Curated playlist
Male literary villains
- Frankenstein's monsterFrankenstein's monster first appeared in 1818, in a novel written by Mary Shelley when she was barely out of her teenage years. He is 8 feet tall, sensitive, vegetarian, and capable of reading French and German within 11 months of his…
- IagoIago has more lines in Shakespeare's Othello than Othello himself. With 1,097 lines, the villain of the play speaks more than its hero, a structural fact that hints at something strange and central about this character. Who is the real…
- SarumanSaruman the White arrives in Middle-earth as one of five angelic emissaries, dispatched by the godlike Valar to challenge the dark lord Sauron without resorting to direct force. His name, drawn from the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon,…
- Grand Admiral ThrawnGrand Admiral Thrawn's final words, spoken as his Noghri bodyguard Rukh turned against him, were "But... it was so artistically done." Thrawn is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise. He first appeared in Timothy Zahn's 1991…
- Jacen SoloJacen Solo begins his fictional life as one of a pair of unnamed twins Leia Organa Solo is carrying in the 1991 novel Heir to the Empire. He arrives five minutes after his sister Jaina, born on Coruscant in the 1993 novel The Last Command.…
- Gríma WormtongueTolkien describes Gríma Wormtongue as "a wizened figure of a man, with a pale wise face, and heavy lidded eyes" and a "long pale tongue." In Edoras, the seat of Rohan's kings, every inhabitant had a contemptuous nickname for the chief…
- Captain AhabCaptain Ahab stands at the helm of the Pequod with a leg carved from ivory, staring out at a sea that once took something from him. Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick introduces him as the monomaniacal master of a whaling ship, a man…
- SauronSauron is the main antagonist of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a figure who rules the land of Mordor and covets dominion over all of Middle-earth. He is almost never seen. He does not speak in the novel. He does not stride…
- GollumGollum is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth, and he may be the most pitiable monster in the history of English literature. He began life as Sméagol, a Stoor Hobbit of the River-folk who lived near…
- NazgûlThe Nazgûl did not exist when J. R. R. Tolkien sat down to write The Lord of the Rings. The figure in dark clothes riding through the early chapter "Three is Company" was, at that stage, Gandalf. In 1938, Tolkien described his decision to…