The White Council

SECTION: Who Was the Necromancer of Dol Guldur?

Greenwood the Great was the greatest forest in the northern world, and for a thousand years of the Third Age nobody had a bad word to say about it. Then, somewhere around the year ten fifty, the record changes.

"About this time a shadow falls on Greenwood, and men begin to call it Mirkwood."

That's the whole entry in Tolkien's Tale of Years. Something arrives, the name changes, and no explanation is offered. So what exactly, happened?

Well, today we're digging into a council that was eventually formed to answer that question. A familiar wizard chaired the council and one year, the good guys finally expelled an evil that had quietly moved in on a hill and overwhelmed it with darkness.

This was a slow investigation. The formation of the council wasn't immediate.

After the darkness fell over Greenwood, it took fifty years to just find the source. The story goes like this...

"The Wise - the Istari and the chief Eldar - discover that an evil power has made a stronghold at Dol Guldur. It is thought to be one of the Nazgûl."

They thought it was one of the Nazgûl.

That's the initial working assumption, and it holds for the next nine hundred and sixty years. Nine centuries of Elrond and Galadriel and Círdan looking south at a fortified hill, agreeing that a Ringwraith had moved in, and building everything they did around it. So it was an assumption. Not a truth. And for a long time, they never really knew who was up there.

They decided to name the place after what they thought was happening there. Sorcery.

Naming the place is all they could do. They named it Dol Guldur. Hill of sorcery.

The word underneath it has a history. Sindarin gûl, the sorcery half, comes down from an older Elvish root meaning deep knowledge - wisdom, lore, the learning of skilled people. The same root gives us Noldor, the Wise Ones, the Elves defined by how much they'd learned. In Sindarin the word went bad. Gûl slid from deep learning toward black magic and kept sliding, until the Elvish word for necromancy was just the Elvish word for scholarship with the rot in it.

The Black Speech has the same piece in it. Nazg means ring. Nazgûl is ring plus gûl - and Tolkien's own note says the Black Speech took that second half as an early loan from Elvish. So when the Wise stood in front of a hill of gûl and guessed at a nazg-gûl, they weren't being slow. They'd read the syllable correctly and mistaken the real sorcerer for one of his own ringed servants.

It took many centuries, until the year twenty sixty, for anyone to say Sauron out loud, and even then it comes out as a fear rather than a truth.

"The power of Dol Guldur grows. The Wise fear that it may be Sauron taking shape again."

The Silmarillion tells us who was fearful. Most of them still blamed the Ringwraiths. Mithrandir - Gandalf - didn't. It was a lonely opinion to have.

So he went and looked for himself. In twenty sixty-three Gandalf walked into Dol Guldur. When he arrived, the true Sorcerer fled. He fled east. Gandalf showed up. The Sorcerer got up and left.

The years that follow were called the Watchful Peace, which sounds like the good part of this story.

It isn't.

The Watchful Peace runs three hundred and ninety-seven years. In that time, no Evil stormed out of the trees of Mirkwood, and the question of who'd been in there went cold - so cold that when it mattered again, the Wise had to work their way back to a conclusion Gandalf had almost reached before any of them were worried.

We learn in the Appendices that Gondor's history of its Stewards remembers that era fondly and hands the credit to the wrong people. Those were the days of the Watchful Peace, it says, "during which Sauron withdrew before the power of the White Council." The odd part is that the White Council wasn't formed until twenty-four sixty-three, which was three years after the Peace ended.

So in their records, Gondor thanked an institution that didn't exist. Instead, they should have been thankful for a victory won by one wizard walking into Dol Guldur alone.

So Gondor enjoyed freedom from the haunting but the enemy wasn't sitting still for those four centuries. In the year Twenty-four sixty: The Watchful Peace ends. Our Sorcerer, Sauron, returns to Dol Guldur.

He was gone for four hundred years.

He came back bigger and stronger than when he left.

SECTION: Why the White Council Couldn't Act

Three years after Sauron came back to the hill, the Wise finally organized. Tale of Years, twenty-four sixty-three:

"The White Council is formed. About this time Déagol the Stoor finds the One Ring, and is murdered by Sméagol."

One historical record with two important events. The most powerful body in Middle-earth convenes to deal with a rising evil, and in the same season a fisherman pulls the One Ring out of a river a few hundred miles north and gets strangled for it by his friend. Nobody puts those two together for another five-hundred years.

So who was actually in the room at the White Council? The Silmarillion gives us five names and then trails off. "Therein were Elrond and Galadriel and Círdan, and other lords of the Eldar, and with them were Mithrandir and Curunír."

For those of us not too deep into the lore, Mithrandir is the Elvish name for Gandalf. Curunír is Elvish for Saruman.

And then there were just other lords of the Eldar. That's the roster. Tolkien never completely settled the membership.

What Tolkien does give us in detail is how the role of chairperson got filled. That's where it starts going wrong.

"And Curunír - that was Saruman the White - was chosen to be their chief, for he had most studied the devices of Sauron of old."

That's a good reason. Arguably the only one that matters: you want the enemy's leading scholar running the committee on the enemy. And then The Silmarillion keeps going.

"Galadriel indeed had wished that Mithrandir should be the head of the Council, and Saruman begrudged them that, for his pride and desire of mastery was grown great; but Mithrandir refused the office... But Saruman now began to study the lore of the Rings of Power."

Tolkien puts those in adjacent sentences. Saruman gets the chairmanship, learns he wasn't the first choice, and starts studying Rings.

We tend to picture this as a governing body - the Wise in session, deciding the fate of the west. But none of them could make anybody do anything, and the reasons sit in how the thing was built. They'd have held even if Saruman had been honest.

The Istari were sent to Middle-earth by the Powers under a specific restriction. They were "forbidden to match his power with power, or to seek to dominate Elves or Men by force and fear." So the head of the Council is barred by the terms of his own errand from the obvious move.

Then Galadriel, the most powerful Elf in the room. Tolkien calls her "unconquerable in resistance, especially in mind and spirit, but incapable of punitive action." The one member strong enough to overrule Saruman was, by her own nature, the one who couldn't.

Then Gandalf, who was offered the chair and turned it down, because he'd have "no ties and no allegiance, save to those who sent him." So the one member willing to act wouldn't be tied to anything. The ones who were tied wouldn't act.

And then the words that finish the argument, from Tolkien's essay on the palantíri, written about Saruman quietly annexing a fortress that wasn't his: "Saruman was a free agent, and had the right, if he wished, to act independently."

That's the constitution of the White Council in one sentence. It could not compel anybody. Not its members, and not its chair. Its only instrument was agreement, and agreement was exactly what Saruman had a private reason to withhold.

There'd been an earlier council, incidentally. Christopher Tolkien flags a council back in the Second Age - the meeting that decided to build Rivendell instead of rebuilding Eregion, where Gil-galad handed Vilya to Elrond - and the text was changed to read "the first White Council." Several of the same people were in both. So this wasn't a new idea in twenty-four sixty-three. It was a revival of something that had worked once, back when there was a High King to make a decision stick.

This revival lasted four hundred and ninety years. Four meetings are recorded. Four meetings and one major military operation.

SECTION: Gandalf, Thráin, and the Key to Erebor

Everything the White Council ever knew for certain about Dol Guldur came from two trips, seven hundred and eighty-seven years apart, made by the same person, alone, with nobody's authorization.

The first was twenty sixty-three, the one that started the Watchful Peace. The second was twenty-eight fifty, and that's the one that changed things.

Gandalf describes it years later at Elrond's council in one careful sentence: "I myself dared to pass the doors of the Necromancer in Dol Guldur, and secretly explored his ways." He's less composed about it in The Hobbit, in a hobbit-hole full of dwarves. "I was finding things out, as usual; and a nasty dangerous business it was. Even I, Gandalf, only just escaped."

He came out with three things.

The first is the identification. The master of Dol Guldur was Sauron. Seventeen hundred and fifty years after the Wise first learned there was a stronghold on that hill, somebody finally had the name.

The second is arguably better than the name. Gandalf came out knowing what Sauron was doing in there - "gathering all the Rings, and seeking for news of the One, and of Isildur's Heir." That was the enemy's own work plan, lifted from inside the building rather than guessed at from outside it, ninety years before Saruman would start telling the Council the One Ring had rolled out to sea.

The third thing Gandalf found was a dying dwarf.

Thráin the Second, son of Thrór, King of Durin's Folk with no kingdom to be king of, had gone east nine years earlier to have another look at Erebor. Appendix A tells it in a few lines and they're bleak. A black rain drove his company to shelter under the eaves of Mirkwood, and "in the morning he was gone from the camp, and his companions called him in vain."

He was in the pits of Dol Guldur for five years. In twenty-eight forty-five they took the last of the Seven Dwarf-rings off him. In twenty-eight fifty Gandalf found whatever was left.

"I had no idea who he was," Gandalf says, telling it long afterwards in Minas Tirith. "He had a map that had belonged to Durin's folk in Moria, and a key that seemed to go with it, though he was too far gone to explain it. And he said that he had possessed a great Ring. Nearly all his ravings were of that. The last of the Seven he said over and over again."

Then Thráin handed over the map and the key. "For my son," he said. And then he died.

Gandalf's verdict on the best intelligence the Wise ever got is four words long.

"I came too late."

There's was one more thing in that cell, and Gandalf keeps referring to it. Sauron had wanted exactly one item from Thráin, took it, and stopped paying attention. "He troubled no further, but just flung the broken prisoner into the pits to rave until he died. A small oversight; but it proved fatal. Small oversights often do."

The Dark Lord threw a dwarf away without going through his pockets. In those pockets were a map of a hidden door and the key that opened it.

And Gandalf kept them, which he admits almost sheepishly: "I stowed the things away, and by some warning of my heart I kept them always with me, safe, but soon almost forgotten."

The calendar says the same thing twice here. Gandalf walked out of Dol Guldur in twenty-eight fifty carrying who the enemy was and a dead king's map. The Council sat on that identification for ninety-one years. The map sat in a pocket for ninety-one years. Ironically, nobody was looking for the map and the map may be what actually what mattered the most.

SECTION: Smoke Rings at Rivendell, 2851

Almost everything we have on the White Council is historical records. One line per century, no dialogue, no scene, no faces. There is, however, one exception.

In Unfinished Tales, in an essay about Gandalf, Saruman and the Shire, Tolkien wrote out a scene from the meeting of twenty-eight fifty-one. It's the only session of the White Council that exists anywhere as a scene. And most of it is two wizards being unpleasant to each other in front of company.

"The Council met in Rivendell, and Gandalf sat apart, silent, but smoking prodigiously - a thing he had never done before on such an occasion - while Saruman spoke against him, and urged that contrary to Gandalf's advice Dol Guldur should not yet be molested."

Gandalf had been inside that fortress a year earlier. He's asking the Council to strike now, while they know where Sauron is and Sauron doesn't know they know.

"Saruman overrules him."

And Tolkien adds a footnote to those three words that changes what the meeting was. "It afterwards became clear that Saruman had then begun to desire to possess the One Ring himself, and he hoped that it might reveal itself, seeking its master, if Sauron were let be for a time."

So the case for waiting was made by a man who wanted Sauron left alone in the hope that the Ring would come out looking for him.

Back in the room, Saruman is annoyed. Not by the argument, which he's winning, but by Gandalf's second-hand smoke.

"When weighty matters are in debate, Mithrandir, I wonder a little that you should play with your toys of fire and smoke, while others are in earnest speech."

Gandalf makes a joke. Saruman doesn't take it well, and what he says next is the tell.

"I know well enough that you have become a curious explorer of the small: weeds, wild things, and childish folk... But to me the days are too dark for wanderers' tales, and I have no time for the simples of peasants."

The childish folk and the peasants are the ones who win the war. The head of the White Council is standing in Rivendell in twenty-eight fifty-one, naming the thing that beats Sauron, and using it as an insult.

Gandalf doesn't answer him. What he does instead is stranger.

"He drew on his pipe and sent out a great ring of smoke with many smaller rings that followed it. Then he put up his hand, as if to grasp them, and they vanished."

One great ring. Many smaller rings following it. A hand closing on them, and nothing there.

Christopher Tolkien found a struck-through version of the passage that says what his father meant by it. Gandalf was showing Saruman "his suspicion that desire to possess them had begun to enter into his policies and his study of the lore of the Rings; and of warning him that they would elude him."

Gandalf blew the One Ring and the Nine at the chief of the White Council and made them disappear in his fist. It's what you do when you can't make an accusation out loud. Saruman "stood for some time silent, and his face was dark with doubt and displeasure" - and then the Council did nothing for another ninety years.

One thing has to be said about that meeting, because most of us met the White Council in a film where Saruman's voice does something to people. Tolkien was emphatic that it doesn't, in a letter in nineteen fifty-eight: "Saruman's voice was not hypnotic but persuasive. Those who listened to him were not in danger of falling into a trance, but of agreeing with his arguments, while fully awake."

Nobody in Rivendell was enchanted. Elrond and Galadriel and Círdan heard a well-made case from the most qualified man present and agreed with it, awake and reasoning and free to say no. Which is a much worse account than magic would have been.

There's a complication here, though. Unfinished Tales reads those smoke-rings as Gandalf already suspecting Saruman in twenty-eight fifty-one. Christopher notes that his father later said the opposite - that Gandalf had no serious suspicion of treachery until Orthanc, a hundred and sixty-seven years later.

SECTION: Saruman's Secret Search for the One Ring

The notes for twenty-eight fifty-one has a second sentence too. "Saruman begins to search near the Gladden Fields."

The river Isildur was killed in flows there. And that's where the One Ring went into the water, in the second year of the Third Age. Saruman starts dredging it in twenty-eight fifty-one and is still at it ninety years later. The Ring is not there. It's been under the Misty Mountains in Gollum's hands since twenty-four seventy, and it stays there the whole time.

In twenty-nine thirty-nine, something happens that should have ended the debate over whether the ring was still findable, for good. Saruman finds out that Sauron's servants are searching the same stretch of the Anduin, "and that Sauron therefore has learned of Isildur's end." So the enemy knows where the Ring was lost and is hunting for it, and Saruman knows it.

The Tale of Years finishes the entry in nine words. "He is alarmed, but says nothing to the Council."

Mostly, though, Saruman didn't lie. So how does one member steer a body of that caliber for a century without lying? Gandalf explains the mechanism himself, in the Shire, to Frodo, years before anyone else works it out.

"The lore of the Elven-rings, great and small, is his province. He has long studied it, seeking the lost secrets of their making; but when the Rings were debated in the Council, all that he would reveal to us of his ring-lore told against my fears. So my doubt slept - but uneasily."

The Council's Ring expert used his monopoly on Ring-lore to keep the Ring question closed. He never had to falsify anything. He only had to decide which parts of his own research the Council was allowed to hear. A little white lie from the white wizard himself. I suppose that's not an abuse of authority. It's an abuse of expertise, and the Council had built itself around trusting that.

He did the same thing with the palantíri. Tolkien tells us: "Only Saruman... had yet made sufficient study of the records of Gondor to perceive the interest of the palantíri and the possible uses of those that survived; but of this he said nothing to his colleagues."

The last meeting is twenty-nine fifty-three, and this time he does lie. He "feigns that he has discovered that the One Ring has passed down Anduin to the Sea." Gandalf quotes him at Rivendell decades later, still hearing the confidence in it: "Have I not earnestly studied this matter? Into Anduin the Great it fell; and long ago, while Sauron slept, it was rolled down the River to the Sea."

So Saruman then withdraws to Isengard. He takes it as his own without asking anybody, fortifies it, and begins to spy on Gandalf. The White Council never meets again.

It turns out that the road Saruman eventually takes to Bag End is genuinely absurd. He'd scoffed at Gandalf's pipe-smoking in public. But Saruman was a bit of a closet smoker himself. A hypocrite that was too proud to admit it.

This meant that he needed a supply and because of that, the Shire mattered to him. Out of a tobacco habit he wouldn't own up to, Saruman built a detailed file on the Shire. Tolkien gives the other half too: he'd begun to feel the Shire was somehow connected with the Ring in Gandalf's mind, and couldn't work out why the guard on it was so heavy.

The same drift runs through what the name Saruman actually means. Saruman is the Old English rendering, from searu - device, craft, contrivance - a word that had already drifted in English toward snare, and plot, and treachery. His Elvish name, Curunír, means man of craft. It's the same slide gûl made, running in a second language, and Tolkien gave it to the wizard who makes the journey personally.

When Orthanc was finally searched after the war, they found a steel closet behind a hidden door, and Tolkien suspects what it was for: "maybe it had been intended to receive the Ring." It was almost bare. Inside was a small gold case on a fine chain, empty, that had once hung the Ring around Isildur's neck. Ninety years of searching, and that's what he had. Tolkien's verdict is brutal. He said Saruman didn't become a dragon, he became a crow. How insulting!

SECTION: The 2941 Attack on Dol Guldur

By the fourth decade of the twenty-nine hundreds Gandalf has a problem he can't get the Council to look at. It isn't Dol Guldur, it's in the north.

If Sauron pushed for the old passes of the Misty Mountains and the ruined lands of Angmar, the only real force in his way was the Dwarves of the Iron Hills. Behind them lay an empty kingdom and a live dragon. Gandalf says it clearly: "The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect." A draft version finishes the thought - there's a Shadow growing in the world far worse than Smaug, and "they will help one another."

So Gandalf runs two operations in the same year, and he only tells the White Council about one of them.

On the fifteenth of March, twenty-nine forty-one, he meets Thorin Oakenshield near Bree and starts the expedition that ends with Thráin's map and key opening a side door into the Mountain. Then he leaves.

"I had to be with the White Council in August at the latest, or Saruman would have his way and nothing would be done. And quite apart from greater matters, that might prove fatal to the quest: the power in Dol Guldur would not leave any attempt on Erebor unhindered, unless he had something else to deal with."

The White Council's only military operation in four hundred and ninety years was, among other things, a diversion to cover a burglary.

And this time Saruman agrees. It's the same argument he beat in twenty-eight fifty-one, so what changed wasn't the argument. Two years earlier he'd found out that Sauron's servants were on the Anduin, and he wanted them off his river. The Wise did the right thing at last, for a reason nobody in the room could see.

Appendix A dates it: "In the late summer of that same year, Gandalf had at last prevailed upon Saruman and the White Council to attack Dol Guldur." A lot of what people picture when they hear that never happens on the page. Tolkien never narrates the attack. No forces, no commanders, no battle, no casualties. The whole event exists in a few sentences scattered across four books.

The sentence that matters is in the Tale of Years. "Sauron having made his plans abandons Dol Guldur."

He'd already decided to go. The Council arrived at a fortress its occupant had written off, and Gandalf says so at Rivendell without softening it. "But we were too late, as Elrond foresaw. Sauron also had watched us, and had long prepared against our stroke... Then he gave way before us, but only feigned to flee, and soon after came to the Dark Tower and openly declared himself."

These receipts come due fast. Twenty-nine forty-two, one year on: "Sauron returns in secret to Mordor." Twenty-nine fifty-one, ten years on: he declares himself openly, rebuilds Barad-dûr, and sends three of the Nazgûl back to Dol Guldur. A decade after the victory the hill was garrisoned by Ringwraiths - which is what the Wise had thought was up there in the first place, eighteen centuries earlier.

Outside that room, the only victory the White Council ever won arrives as gossip. In The Hobbit, Bilbo, on his way home, overhears Gandalf telling Elrond that the white wizards "had at last driven the Necromancer from his dark hold in the south of Mirkwood." And Elrond, in a children's book published in nineteen thirty-seven, answers with the entire War of the Ring: "It would be well indeed; but I fear that will not come about in this age of the world, or for many after."

Meanwhile the reader has spent the whole book alongside the decisive event of the age and doesn't know it. In the same year the Council took Dol Guldur, a hobbit picked a gold ring off a cave floor in the dark. Gollum had held it for four hundred and seventy-eight years, since twenty-four sixty-three, the year the White Council was founded. The Ring entered the story in the Council's first year and left in the year of its only campaign, and nobody in that room ever knew.

SECTION: Lórien, Rivendell, and the Hands of the Weak

It's easy to read this as thinking that the White Council failed. Four hundred and ninety years, four meetings, one campaign, and the campaign arrived after the enemy had already packed up and was ready to go. Gandalf gives us the language for it himself: "the gap in the knowledge of the Wise has been filled at last. Yet too slowly."

But there's a sentence in Gandalf's account of that year that makes us think differently. He's talking about Sauron running for Mordor and declaring himself ten years later, and how dark it all got afterwards. And then he says this.

"And yet that was not his original plan; and it was in the end a mistake. Resistance still had somewhere where it could take counsel free from the Shadow. How could the Ringbearer have escaped, if there had been no Lórien or Rivendell?"

Sauron's opening move was going to be Lórien and Rivendell. Destroy the two places where the enemies of Mordor could still meet and think, and do it before anybody was ready. The Council's stroke pushed him off that plan. It didn't hurt him and it didn't hold the ground, but it cost him the war he'd meant to fight. It left standing the two houses that helped Frodo get out of Eriador alive.

So the Wise were victorious in twenty-nine forty-one. They just might not have known that at the time. And Gandalf, who'd pushed for it, spent the rest of his life apologizing for how late it came.

That apology is on the record too. At the Council of Elrond, Gandalf gets to the part where he believed Saruman about the Ring, and stops. "There I was at fault. I was lulled by the words of Saruman the Wise; but I should have sought for the truth sooner, and our peril would now be less."

And Elrond, who'd been at that meeting in twenty-eight fifty-one, doesn't let him carry it alone. "We were all at fault," said Elrond, "and but for your vigilance the Darkness, maybe, would already be upon us."

Galadriel is harder on herself than either of them. In Lórien she tells Frodo something she's clearly been holding for centuries: "I it was who first summoned the White Council. And if my designs had not gone amiss, it would have been governed by Gandalf the Grey, and then mayhap things would have gone otherwise."

She convened it, she wanted Gandalf in the chair, and she got Saruman - because summoning a council is not the same as running one.

And when the job finally got done, no committee did it. In March of thirty nineteen, with the Ring already inside Mordor, Celeborn crossed the Anduin. "They took Dol Guldur, and Galadriel threw down its walls and laid bare its pits." Nine days later Celeborn and Thranduil met in the middle of the forest and renamed it Eryn Lasgalen, the Wood of Greenleaves. Seventy-eight years late, the people who actually lived there finished it.

Sixty-five years after the last White Council, Elrond convened a different council in the same valley. No permanent chairman, no test of expertise. A dwarf, a man of Gondor, a ranger nobody in the south had heard of, and a hobbit - and the decisive speech came from the least qualified person there, who said he'd take the Ring though he didn't know the way.

Tolkien told us this would happen, early, in Gandalf's own voice, before the White Council was ever formed. "Many are the strange chances of the world, and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter." Then, chapters later, he marks it off as done. "Yet in that hour was put to the proof that which Mithrandir had spoken, and help came from the hands of the weak when the Wise faltered. For it was the Periannath, the Little People, dwellers in hillsides and meadows, that brought them deliverance."

Gandalf's word for the timing is chance. The Council drove Sauron out of Mirkwood in the same year Bilbo found the Ring - "a strange chance, if chance it was." Scholars have pointed out that Tolkien is borrowing from Boethius there, a philosopher he knew inside out: what we call chance is actually "cause", running through channels a creature can't see from where it's standing. So Gandalf isn't shrugging there - he's doing philosophy, carefully.

And when Gimli asks him about all this years afterwards, Gandalf gives the least grand answer available, which is probably why it's the true one. "I dare say he was 'chosen' and I was only chosen to choose him; but I picked out Bilbo."