During the War of the Ring, Isengard was controlled by Saruman until the fortress's destruction, but Saruman had become more like Sauron than he realizes, like him believing in supremacy through absolute power, and unintentionally a pupil of Sauron, having against Elrond's advice stud[ied] too deeply the arts of the enemy. The Tolkien scholars Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull note that the palantír in Orthanc had formed what Gandalf called some link between Isengard and Mordor, which I have not yet fathomed: the link was that Sauron had used the stone to take control of Saruman, and through him his forces of Orcs. In The Two Towers, Tolkien himself described Saruman's Isengard as only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery ... [of Sauron's] vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr. The Tolkien scholar Brian Rosebury writes that Tolkien was making the point that whereas good government in free societies like those of Gondor, the Dwarves, the Elves, the Drúedain, and the Shire leads to diversity, evil tends to homogeneity.