The Two Towers - Other questions!

[Vanye]

OK! Enough of that question for now! I 've got a couple of other ones, however.

1). Although Gandalf states fairly plainly that he was not the 'old man' seen walking over the battlefield near Fangorn I'm wondering if all of you accept that it was Saruman or has anyone an alternative explanation you would wish to expound on here??

2). In the White Rider,TTT, Gandalf in speaking of Saruman says that he 'Saruman' "had best not be caught away from home when the dam bursts".
Did Gandalf know something about Treebeard's plans?
We know that he saw Treebeard but they did not speak (or did they?). Was this just a figure of speech used by Tolkien? I don't think I believe that! (italics mine)
and one more...

3). In The Riders of Rohan,TTT, Aragorn is speaking of 'the Elder Days, in which the Firstborn roamed while men still slept.' In this s he referring to Tom Bombadil? (italics mine)

These are questions which have piqued my curiosity so far in TTT which I am currently nearly finished reading. I was reading the Hobbit this summer & went on into the trilogy when some of the people on another site talked about a careful rereading of same. I've certainly found many details that either I had totally forgotten or that had become muddled in my mind since so many incidents & bits of dialog had been rearranged in the movies. So I obviously needed to do this plus when I tried to keep up w/some of you in an advanced reading group I detected many 'holes' in my knowledge of our favorite subject !!! So I've 'gone back to the source' as a fellow Tolkien fan put it. Thanks for being patient 'listeners'. Vanye TEXT

P.S. I tried to put Italics in the text & make the posting in purple but it seems I don't know as much as I thought I did about those tasks.TEXT

There, italics all fixed!!! Desi

[Stormrider]

Vanye:

When you wish to make something iltalics, bold, underlined, purple, etc., you click on the button in the tool bar. Then when you see the word "TEXT" between the bracketed i's (for italics, for instance) you REPLACE the word "TEXT" with what you wish to have in italics....and so forth for bold, underlined, a color, etc.

For the answer to your number 3 above, the Firstborn refers to the Elves. Have you read The Silmarillion? Ilúvatar made the Elves first and the humans came later in the creation.

[Andorinha]

Vanye, your question #1 has bothered me ever since I first read LotR. The whole episode seems somehow vague despite Gandalf's eventual flat denial that the Three Companions saw him. The point, for a long time, was never, in my mind, convincingly made that the first "old man" was Saruman. What was he doing out there at that time of night, stumbling through an increasingly hostile forest? I guess JRRT was trying to make the point that Saruman, at this point in his career, was still able and willing to do his own skulking, especially when he hoped to see if the Orcs were bringing him the One Ring. Unable to trust any of his minions, he exposed himself to great peril in his eagerness to get the Ring.

Perhaps he did not challenge/ fight Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas because he did not recognize them? But surely seeing Man, Dwarf, and Elf together would have clued him in to the fact that he was confronted with members of the Ring Fellowship? Surely he could only have suspected they knew something about the Ring, perhaps were actually carrying it? So why not at least try to find out what they knew? Instead, he just disappears...

Saruman in a hat? Was he wandering about in disguise, trying to look less like himself and more like Gandalf? But did he even know yet that Gandalf was still in the game? Did he know from Orc spies that Gandalf had tangled with a Balrog in Moria and was presumed "dead?" More questions than answers here!

But eventually, though still not fully satisfied, I did come to believe that the first old man in the forest, hat or not, was Saruman. Gimli's question and Gandalf's firm answer seem to make that point unarguable: " 'Wait a minute!' cried Gimli. 'There is another thing that I should like to know first. Was it you, Gandalf, or Saruman that we saw last night?' 'You certainly did not see me,' answered Gandalf, 'therefore I must guess that you saw Saruman.' " (LotR Omnibus "The White Rider," p. 520)

[Stormrider]

Could Sauruman have seen that the Orcs failed? Would he have seen the smoke rising from the burning of their carcasses? If he saw smoke, that might have given him cause to come out and look for the orcs and seeing them destroyed, then search for the hobbits. Was Orthanc close (and high) enough to see that area outside Fangorn Forest where Éomer's troops killed the orcs? Or perhaps his Palantír showed him the orcs being attacked and the hobbits escaping into Fangorn Forest.