Well, I suppose you could say theoretically redemption is always available and Morgoth or Sauron could freely choose to repent, ask for forgiveness, and be redeemed. But practically, they would never choose it.
Boromir was trying to counteract the mess he contributed to, and he was not completely successful. I have a hard time calling that heroic or redeeming.
To me the word “ultimate” is an absolute, in this case meaning impossible to be redeemed.
I assumed you used “ultimate” as meaning “greatest”. If you mean it just as “final”, then I’ll grant the point. Saruman and Gollum had the end that comes to all evil shorn of power.
But with respect to their original positions and the amount of evil they produced, Saruman’s evil was greater than Gollum’s, Sauron’s greater still, and since there can be no fall greater than Morgoth’s, his evil was ultimate in both senses.
Well, since you read HOMES, you realize that it was troubling to JRRT too. If he’d lived long enough, and kept writing, he’d have written himself out of that moral ambiguity somehow. He’d groped in the past for ways to turn them into fallen humans, leaving the elves out of the picture completely. But that didn’t really solve the dilemma. Then he considered making them descended from some dark Ainur spirit, a la the lesser children of Ungoliantë.
I should have added the footnote that redemption (to Tolkien) is only possible for humans (and, presumably, other mortals like hobbits.) “Redemption” is tied to mortality, the Gift of Men.
There were several occasions where Sauron was disembodied: after the fall of Numenor, and after Isildur cut the Ring from his finger for quite some time. So there were times when he was the disembodiment of evil, though you are correct in saying that by the time of the War of the Rings, he had regained shape. I’m looking in the Silmarillion now to recall what shape his final embodiment took, but I’m not finding it. Fill me in?
“Letters” # 246 does elaborate some: “Sauron should be thought of as very terrible. The form that he took was that of a man of more than human stature, but not gigantic. In his earlier incarnation he was able to veil his
power (as Gandalf did) and could appear as a commanding figure of great strength of body and supremely royal demeanour and countenance.”
Combine that with JRRT’s statement in Appendix A of ROTK:
“Sauron was indeed caught in the wreck of Numenor, so that the bodily form in which he had long walked perished; but he fled back to Middle-earth, a spirit of hatred borne upon a dark wind. He was unable ever again to assume a form that seemed fair to men, but became black and hideous, and his power thereafter was through terror alone.”
After the War of Wrath, the Noldor were allowed the chance to repent and return to Valinor. Most of them did. Galadriel did not, allowing her pride to imprison her in Middle-Earth. Her constant vigilance against Sauron and most especially her rejection of the Ring when it came within her power redeemed her and she was allowed to take ship to the West at the end of the Third Age.
The “gift” of men is described as: “Therefore {Eru} willed that the hearts of men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but that they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest. But the elves die not…but the sons of man die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Iluvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy. But Melkor has cast his shadow upon it, and confounded it with darkness, and brought forth evil out of good, and fear out of hope.” From Silmarillion, of course.
I don’t recall JRRT writing on redemption in the later HOMES books where he spent some time alluding to the downfall of the fathers of the Edain but I certainly might have overlooked it.
You do have faith in the man, dontcha? The published work is riddled with both independent-action orcs and unthinking orc slaughters because it is not morally wrong to kill orcs–you don’t have to examine their actions for possible good or repentance because it cannot be there. Unless we allow him to rewrite the published work (which he was always reluctant to do), he’s got a pretty tough row to hoe. (He may have moved towards making the orcs more like automatons–you can see a hint of that in the scenes where they quail when Sauron’s will turns away from them–in which case they would lose their slippery self-interest which gave them what little charm they had.)
Still, it is nice to see that kind of faith in this age of the anti-hero and all.
I’m not sure that redemption is being used as a “technical” term here–for my part, I used it in the sense of “turning away from and repenting bad stuff, and being forgiven.” It’s the first part I don’t think the orcs are capable of, making the question of whether they can be forgiven moot.
Sure, why not? He started as a story-teller and grew into a sub-creator, and he took his role far more seriously that I ever would have. Heck, when the Bible is littered with stories advocating the mass slaughter of the enemies of the righteous, including smashing in the heads of their children, JRRT can certainly be forgiven for drawing from that source (among others) to create his fables.
And since JRRT never did state definitively just what the orcs’ situation was vis a vis souls, forgiveness, etc. then there’s not really much point in our declaring our own opinions as fact.
