, we know about the external structure of the tower of Orthanc. What is missing, however, is detail about the inside of Orthanc. The situation is different in the films. We see the inside of Orthanc, rooms and designs which are totally based on the concept artists’ imagination.

Isengard and Orthanc in the books

The circle of Isengard
“…a great open vale that lies between the Misty Mountains and the northmost foothills of Ered Nimrais, the White Mountains of his [Boromir’s] home. But Isengard is a circle of sheer rocks that enclose a valley as with a wall, and in the midst of that valley is a tower of stone called Orthanc. It was not made by Saruman, but by the
Men of Númenor long ago; and it is very tall and has many secrets; yet it looks not to be a work of craft. It cannot be reached save by passing the circle of Isengard; and in that circle there is only gate.
“Late one evening I came to the gate, like a great arch in the wall of rock; and it was strongly guarded.” (FotR: The Council of Elrond)

“Partly it was shaped in the making of the mountains, but mighty works the Men of Westernesse had wrought there of old; and Saruman had dwelt there long and had not been idle.
…
A great ring-wall of stone, like towering cliffs, stood out from the shelter of the mountain-side, from which it ran and then returned again. One entrance only was there made in it, a great arch delved in the southern wall. Here through the black rock a long tunnel had been hewn, closed at either end with mighty doors of iron. They were so wrought and poised upon their huge hinges, posts of steel driven into the living stone, that when unbarred they could be moved with a little thrust of the arms, noiselessly. One who passed in and came at length out of the echoing tunnel, beheld a plain, a great circle, somewhat hollowed like a vast shallow bowl: a mile it measured from rim to rim. Once it had been green and filled with avenues, and groves of fruitful trees, watered by streams that flowed from the mountains to a lake. But no green thing grew there in the latter days of Saruman. The roads were paved with stone-flags, dark and hard; and beside their borders instead of trees there marched long lines of pillars, some of marble, some of copper and of iron, joined by heavy chains.” (TTT: The Road to Isengard)

Boundary pillars
“Suddenly a tall pillar loomed up before them. It was black; and set upon it was a great stone, carved and painted in the likeness of a long White Hand. Its finger pointed north.”

Circle of Isengard
“…whereas it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges. Wolves and orcs were housed in Isengard … Over all his works a dark smoke hung and wrapped itself about the sides of Orthanc.” (FotR: The Council of Elrond)

“They had passed into Nan Curunír, the Wizard’s Vale. That was a sheltered valley, open only to the South. Once it had been fair and green, and through it the Isen flowed, already deep and strong it found the plains; for it was fed by many springs and lesser streams among the rain-washed hills, and all about it there had lain a pleasant, fertile land.
It was not so now. Beneath the walls of Isengard there still were acres tilled by the slaves of Saruman; but most of the valley had become a wilderness of weeds and thorns. Brambles trailed upon the ground, or clambering over bush and bank, made shaggy caves where small beasts housed. No trees grew there; but among the rank grasses could still be seen the burned and axe-hewn stumps of ancient groves. It was a sad country, silent now but for the stony noise of quick waters. Smokes and steams drifted in sullen clouds and lurked in the hollows.
…
After they had ridden for some miles, the highway became a wide street, paved with great flat stones, squared and laid with skill; no blade of grass was seen in any joint. Deep gutters, filled with trickling water, ran down on either side.” (FotR, The Road to Isengard)

“Many houses there were, chambers, halls and passages, cut and tunnelled back unto the walls upon their inner side … Thousands could dwell there, workers, servants, slaves and warriors with great stores of arms; wolves were fed and stabled in deep dens beneath.” (FotR, The Road to Isengard)

The Caverns of Isengard

“The plain, too, was bored and delved. Shafts were driven deep into the ground; their upper ends were covered by low mounds and domes of stone, so that in the moonlight the Ring of Isengard looked like a graveyard of unquiet dead. For the ground trembled. The shafts ran down by many slopes and spiral stairs to caverns far under; there Saruman had treasuries, store-houses, armouries, smithies, and great furnaces. Iron wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded. At night plumes of vapour steamed from the vents, lit from beneath with red light, or blue, or venomous green.” (FotR, The Road to Isengard)

Orthanc

“To the centre all the roads ran between their chains. There stood a tower of marvellous shape. It was fashioned by the builders of old, who smoothed the Ring of Isengard, and yet it seemed a thing not made by the craft of Men, but riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills. A peak and isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard: four mighty piers of many-sided stone were welded into one, but near the summit they opened into gaping horns, their pinnacles sharp as the points of spears, keen-edged as knives. Between them was a narrow space, and there upon a floor of polished stone, written with strange signs, a man might stand five hundred feet above the plain. This was Orthanc, the citadel of Saruman, the name of which had … a twofold meaning; for in the Elvish speech orthanc signifies Mount Fang, but in the language of the Mark of old the Cunning Mind.” (FotR, The Road to Isengard)

“But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought … [but] what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr.” (TTT, The Road to Isengard)

“It was black, and the rock gleamed as if it were wet. The many faces of the stone had sharp edges as though they had been newly chiselled. A few scorings, and small flake-like splinters near the base, were all the marks that it bore of the fury of the Ents.
On the eastern side, in the angle of two piers, there was a great door, high above the ground; and over it was a shuttered window, opening upon a balcony hedged with iron bars. Up to the threshold of the door there mounted a flight of twenty-seven broad stairs, hewn by some unknown art of the same black stone. This was the only entrance to the tower, but many tall windows were cut with deep embrasures in the climbing walls” (TTT, The Voice of Saruman)

Inside Orthanc
“I rode to the foot of Orthanc, and came to the stair of Saruman; and there he met me and led me up to his high chamber.” (FotR, The Council of Elrond)

“They took me and they set me alone on the pinnacle of Orthanc, in the place where Saruman was accustomed to watch the stars. There is no descent save by a narrow stair of may thousand steps, and the valley below seems far away.” (FotR, The Council of Elrond)

Guard-house
“…they passed under the arch and came to a wide door upon the left, at the top of a stair. It opened direct into a large chamber, with other smaller doors at the far end, and a hearth and chimney at one side. The chamber was hewn out of the stone; and it must once have been dark, for its windows looked out only into the tunnel.
…
“Store-room in there …,” said Pippin, as they came back laden with dishes, bowls, cups, knives and food of various sorts.” (TTT, Flotsam and Jetsam)

Isengard destroyed
“…the doors lay hurled and twisted on the ground. And all about, stone, cracked and splintered into countless jagged shards, was scattered far and wide, or piled in ruinous heaps. The great arch still stood, but it opened now upon a roofless chasm: the tunnel was laid bare, and through the cliff-like walls on either side great rents and breaches had been torn; their towers were beaten into dust.
…
The ring beyond was filled with steaming water: a bubbling cauldron, in which there heaved and floated a wreckage of beams and spurs, chests and casks and broken gear. Twisted and leaning pillars reared their splintered stems above the flood, but all the roads were drowned. Far off, it seemed, half veiled in winding cloud, there loomed the island rock. Still dark and tall, unbroken by the storm, the tower of Orthanc stood. Pale waters lapped about its feet. (TTT, The Road to Isengard)

“There are lots of things floating about. It was Pippin who found two small barrels, washed up out of some cellar or store-house, I suppose.
…
“My dear Gimli, it is Longbottom Leaf!”” (TTT, Flotsam and Jetsam)

“Isengard began to fill up with black creeping streams and pools. They glittered in the last light of the Moon, as they spread over the plain. Every now and then the waters found their way down into some shaft and spouthole. Great white steams hissed up. Smoke rose in billows. There were explosions and gusts of fire. One great coil of vapour went whirling up, twisting round and round Orthanc, until it looked like a tall peak of cloud, fiery underneath and moonlit above. And still more water poured in, until at last Isengard looked like a huge flat saucepan, all steaming and bubbling.
…
The Ents kept on pouring in more water, till all the fires were quenched and every cave filled. The fogs slowly gathered together and steamed up into a huge umbrella of cloud: it must have been a mile high.” (TTT, Flotsam and Jetsam)

Isengard in the films

Isengard is one of only a few locations which is present in all three films – from the meeting of Gandalf with Saruman in ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ to Gandalf showing mercy to Saruman at the start of ‘Return of the King’.

Orthanc
The film version of the tower of Orthanc is very similar to the way most people imagine the tower from the books, principally because the exterior of the film version was based on Alan Lee’s famous painting of the tower.

The film also brings across the idea that Orthanc was created of old, looking somehow as if it was just formed from the rocks below, rather than being created by human hands. Look at the stonework in this picture – it really looks as though it was made from volcanic rock that flowed and cooled into the form of Orthanc, not obviously created by human hand.
And that was indeed the idea. As John Baster from WETA explained:
“The small sculptural shapes and sizes were modelled out hard material and we then cast it into wax because the tower is supposed to be made from obsidian … The wax was carved with scalpel blades and given a shard-like feeling. Once all that componentry was done with the wax, it was reassembled into the final model material, and the tower was assembled.”

The balcony with elaborate iron bars is set above the main door. At the back of the balcony is a door into the tower with elaborate metal grille decoration, and through another open doorway, a shadowy glimpse of an empty interior can be seen, as you can see here.

The Ring of Isengard
The Ring of Isengard consists of a solid circular structure, running around three-quarters of a circle, with the rocks of a mountain providing the rest of the barricade. It has external triangular buttressing.

The guarded gateway is missing, with only a simple open bridge being cut through the solid buildings. There are roads radiating from the perimeter into the tower, with pits and workings dug in between them.

The first sight of Isengard in the film is at night, when Gandalf the Grey rides to confer with Saruman. They walk through a forest next to Orthanc, crebain flying in the background. Immediately we have differences to the books. At this point in the books, the Ring of Isengard had been stripped of its trees, and was a wasteland. As is described by Alan Lee, the surroundings of Orthanc at that time looked like “a big industrial wasteland”.

Inside Orthanc
The main room inside Orthanc is the Palantír, or throne chamber. An actual set was built up to about 7 metres in height, and the rest of the room was modelled digitally. The whole thing is black and made of the same material as the outer walls. There is a black glassy floor with signs etched into it, and the Palantír is placed on a font-like pedestal in the centre of the room, at the centre of an etched equal-sided cross. Saruman’s throne is set against the wall, placed off to one side. It looks as if there is a portcullis over the main door leading out into a corridor lit by rows of candles. The palantír chamber reaches up through the full height of the tower.

This room was made up entirely for the films, and was used extensively – during Gandalf and Saruman’s fight, when Saruman is “exorcised” from Théoden’s mind, and during all other brief scenes involving the Palantír.

After Gandalf and Saruman have had their duel, Gandalf is thrown upwards through the inside of the tower, landing on the tower’s roof. The top of the tower is pretty much identical to that described in the book, with a narrow floor set among four pinnacles and with geometrical signs engraved onto the floor. However, the pinnacles do look a little less than razor-sharp!

The other room used inside the tower is Saruman’s study – also created just for the film. This again is black, though it does have some light coming into it through arched windows containing ornate metal grilles. The chamber has a number of desks piled high with scrolls and books, and there is even a spinal column in a big dissecting jar on one of the tables. Candle sconces are all around.

Caverns of Isengard

The Caverns are used much more in the films than in the books. As Alan Lee said:
“This area is briefly alluded to in the books, but Peter and Richard saw the potential for creating some stunning and dramatic set pieces.”

They are one of the most detailed, most amazing sets created for the films. Details of their creation and operation were given on www.lordoftherings.net:

“We carved pits and holes into the ground before they did the shoot, and all the machinery and some of the pits we made were then lowered into the ground,” [Mary] Maclachlan [of WETA] says. “We pre-fabricated a few of them. They were like large cocoons, as tall as a person, and we did all of the little ledges inside, and we did all of the little machinery.”

The details inside the Isengard caverns are a particular point of pride for their builders.

“There were little wheels, and lots of walkways and ladders and hammers and a lot of peculiar things which you can’t imagine what they did,” Maclachlan explains. “Most of the machines were made out of pine, or wood of one sort or another, and meshed together with what looked like metal strapping and rope–the way Orcs would roughly build things.”

Baster considers some of the tower detailing to be a highlight of the set.

“The facade in some places has little windows, and within those windows are little rooms,” he says. “We deliberately carved the whole exterior of the tower with scalpels, very neatly and at very small scale, and that catches the light and looks very sharp to the camera.”

In all, the Isengard miniature set took up a substantial amount of space. The tower of Orthanc, built at a 1/35th scale, stood nearly 15 feet high. And the wall-to-wall measurement of the Isengard plain stretched 22 meters.

In the books the caverns are simply storehouses, smithies, places for Saruman’s mind of metal to discover, to create. They seem fairly organised, stairs and steps leading carefully between workspaces. The film caverns are chaotic, heated by fire, newly-born orcs flopping out of their cocoons, Crebain flying through the levels. Trees were uprooted and allowed to fall down to the base of the caverns, seemingly in total disregard for the havoc they could cause on the way down:

Saruman: “The old world will burn in the fires of Industry, the forests will fall, a new order will rise. (Orcs are seen making weapons) We will drive the machine of war with the sword, and the spear, and the iron fist of the orc. (Uruk-Hai are being hatched, then inspected by orcs.) We have only to remove those who oppose us.” (TTT)

The destruction of Isengard

The destruction of Isengard in the films occurs in a similar fashion to in the book. The Circle is flooded, waters pour down into the caverns, clouds of steam issue forth, debris floats all around from Orthanc and the caverns.

However, the Longbottom Leaf in the films was found in a storeroom, not floating in the water as per the book. The storeroom, full of provisions, was situated right next to the tower, whereas the storerooms in the book were located in the Ring and the Caverns.

Conclusion

The overall atmosphere of Isengard – as well as the external structure of Orthanc – fits in extremely well with the books. The words of Ethan Van Der Ryn, the Supervising Sound Editor, about film Isengard could so easily be applied to the books as well:

“Isengard is really based on machinery and industry. It’s the sounds of trees being chopped down and killed and industry taking over. So there’s the sound of blacksmiths and fires–really the opposite of natural sound. It’s the sounds of death and destruction.”