LOTR: Is Saruman A Reincarnation Of Melkor?

gamerant.com:

Many writers create and recreate characters over and over again across the course of their writing journey, making small tweaks and changes that result in a well rounded, fleshed out character in the end. And some writers even use earlier drafts of that character as a separate character in another work, to give them a test run of sorts, before they get to the final version. Using this as the basis, some Tolkien fans have come up with an interesting theory that Saruman is a reincarnation of Melkor.

Now this is meant both in the spiritual sense, of Melkor’s essence being brought back to being in the physical form of Saruman in Middle Earth, and also in the writing sense of Melkor essentially being an earlier draft of what would later become Saruman’s character in the Lord of the Rings. There are lots of ways in which the two characters can be compared to one another, and in which readers have noted a progression from the early concepts of The Silmarillion that Tolkien had been conceiving for many many years, to the more fleshed out version of the white wizard that appears in his most well known works.

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The most glaring similarity between the two characters are their powers of corruption, as they both started out as good beings, with noble intentions, but quickly became seduced by greed and narcissism, which they then spread to contaminate the peoples and the lands around them. ‘To Melkor among the Ainur had been given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, and he had a share in all the gifts of his brethren.’ He is, like Saruman, one of the most powerful of his order, and as an Ainur, one of the most pure and the most trusted with great responsibility.

But both