Sauron

Sauron belongs to the order of spirits that came into being before the world and entered it at its shaping. Within that order he was not one of the great powers set to govern Arda, but of the lesser kindred of the same nature who served them, and his first allegiance was to the smith among those powers, Aulë. The Valaquenta and the account of the Rings both state that he was in his beginning of Aulë's people and that he kept the lore of that company afterwards, which is the single fact about his origin that the published texts insist upon. The moment of his change of masters is nowhere narrated; the texts record only that Melkor drew many of these spirits into his service and that Sauron was the greatest of them, so that a servant of making passed into the service of a will that unmade.

None of the names by which he is commonly known was of his own choosing. Sauron is the Quenya form used by his enemies, understood as the abhorred or the foul; its Sindarin counterpart, noted in the Valaquenta and glossed as the Cruel, is Gorthaur, compounded of elements meaning dread and abomination. The names he took for himself run in the opposite direction, advertising craft and open-handedness. Coming among the Eldar of the Second Age he called himself Annatar, which may be rendered the lord of gifts, and Unfinished Tales preserves two further styles used in the same period: Artano, the high smith, and Aulendil, one devoted to Aulë. The last was not a fabrication but a true statement of where he had come from, and was the more serviceable to him for that reason.

By the Third Age the plain name has largely given way to circumlocution. In the north the power seated in southern Mirkwood was known for centuries as the Necromancer, a title describing what was observed of him rather than any understanding of who he was, and it is under that name that he enters The Hobbit. Elsewhere he is the Dark Lord, the Enemy, the Shadow, the Nameless One, the Eye; Gollum will not say the name at all, and the reluctance to pronounce it is general among those who have most to fear. Appendix E fixes the sound of the Elvish name for readers: the diphthong au carries the value it has in the English word loud, so that the first syllable is properly sour rather than sore, a distinction regularly lost in ordinary English speech.

Sauron's recorded deeds begin in the service of another. In the wars of Beleriand he acted as the chief officer of Morgoth's will, and after the Battle of Sudden Flame he took the island fortress that Finrod Felagund had raised in the pass of Sirion, holding it with werewolves and making it a place of dread on the northern road. There he contested in songs of power with Finrod, who was disguised among Beren's company, and broke him; the captives were thrown into pits and devoured one by one. His mastery of the isle ended when Lúthien came against him with the hound Huan, who overcame each shape he assumed until he yielded the tower and fled north as a bat-like phantom. At the end of the age, when his master had been thrust out of the world and the herald of the Valar proclaimed the terms of surrender, Sauron sued for pardon in fair words, then refused the humiliation of returning west for judgement and hid himself instead in Middle-earth.

He remained quiet for a thousand years of the Second Age. Around the year 1000 he chose the land east of the Ephel Dúath for his seat and began the raising of Barad-dûr, judging the Númenóreans a growing danger. About 1200 he came to the Eldar in a shape and a manner calculated to win them, claiming to bring gifts of knowledge; Gil-galad and Elrond would not receive him, but the smiths of Eregion, whose craft he flattered and taught, did. From roughly 1500 the Rings of Power were made under his tutelage, and by 1590 Celebrimbor had completed the Three alone and untouched by his hand. About the year 1600 Sauron forged the ruling Ring secretly in the fires of Orodruin and finished his tower; the moment he claimed it, Celebrimbor understood what had been done, and the Elves took off their rings.

The deception having failed, he took what he wanted by force. War between Sauron and the Elves opened in 1693, and the Three were sent away for hiding; in 1697 Eregion was ruined and Celebrimbor killed, the West-gate of Moria was shut, and Elrond withdrew north with the remnant to found Imladris. Two years later Sauron held nearly all of Eriador. What broke him was a fleet: in 1700 a great force out of Númenor under Tar-Minastir came to Lindon, and by 1701 he had been driven out of Eriador altogether, leaving the western lands at peace for centuries. The Nine Rings bore their fruit later, for it was about 2251 that the wraiths who wore them are first recorded abroad.

His next stroke was aimed at Númenor and succeeded by surrender. When Ar-Pharazôn landed at Umbar with a host that Sauron's own servants would not face, he gave himself up and was carried to the island as a prisoner in 3262, and within a few decades had become the King's chief counsellor, turning that people from the Valar to the worship of the Dark. The counsel ripened in 3319, when the fleet of Númenor sailed against the Undying Lands and the island was destroyed; Elendil and his sons escaped east, and Sauron was back in Mordor by 3320. He struck at the exiled realms in 3429, taking Minas Ithil and burning the White Tree, and the answer was the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, leagued in 3430 and victorious on Dagorlad in 3434. The siege of Barad-dûr held for seven years, until in 3441 Gil-galad and Elendil threw him down and died in the act; Isildur cut the Ring from his hand and kept it for himself, and the Second Age ended.

Isildur was killed by orcs in the second year of the Third Age and the Ring went into the Anduin, which secured Sauron's survival as surely as any fortress. A shadow was noticed in Greenwood the Great about the year 1050, and the nameless power who settled at Dol Guldur was taken for a sorcerer rather than the old Enemy. Minas Ithil fell to the Ringwraiths in 2002 and became a stronghold of his servants. In 2063 Gandalf went to Dol Guldur and its master withdrew into the East, and the Watchful Peace that followed lasted until 2460, when he came back with greater strength. Gandalf entered Dol Guldur a second time in 2850 and learned who was in fact seated there; the White Council drove him out in 2941, but he had already prepared Mordor and went there, and in 2951 he declared himself openly and rebuilt his tower.

Within the legendarium Sauron fills the place of the servant who outlasts his master and inherits his war. He is described as having been one of the Maiar of Aulë's people at the beginning, and he kept from that company a deep knowledge of substances, forms and the making of things; what he brought to Melkor was not raw destructive force but administration, the ordering of armies, strongholds and subject peoples. The Valaquenta ranks him the greatest of that Enemy's servants and gives him the Sindarin name Gorthaur, and Aragorn, recounting the tale of Beren to the hobbits, is careful to place him below Morgoth as no more than a servant. His later lordship is thus presented as a second and smaller thing than the one it imitated, and the texts keep that proportion consistently.

His characteristic power is the domination of other wills, exercised through gifts, oaths, fear and the rings themselves. The Nine were the instrument that worked best: those who took them became wraiths wholly subject to him, useful precisely because they had no separate purpose left. Gandalf explains that in making the ruling Ring he put a great part of his own strength into it, which gave him command over the lesser rings and their bearers, and that the strength of his fortress was of the same kind, raised and held by that power. He could also reach through a seeing-stone to bend a mind at a distance. The arrangement was efficient and made him formidable, but it also placed the greater part of what he was inside an object he did not always hold.

Sauron's dealings are recorded almost entirely in terms of rank. He has no kindred, no marriage and no companions in any of the texts; every figure attached to him is either a superior he outgrew, an instrument he used, or an adversary he tried to break. His first bond, to the people of Aulë, is the one that most clearly measures the rest, for the craft-lore he took from that company was afterwards turned to purposes its teachers would not have recognised. His second, to Melkor, was durable in a way that his later loyalties never were: he kept faith with that master longer and more usefully than any other servant, and the Silmarillion presents his own dominion as a lesser copy of it, a shadow cast by a malice that had gone out of the world. After the first age he took no lord and left the arrangement unrepeated in the other direction, never raising anyone to a station from which he could be answered.

The single relationship he built on something other than fear was with the smiths of Eregion, and its collapse is instructive. Galadriel is said to have distrusted the fair-seeming counsellor from the start and to have been overruled by others, while Celebrimbor gave him the welcome of one craftsman to another. When the pretence ended, Sauron treated that intimacy as a source of intelligence: Celebrimbor was tormented until he gave up the hiding of the Seven and the Nine, held back what he knew of the Three, and his body was afterwards carried before the invading host as a standard. The Elves who had refused him were left with the knowledge that the ruin had come through a door they themselves had opened.

Among his own people the pattern is one of graded possession. The Ringwraiths are wholly his, without will or name apart from him; the lieutenant who parleys at the Black Gate is a living man of high standing who has forgotten what he was once called. Others he merely turned to account: the spider of Cirith Ungol acknowledged no master and wanted nothing he had to give, yet he was content to keep her where she was and to feed her his prisoners. Gollum he used by releasing him, and Saruman he handled as a subordinate who believed himself a rival, tolerating an ambition he had no intention of satisfying.

In the earliest written form of the tale of Beren and Lúthien the place later held by Sauron is filled by a creature of a wholly different kind: Tevildo, Prince of Cats, a great talking beast with a household of feline servants, who keeps Beren as a drudge in his kitchens. The hound's enmity there is a quarrel between cats and dogs rather than a contest of powers, and no origin among the spirits of the world is claimed for the captor at all. When Tolkien turned the story into verse the cat was discarded and replaced by Thû, a necromancer and lord of werewolves holding the tower on the isle in the river, which is the role and the setting that the later prose kept. Thû retained the name through the compressed mythological summaries of the following years, and only afterwards was it displaced, by way of the intermediate form Gorthû, in favour of the names used in the finished work.

The later drafts are more concerned with motive than with name. In the late essays gathered under the heading of transformed myths, Tolkien argued that this servant had not been evil at the beginning, that what drew him to Melkor was an appetite for order, planning and efficiency rather than for ruin, and that his corruption lay in preferring a master who could impose such order quickly; the same discussion allows that his offer of submission after the first Enemy's fall may not have been wholly feigned. The Númenórean strand developed separately. In the drafts of the island's fall his function as counsellor and corrupter of the last King was worked out before the account reached its published shape, and in the version composed in the Adûnaic manner he is called Zigûr, a name given the sense of wizard, which shows Tolkien assigning him a name from within the mortal tradition that recorded him.

In Peter Jackson's three films Sauron has no embodied role after the opening sequence: the armoured figure of the prologue was performed by Sala Baldwin, while the voice, used both for Sauron and for the Ring itself, was Alan Howard's. For the remainder of the trilogy he is represented as a burning, lidless eye set upon the summit of Barad-dûr, which turns a figure of speech used by characters in the novel into the literal form the Enemy takes on screen; the book gives no warrant for a physically present eye, and keeps his person unseen but not disembodied. The prologue also rearranges his overthrow. Elendil is killed by Sauron directly and Isildur takes up the broken sword to cut the Ring from his hand, whereas the narrative in the appendices has Gil-galad and Elendil throw him down together and perish in the act; Gil-galad is absent from the sequence altogether. In the later trilogy drawn from The Hobbit the same studio gives him a considerably larger part, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who also spoke Smaug. There the White Council's expulsion of the Necromancer from Dol Guldur, reported only in summary by Tolkien, is staged as an extended confrontation, and his identity is revealed on screen rather than deduced.

The older adaptations keep him at a distance. Ralph Bakshi's unfinished film confines him to its introductory summary and gives him nothing to speak, and the BBC dramatisation, though the most complete of the early versions and generally close to the book, allows him no speaking presence at all, conveying him wholly through what other characters say of him.