Evil magician : many works play up his supposed fascination with the occult, ever since Le Matin des Magiciens (see : Indiana Jones). Some cut out the middleman.
Chtulhian medium and/or priest : from the video game Prisoner of Ice.
millenia old lich : not quite sure myself, there. I’m sure I read it somewhere, but can’t pinpoint it at the moment.
evil alien race : Marvel comics, for instance the Ultimate Avengers.
zeerust super soldiers and evil science : lots and lots of video games, such as Wolfenstein, Bloodrayne and Freedom Force.
cannibal : ok, that one I just made up. But there’s *got *to be a B horror movie about it
“Very nearly as” is not “as.” And, actually, Sauron never came remotely close to anything Morgoth achieved in terms of pain, misery, and destruction. Sauron was cowed by the Numenoreans; Morgoth would have laughed and smashed them into oblivion. He all but annihilated the Noldor and Sindor in Beleriand, for Iluvatar’s sake, and would have but for the intervention of Aman. Sauron was puny by comparison; he was a deceiver. Morgoth dominated and crushed. Morgoth went beyond wanting to subject the wills of all living things to his own; he destroyed and twisted them into abominations, and he did it over and over and over. He created the dragons. The balrogs were his minions. Balrogs, plural. Sauron was of the same order as a balrog, of the maiar, a far lesser order. Morgoth was originally of the Valar, and created the most supreme of all of them, and became the most corrupted, the most fallen, of any being in the Tolkien mythos.
The only being Morgoth could not ultimately defeat or dominate (excluding the other Valar themselves) was Ungoliant. Also, nothing in Mordor, not even the Dark Tower, can remotely compare to the horror of Thangorodrim and Angband.
But you have a point: in a sense, ultimate evil is infantile. C.S. Lewis actually makes a similar point.
There’s just something about a guy who’d mention his plans for consuming a big roast beef sandwich and a chocolate shake to a starving prison inmate contemplating having to eat a rotting corpse.
In The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie, there’s a character called Uma Saraswati.
She seduces the main character, Moor, while he’s still a child. When they’re having sex, she likes him to talk dirty, but in a special way: she likes him to graphically describe himself having dirty sex with his own mother. Then she secretly records him saying these things, and brings the tape to his family, who disowns him without even telling him why (he doesn’t find out until many years later).
When he runs to Uma for comfort, she insists they die together in a suicide pact. She produces two pills and eats one, prompting Moor to swallow the other. A minute later, to her great surprise, she dies, and Moor starts having psychedelic hallucinations. Apparently, the pills got switched accidentally. Moor was supposed to take the poison, and she was supposed to get high while watching him die.
So basically, she takes a kid and alienates him from his family, with the intention of manipulating him into committing suicide while she trips balls, for no reason at all. I think the character was intended as an avatar of the universal force of destruction. I mention it here because, I read the book once, about twelve years ago, and the evil of that character leaves an impression on me to this day.
Of course Morgoth was more powerful. That is not a question. The question is whether Sauron is more evil. Which of course leads us to what is evil?
And yeah, I gotta say, that summary of Uma from The Moor is pretty sick. She gets points for twisted creativity and depravity, but lacks body count enough to be considered (of course I haven’t read it, and there may be lots more).
I don’t remember Sauron ever having good intentions within the narrative. Sauron certainly made moves towards wiping out all Men, starting with Gondor.
That’s actually pretty much it. I think what impressed me was that she’s a manifestation of pure destructive force. The Moor acknowledges as much. Later on in the story, a new character is introduced: a young man who the Moor identifies as a male version of Uma. A manipulator, a destroyer, only not as good at it. The Moor even says something to him like “I’ve met your sister, and she was way better at this than you.” The young man doesn’t know what The Moor is talking about, but the reader does, and it’s a good line. Sure enough, the young man is no Uma, as his own destructive plans fall apart, and he… either dies or gets caught and goes to jail, I forget.
One way to look at it is, Uma may not be much of a villain, she didn’t kill anybody and managed to get herself killed in a very dumb way, but she’s the agent of an Ultimate Villainy, the force responsible for all the destruction in the universe (it’s clearer in the book). That’s why she gave me such a chill.
Morgoth did more to mar and destroy and corrupt, out of rage and selfishness and sheer bloodymindedness, than any other being in Arda. He caused more misery. He had worse betrayals.
What better definition for “more evil” than the greater capacity to do evil, accompanied by actual the doing of said evil, and the greater fall from high virtue in the first place? Morgoth pushed the boundaries of destruction and sowing of chaos as far as he could, which was very far indeed.
Go re-read The Silmarillion. I think you’ve forgotten what a heinously corrupt, evil, malicious bastard Morgoth was.
I considered the Anti-Monitor, but since he actually received personal power from destroying positive-matter universes, his motivation is some sort of physical pleasure. I chose Thanos because he did it for some twisted sense of love that’s all in his head, it seems more evil to me.
Honestly, I have to argue against Medea. She was wronged. She fell in love with Jason, threw in her lot with him, helped him gain the golden fleece, suffering herself with a birds foot, gives him two beautiful children and so he dumps her and things he is going to keep custody of the children? Killing them was not unprovoked, which is the mark of true evil.
Otha and Azash from The Sapphire Rose are much worse. They delight in the perverse, and not in a good way. After reading about the rites they insisted on, The Divinci Codes secret rite made me laugh. I could not even see why the heroine was upset. Hey, no one was being sliced up and eaten, what is your problem?
Most definitely. Sauron was Morgoth’s lieutenant and eventually wanted to succeed him, but as awful as he was, he was just a pale shadow of his big bad boss.
