The dark Maiar, the main villain of the Lord of the Rings saga - Saruman... Or Sauron? Fans of Tolkien's books and Peter Jackson's films are now ready to throw slippers at us, but the problem with confusion exists.
Many people really do not distinguish between the lord of the orcs from Mordor and the white magician who sank to the very bottom. We decided to figure out why they got such similar names.
Consonant, but not similar
While working on the book, Tolkien drew a lot of information from mythology, Scandinavian epics, and ancient tomes. The name of the Maiar Sauron comes from the word putrefactive, which hints that initially this local god had a flaw in his soul. Saruman, on the contrary, means mastery. Therefore, the white magician was the head of the order and respected by all the kings. But having obtained the palantir, he succumbed to the influence of Sauron and went over to the dark side.
A hint from Tolkien
There is also a popular theory on the Internet that the maestro deliberately made the names sound similar to emphasize the similarities between the characters, to make it clear that the head of the order of magicians could be on the dark side.
“I always thought that they came up with such similar names to confuse everyone and confuse me,” “In the 1979 animated version, they call Saruman “Aruman,” people write on the Internet.
Although both heroes created their own armies of orcs and wanted to seize power in Middle-earth, there are differences between them. Saruman is a spirit in human form, and Sauron is an ethereal and eternal evil, who in the film adaptation lost his body (we do not take into account the deleted scenes) and represented an ever-present evil, shown in the form of a red eye.
