Q: Does Saruman Appear in The Hobbit?
ANSWER: Saruman does not appear in the book, The Hobbit, but it has been widely reported that he will appear in the Peter Jackson movies based on The Hobbit. This is a popular choice by most accounts because Saruman was a member of the White Council, which according to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings was the same “council of wizards” that Gandalf was in such a hurry to attend in the middle of The Hobbit.
It was this council — composed of the Istari (including Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast) and the chief lords of the Eldar (most probably including Elrond, Cirdan, Celeborn, and Galadriel but perhaps others as well) — that took action to drive the Necromancer from Dol Guldur.
Gandalf had discovered that the Necromancer was really Sauron, the servant of Morgoth, returned in a living body (in the books Sauron has a physical body and is NOT a disembodied “eye” as in the movies). Saruman feared that Sauron might find the One Ring near the Gladden Fields, and so he agreed to move against Dol Guldur.
Rather than face his enemies openly, Sauron retreated from Dol Guldur to the east, but within 10 years he returned to Mordor in the south and declared himself openly.
Although there is not much information about Saruman’s role in the background story for Gandalf’s journey away from Bilbo and the Dwarves, Peter Jackson should have enough material to develop a sub-plot that follows Gandalf and presumably other members of the White Council for a substantial part of the story.
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