Sauron

• 1. Introduction

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  Sauron 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 across the battlefield in person. And yet he is everywhere, felt in the dread of his servants, glimpsed in a burning eye that watches from a tower. Sarah Crown, writing in The Guardian, called it "a bold move, to leave the book's central evil so undefined". She argued the result is a villain who becomes "truly unforgettable... vaster, bolder and more terrifying through his absence than he could ever have been through his presence."

  The questions Sauron raises are not simple ones. Where did this being come from, and what, exactly, is he? How did a spirit created good become the embodiment of something close to absolute evil? What does it mean that the instrument of his power, the One Ring, was forged from his own will? And why, across a century of adaptations, from radio to animation to film to television, has every storyteller struggled to show him at all?

• 2. Origin and Fall

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  Before the world itself existed, the supreme being Eru created good immortal spirits: the powerful Valar and the lesser Maiar. Sauron was one of the Maiar. He served Aulë, the smith of the Valar, and from that service he gained deep knowledge of craft and making.

  The Vala Melkor was the first to rebel against Eru, and Sauron was drawn in by Melkor's offer of power and his hatred of disorder. He became a spy for Melkor on the isle of Almaren, the home of the Valar. When Melkor destroyed Almaren and the Valar retreated to Valinor, they did not perceive Sauron's treachery. He followed Melkor to Middle-earth and did not look back.

  Tolkien explained in his Letters that, like all tyrants, Sauron had started with good intentions but was corrupted by power. He went further than any human tyrant could, Tolkien wrote, because he was an immortal angelic spirit. As an immortal, his pride and lust for domination had no natural ceiling. By the time the Elves awoke in Middle-earth, Sauron already commanded the stronghold of Angband as Melkor's lieutenant.

  When the Valar eventually captured Melkor, Sauron escaped, repaired Angband alone, and bred an army of Orcs. His autonomous survival after his master's capture says something about the depth of his corruption. He was no longer a servant. He was an institution.

• 3. The Ring and the Deception

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  Early in the Second Age, Sauron adopted a new strategy. He assumed a fair appearance and called himself Annatar, meaning "Lord of Gifts". Under that name he befriended Celebrimbor and the Elven-smiths of Eregion, teaching them arts and magic, helping them forge the Rings of Power.

  His private purpose was to forge one ring that would control all the others, binding their wearers to his will. The Elves detected him when he put on the One Ring, and they removed their own Rings immediately. Sauron's response was war. He killed Celebrimbor, seized the Seven Rings meant for Dwarves and the Nine meant for Men, and launched an assault on the surviving Elven lords.

  The Nine Rings enslaved nine Men entirely, transforming them into the Nazgûl, Sauron's most feared servants. The Dwarves proved harder to dominate; their nature resisted the rings, and they did not submit. Sauron's theory of control, working perfectly on Men but failing on Dwarves, reveals something about how he understood power: as a mechanism that could be engineered.

  Late in the Second Age, Sauron surrendered to the Númenórean army not because he was defeated but because he saw an opportunity. He allowed himself to be taken to Númenor as a prisoner, then spent years undermining the island kingdom's religion from the inside, encouraging human sacrifice to Melkor and finally convincing the king Ar-Pharazôn to sail against the immortal lands of Aman. Eru destroyed Númenor entirely. Sauron's body perished in that catastrophe, and he permanently lost the ability to take a fair or beautiful form.

• 4. Defeat and Return

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  Elendil led nine ships of survivors out of the drowning of Númenor to Middle-earth, where they founded the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor. Sauron returned to Mordor in a new hideous body that Isildur described in writing, recording that his hand "was black, and yet burned like fire".

  The war that followed ended at the Battle of Dagorlad, where the Last Alliance of Elves and Men defeated Sauron's forces and invaded Mordor. The siege of Barad-dûr lasted seven years. When Sauron finally came out to fight face-to-face, he killed both Elendil and the Elven-king Gil-galad. Elendil's sword Narsil broke beneath him. Isildur took up the broken hilt-shard and cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand, which ended him.

  But Isildur refused to destroy the Ring by casting it into Mount Doom and kept it for himself. When Isildur was ambushed and killed by Orcs at the Gladden Fields, the Ring slipped into the River Anduin and was lost. Sauron spent roughly a thousand years as a shapeless evil before reconstituting as the Necromancer, hiding in Dol Guldur in Mirkwood. The White Council drove him out in the year 2941. He returned openly to Mordor and began rebuilding Barad-dûr.

  In the year 3018, Sauron sent the Nazgûl to find "Baggins" and seize the Ring. He had tortured the creature Gollum and learned that the hobbit Bilbo Baggins had taken it. He did not anticipate what Elrond's council at Rivendell would decide: that the Ring must be destroyed rather than wielded. He expected someone would try to use it against him. That miscalculation shaped the entire final campaign.

• 5. The Eye That Watches

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  Frodo Baggins glimpsed the Eye of Sauron in the Mirror of Galadriel. Tolkien describes it precisely: "rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing."

  Later in the story, the mists around Barad-dûr briefly part, and Tolkien writes that "one moment only it stared out... there stabbed northward a flame of red, the flicker of a piercing Eye." Frodo, even though the Eye was not directed at him, "fell as one stricken mortally".

  Whether the Eye was Sauron's literal physical form or a projection of his will has no clean answer. Gollum, who was tortured by Sauron directly, confirmed that Sauron has at least a "Black Hand" with four fingers, the fifth having been severed when Isildur took the Ring. Christopher Tolkien, commenting on a draft of the climactic chapters, noted that his father had come to "identify the Eye of Barad-dûr with the mind and will of Sauron" so completely that the Eye has wrath, fear, and thought as attributes. In the draft text, the Eye is referred to by the pronoun "its", and Tolkien shifted to "his" only as he wrote out the passage a second time.

  Aragorn told his companions that Sauron did not allow his name to be written or spoken. His Orcs referred to him only as the Eye. The Lord of the Nazgûl threatened the shieldmaiden Éowyn with torture before the "Lidless Eye" at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. The image the name conjures, permanent surveillance with no body and no vulnerability, is arguably Sauron's most potent weapon.

• 6. Character on the Page

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  Tolkien's prototype for Sauron was a giant monstrous cat, the Prince of Cats, who bore the names Tevildo, Tifil, and Tiberth in the earliest version of the Beren story, written in The Book of Lost Tales in 1917. That cat-figure was later replaced by a character called Thû, the Necromancer, and then successively renamed Gorthû, Sûr, and finally Sauron. The name Gorthû survived in The Silmarillion as Gorthaur. Both Thû and Sauron name the character in the 1925 Lay of Leithian.

  The scholar Tom Shippey reads Tolkien's depiction of Sauron as engaging an ancient theological debate. Elrond's statement that "nothing is evil in the beginning, even Sauron was not so" implies an Augustinian universe created entirely good, in which evil is the absence of good rather than a force in its own right. But Tolkien also sets alongside that view the Manichaean position, that good and evil are equally powerful and battle it out in the world. Shippey argues this second strand came from Tolkien's personal experience in the First World War, where evil seemed at least as powerful as good and could easily have won.

  The classicist J. K. Newman observed that Sauron's name, from the Greek, makes him "the Lizard", and that this places Frodo in the role of "a version of Praxiteles' Apollo Sauroktonos", Apollo the Lizard-killer. The scholar Gwenyth Hood, writing in Mythlore, compared Sauron to Count Dracula from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, noting that both antagonists are parasitical on created life, both are linked to powers of darkness, and both exert psychological domination through "hypnotic eyes". Edward Lense, also writing in Mythlore, identified Balor of the Evil Eye from Celtic mythology as a parallel source. Balor's evil eye, set in the middle of his forehead, could overcome a whole army; he ruled the dead from a tower of glass; and he was a leader of the supernatural Fomorians.

  The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argued that Sauron's true opposite in The Lord of the Rings is not Aragorn, his political rival, nor Gandalf, his spiritual enemy, but Tom Bombadil. Bombadil is entirely free of the desire to dominate, and therefore the One Ring has no effect on him at all.

• 7. From Page to Screen

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  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version of The Lord of the Rings kept Sauron off-screen entirely, treating him as an invisible and unvisualizable antagonist. Rankin/Bass's 1980 animated adaptation of The Return of the King showed him only as a disembodied Eye. The 1981 BBC Radio adaptation did not give Sauron a voice of his own; his wishes and commands were spoken by intermediaries, including the Mouth of Sauron, played by John Rye.

  Peter Jackson's 2001-2003 film trilogy gave Sauron a brief humanoid appearance, a large figure in black armour portrayed by Sala Baker and voiced by Alan Howard. In earlier drafts of Jackson's script, Sauron fought Aragorn directly at the climax, a scene that survived into the extended DVD version of The Return of the King before being cut as too large a departure from Tolkien's text. It was replaced with Aragorn fighting a troll.

  In Jackson's The Hobbit adaptations, Sauron appears as the Necromancer and is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. In The Lego Batman Movie in 2017, Sauron appears as his Eye form voiced by Jemaine Clement, one of the classic villains the Joker frees from the Phantom Zone.

  Amazon's prequel series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power portrays Sauron's rise to power in the Second Age. The production team disguised him as Halbrand, a non-canonical human character, before revealing his identity. Charlie Vickers, who plays Halbrand and then Sauron openly as Annatar in the second season, said he did not know his character's true identity until filming the third episode. He admitted he began to suspect when lines from John Milton's Paradise Lost were used during his audition. In the second season premiere, Jack Lowden portrays Sauron's form during the First Age and early Second Age in flashback.