I think it helps a bit to understand Sauron by considering the motivations and actions of his rival and imitator, Saruman. In my opinion there’s a good, story-relevant reason why their names are so similar. Tolkien is addressing the problem that his primary villain is a remote, disembodied Force who never actually appears on stage, by pointing the reader toward a surrogate character who shares the same viewpoint. The same device is used later with the “Mouth of Sauron” character in Return of the King.
Everything that Sauron is, Saruman reflects albeit in miniature. But whereas LOTR takes place many ages after Sauron was corrupted, we are presented with a relatively full account of how Saruman, the wisest of the Grey Council, was overthrown by his own pride. It is therefore no great leap to consider Saruman’s downfall as an intentional parallel to that of the Dark Lord.
Saruman is not a two-dimensional character-- he acts as he does because he has been led to believe that the Enemy is stronger, and his pride in his own skill and intellect blinds him to the possibility that he is wrong. Even as he degenerates further into villainy and betrayal, he fools himself that it is the others who are blinded. His allies become obstacles that must be manipulated by deceit or controlled outright, because they are too foolish to save themselves.
As Gandalf observes: “Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.” LOTR takes place at the tail-end of an ages-long chronology, and Sauron is a being too old and powerful to easily fit into the human-scaled epic. Saruman’s fall represents what Sauron once was in the remote past and how he came to be the Dark Lord.
… which, I respectfully note, was not part of the Trilogy, the Four book Hobbit series, or published in J.R.R.'s life time.
Keeping the discussion on the completed and published trilogy, I maintain that Sauron, as I think was discussed on this board earlier, is the complete anti-thesis of the Cool Villain, the Complex Villain, or the Sympathetic Villain.
The only way to enjoy the trilogy is to just accept Sauron as a plot device similar to an earth-quake or an erupting volcano.
Yes, Sauron is essentially “just” a plot device. The trilogy is all about how the various heroes and others react to the challenge of the villain. It’s not about the villain.
-I really like Terrifel’s discussion of Saruman/Sauron. Insightful.
I see Sauron as Satan in Paradise Lost, in that they have the same motivation. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”.
Back to the Op: eleanorigby, Sauron **did not wish to destroy all men **and elves and even Hobbits. He wish to subjugate and command all free creature. He had many men already working for him. It was men and slaves that raised the food in Nurn (Southern Mordor) that raised the food to feed his armies of orcs and trolls. He had vast armies of men also at his command.
As to what Sauron was, the easiest way to think of it is that above all was Eru who is God. The Valar were Greater Angels and included Morgoth, Sauron’s boss. Morgoth was the leader of the fallen or evil Angels. Sauron was the stronger of the lesser Angels that followed him. In power Saurumen and Gandalf were not much less powerful in their own forms but they were sent instead to act as guides and helpers for Men and Elves to fight and defeat Sauron. Sauruman was corrupted by his studies of the Ring Lore and contact with Sauron via the Palantir (special very ancient elven made crystal ball) in his tower. The same one Pippin picked up and nearly gave away the whole show with to Sauron.
Gandalf was the wisest of the lesser Angels and in the end stayed the truest to the mission and succeeded were the other Wizards failed.
Yes, but WHY? What did all those enslaved folk do for him? Did they mine for gold or grow really good crops or weave the finest cloth or what? You don’t enslave people for no reason (beside monomaniacal power). What was he to with them all once he was King of the World?
Eleanorigby, I think you just have to accept for Sauron, as for that other fallen angel (Satan), the purpose is simply to rule over others. Evil is irrational, from the viewpoint of the non-evil.
Originally he was trying to control Middle Earth to gain enough power to threaten the Valar and free his master. I suspect if he had ever succeeded that he would have put off that whole freeing thing for many long centuries. Once he was King of all of Middle Earth he would probably have tried to eventually challenged the Valar themselves.
Why do certain men that have made enough money continue to work their asses off to make even more money and gain more power? I see Sauron in a situation like that, all he knows now is a hatred for freedom and a desire for more power. He cannot be content and it was his undoing and would have been even if he had defeated Gandalf’s grand conspiracy.
The underlined sentence is the crux of the whole matter. By the time of LOTR, Sauron was indeed a monomaniac whose only goal was to be the boss.
I’m sorry you found it irksome to slog through Polycarp’s excellent exposition of the cosmology of Middle-Earth, but if you didn’t want the answer, you shouldn’t have asked the question. There’s an echo in the “Music of the Ainur” creation story of how Sauron wound up the way he was. In the Creation Music, each of the Ainur had their own part to sing. But Melkor had some ideas of his own and departed from his assigned part. He wanted others to go along with him and so he began to sing louder. Eventually he had no other goal than to sing louder and louder on the same few notes, and he kept doing this even though by this time he was no longer making music worthy of the name.
Imagine if you will a trumpeter in the orchestra when Mozart is performing one of his own piano concerti, and the trumpeter decides he’s going to be the star of the show. He ends up playing the few loudest notes in the trumpet’s range, an idiot’s performance and one that defeats even its own purpose because young Wolfgang brilliantly improvises around him to make the trumpet blasts an even better counterpoint to his piano playing instead of a solo part in its own right. That’s what Melkor was like, and that’s how Sauron became: a giant jerk constantly trumpeting on the one theme even when there had long since ceased to be any point in it.
So Gandalf and Saruman were angels, sent into the world to guide its inhabitants against the evil of Sauron. Gandalf sticks to the plan, while Saruman is corrupted.
Ok then.
Now, I recall hearing that Gandalf could not actively fight against Sauron, he could only act behind the scenes.
But…
After Saruman is corrupted, what is stopping HIM from unleashing all of the power that an angel surely must have? Why does he keep his puny human form? Why doesnt he revert back to his original “angel” form and unleash angel hell???
He was cast into “The Void” and won’t return until a Last Battle at the end of the world. He couldn’t be killed because he had put so much of himself into the world that it was, in essence, his “One Ring”; to kill him, the Valar would have had to destroy the world first.
No. If he had claimed the One Ring for himself, possibly. To quote one of Tolkien’s letters :
No; if Galadrial was, she would have marched into Mordor and pounded Sauron into the ground. Morgoth was stronger than Sauron, of a higher order.
Although much less powerful than he was; back when he was named Melkor he was far stronger. Over the Ages, he invested so much power into dominating and twisting the world and it’s creatures that his personal power was reduced to something that some of the greatest elves managed to rival. By then, it was his armies that made him dangerous more than his personal power. That, and the fact that he’d put so much of his essence into the world that it was permanently warped, even after he was tossed into the void.
I recall a line comparing Saruman and his creations at Orthanc to be “a toy, a child’s imitation” compared to what Sauron had created at Barad-dur. And it is a common theme in Tolkien that evil creatures delude themselves as to their greatness. Melkor tried to outshine Eru, Sauron underestimated the Valar when he tricked the Numenoreans into attacking them and lost his body and the ability to look good because of it; Saruman thought he was more powerful than he was. And then we have the Ring which constantly deludes people about how great they would be if they just took it and used it.
I suspect that it’s not just a matter of rules, but of having some sort of constraint laid on them. The rules limit what they are allowed to do; the constraints limit their power. Or so I guess.
Thanks, all. I get that once he had the power, he would want to see just how far he could go etc, but I was curious as to why he started it all in the first place. More of the same, really, but everyone starts somewhere…
Mal--true enough, but my eyes can’t help but glaze over when there are so many names so in one sentence, none of which have any context to my world. I like a different approach into other worlds, that’s all. Wendell–that is not true. A great deal of dialogue from the books is in the films. And Saruman’s army was designed with that fell purpose. It’s accurate, succinct and nicely phrased.
WhatExit and DerTrihs–thank you for providing original motivation and for clearing up some of the organizational chart. I’d much rather come in here and ask questions than weed through Tolkien and Co (meaning his son).
That’s not what I said. I said that it’s not a good idea to assume that a line from the movie comes from the book. Yes, some of the lines come from the book, but many of them are quite different.
Remember the scene were Gandalf kicks the Balrog’s ass? Gandalf was “allowed” to use his full strength against the Balrog because the Balrog was a being of the same sort as Gandalf. Gandalf unleashes his full angelic powers against the Balrog, and while he eventually defeats it Gandalf is killed and can only return to Middle Earth by special dispensation.
Saruman’s natural powers weren’t tied to his puny human form. Saruman and Gandalf had spent something like a thousand years playing their assigned roles. Saruman wasn’t going to turn himself into a killing machine of fire and shadow like the Balrog had, because he just wasn’t into that sort of thing. His pride was in his knowledge and wisdom, even as an angel he was a scholar and loremaster, not a fighter. Saruman had developed great powers of persuasion, and could easily dominate the weak-willed simply by the power of his voice. Grima Wormtongue was his slave, and even stout-hearted hobbits could be dominated if Saruman put forth some effort.
Even when Saruman “allied” with Sauron it was because of his pride in his wisdom…he didn’t want Sauron to win, but he figured that if he came to terms with Sauron he’d eventually figure out a way to stab Sauron in the back. As was pointed out before, Saruman was intended to be a sort of imitation of Sauron, paralleling Sauron’s descent into absolute evil, in the same way that Sauron is a lesser imitation of Morgoth.
Saruman did exert his full angelic powers, but he exerted his powers to create the Uruk Hai and dominate mortals rather than as a combat monster. In other words, Saruman could have eventually turned himself into a demonic killing machine, but he would thought that was a stupid waste of his powers.
Remember also, after Gandalf died and was allowed to return by the Valar, Saruman was ejected from the Angelic Wizard Order and his angelic powers were rescinded. When Gandalf says “Saruman, your staff is broken,” this is none-too-subtle code for: “Saruman, the Valar have cut off your wang.”
So it’s doubtful that Saruman could have Balrogged up even if he wanted to. Seemingly the arrangement whereby the Wizards take on human form has certain built-in limitations.
Originally the maiar could take on various forms as easily as putting on a suit of clothes. However, after many ages of using the same form that form became more and more a part of them.
Saruman could had attempted to transform himself into some sort of Balrog type creature of pure destruction, but he would have had to work on it, and he wouldn’t have been very good at it until he had inhabited that role for ages. He would have had to give up his most cherished powers as “Saruman” and turn his will to becoming something completely different, which would have been absurd since he was at the top of his game as the “man of skill”. He’d be Michael Jordan trying to play baseball.
And of course as you say, Gandalf cut off his balls at Orthanc, and afterwards Saruman’s power was greatly reduced…as “Mr. Sharkey” he got his ass kicked by a couple of hobbits. Even then, he still was able to dominate and corrupt lowly creatures such as Grima.
Terrifel has this best I think. Saruman was still stuck in his old man Wizard role even when he turned from good to evil. Gandalf the White was far more powerful than Gandalf the Grey as Gandalf the Grey had actually died on that mountain and the Valar (Top Level Angels) sent him back much closer to his spirit form than any of the 5 Wizards had been.
Additionally, Saruman was by nature a Crafter or Smith. He was like Sauron one of the people of Aulë the Smith, the Smith of the Valar. So you saw his powers deployed in engines of war, blasting powder and an attempt to make his own ring. His power to use great magic was actually less than when he had arrived as he concentrated his powers in other areas.
Early on Sauron was capable of becoming a fierce monster. A great Werewolf and other shapes but he was never restricted like Sauruman until after he lost his body twice in short order. First in the destruction of Numenor and then when he lost his Ring in which he had vested much of his powers. Sauron was little more than a Spectre in the third age leading up to the War of the Ring.
So Sauruman was in a bit of a pickle, to use his full powers which where never meant for direct combat anyway, he would have need to disincorporate and return to his Angelic (Maia) form. If he did this he was also subject to recall by the Valar.
Which makes perfect sense, since they were sent to deal with the depredations of a corrupted Maiar. The Valar would want to take precautions against just ending up with a whole posse of Saurons. Note, that Gandalf couldn’t just chop him off from his power like that before, or the Balrog or Sauron for that matter.
This is speculation, but it seems likely to me that they were sent to Middle Earth with some sort of binds, some sort of limits in place ( which I think is why Gandalf the White was stronger; the Valar lifted the limits a bit ). As a guess from the results, Gandalf as Gandalf the White was given the keys to that binding, and could shut Saruman down. Neither of them could do that to Sauron or the Balrog because they weren’t sent and had no bindings.
There’s an echo in the “Music of the Ainur” creation story of how Sauron wound up the way he was. In the Creation Music, each of the Ainur had their own part to sing. But Melkor had some ideas of his own and departed from his assigned part. He wanted others to go along with him and so he began to sing louder. Eventually he had no other goal than to sing louder and louder on the same few notes, and he kept doing this even though by this time he was no longer making music worthy of the name.