On the First Day of Sauron young Tolkien gave to me: three characters who appear in some of Tolkien’s earliest Middle-earth writings (published in the two volumes of The Book of Lost Tales) who bear some resemblance to the villain we know as Sauron: Fankil (a “child” of Melko[r]), Tu (or Tuvo) the Wizard, and Tevildo Prince of Cats.¹

If you’ve seen some of the early Rings of Power cast interviews you might remember Tevildo being mentioned. He’s a fun character, but a nasty one—a minion of Morgoth in the form of a giant black cat who keeps cat thralls of his own through the power imbued in his golden collar (sound familiar?)

Now Tevildo was a mighty cat—the mightiest of all—and possessed of an evil sprite […] and he was in Melko[r]’s constant following; and that cat had all cats subject to him, and he and his subjects were the chasers and getters of meat for Melko’s table… (The Book of Lost Tales Part Two 15)

The character Tevildo doesn’t survive rewrites of the story he appears in: “The Tale of Tinúviel,” the earliest version of the story of Beren and Lúthien. When this prose story is replaced by “The Lay of Leithian,” Tevildo’s role is given to another (in some ways very similar) character: a Lord of Wolves named Thû (or Gorthû)—a cruel, shapeshifting necromancer and powerful sorcerer who is, essentially, Sauron by another name. Since Tevildo is said to be “possessed of an evil sprite” (15), it seems possible that this sprite may have been the bridge between the characters, but the tone of the story changes quite drastically at this point, becoming much darker. Many of Thû’s attributes more closely mirror those of the character Fangli (or Fankil or Fukil), but his name and a few other select attributes tie him instead to Tu/Tuvo The Wizard.

Thû is in one draft called “the Hunter,” but instead of being in charge of hunting meat for Morgoth’s table, he seems to be employed in the hunting of Morgoth’s enemies, particularly Beren and Túrin. He is elsewhere identified as both Morgoth’s “mightiest thane” and also one “whom Morgoth made” (The Shaping of Middle-earth 226) or even as one “bred of evil” (The Lays of Beleriand 302) In the two latter cases he is tied quite closely to Morgoth on a metaphysical level and even conflated with him, a pattern that continues through the 1930s.”

Some say also that Morgoth at whiles secretly as a cloud that cannot be seen or felt, and yet is, and the poison is,2 creeps back surmounting the Walls and visiteth the world; but others say that this is the black shadow of Thû, whom Morgoth made, and who escaped from the Battle Terrible, and dwells in dark places and perverts Men3 to his dreadful allegiance and his foul worship (The Shaping Of Middle-Earth 226-227).

The descriptions of the character Thû show him to be a more powerful and dreadful character than Tevildo was, one with a stronger connection to Morgoth, one who will continue to trouble the world long after Morgoth’s expulsion to the Void—and it is here that we see the seed of the idea that would eventually blossom into future Ages of Middle-earth. Sauron (Thû) is the bridge between Ages in more ways than one, shifting and evolving to accommodate the stories Tolkien wanted to tell, even insinuating himself into stories meant to be unrelated and tying them back together.

Mr Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent Grimm’s fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of [the Silmarillion material] – so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge (Letters 26)

But still by the end of the 1930s there is no hint yet of anything redeeming about Thû, nor yet any overt connection to the Vala Aulë or the characteristics associated with a being in Aulë’s service, such as the knowledge of craftsmanship that might be used to, say, forge Rings of Power.

Sauron’s development was the focus of the paper I gave at last year’s Oxonmoot, an abbreviated diachronic analysis of Sauron across Tolkien’s lifetime where I argued that Sauron is not only a literal shape-shifter, but also a metatextual one! He is shaped for different stories and in different eras by differing amounts of the traits first identified in each of those three characters from The Book of Lost Tales: The Wizard, the Demon, and the Cat.

On the 2nd Day of Sauron John Ronald gave to me: two entirely new Ages of Middle-earth for Sauron to do some catastrophic damage to. The First Age may have ended with Morgoth’s expulsion, but Tolkien kept dreaming up new stories to tell. Luckily, he had a villain waiting in the wings. The last we see of Thû in “The Lay of Leithian” is his defeat by Lúthien and Huan the Hound of Valinor, from whose jaws Thû can’t escape despite shifting his form into that of a serpent, a werewolf (no, not the Lon Chaney kind), and a vampire (not the Bela Lugosi kind either). He yields to Lúthien’s demands (by which she rescues Beren—a spectacular reversal of the “damsel in distress” trope) and flees to the forest of Tar-nu-Fuin, blood dripping from the wound made by Huan’s jaws (remember that part). He broods there for the rest of the First Age. At the same time Tolkien is working on the “Lay” he has started writing The Hobbit.

According to John D. Rateliff, in early drafts of The Hobbit Mirkwood clearly is Taur-nu-Fuin, and “the necromancer” who lives there is explicitly said to have been driven there by Beren and Lúthien: this character is clearly Thû². Meanwhile, Thû is making inroads into other stories, too. Concurrent with The Hobbit, Tolkien starts work on a story called “The Lost Road” about a series of father and son pairs who time travel in dreams, and learn about a deep past in which a great island nation is corrupted and drowned in a great cataclysm. If you’re familiar with the bit of history where Tolkien and Lewis agree that Lewis would write a space travel story—what would become Out of the Silent Planet—while Tolkien would write a time travel story… well, “The Lost Road” is what would have been the time travel story.

According to one draft, Thû “came in the likeness of a great bird to Númenor and preached a message of deliverance [from death], and he prophesied the second coming of Morgoth” (The Lost Road 14). This is one of if not the only time we encounter this kind of evangelistic language in the Legendarium. Combined with the reference to Sauron as a great bird and this reads as nothing so much as casting Sauron as a kind of Satanic subversion of John the Evangelist.³

As in the earlier writings, where Thû is called one “whom Morgoth made,” he and Morgoth are closely joined (and sometimes even conflated) either because Thû is being mistaken for Morgoth’s spirit at work or because he actually may be acting under the force of Morgoth’s will from outside the Walls of the World. The Númenoreans are even said to build the temple explicitly to “Thû-Morgoth” (and not just Morgoth) in one draft. Perhaps by “prophesying” Thû literally is acting as Morgoth’s voice in the world: compare this to The Mouth of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Incidentally, Tolkien will later state in one of his letters that in the late Third Age Sauron claimed to in fact be “Morgoth returned” (Letters 454), another conflation of their identities.

These drafts of the story that would become “Akallabêth” contain some other fascinating elements: the idea that Númenorean long life comes from bathing in the radiance of Valinor⁴ or that the Dúnedain had flying ships which they used to try to reach the Straight Road! The time-travel framing story of “The Lost Road” is soon abandoned, but as drafts progress to a period around 1936 (possibly concurrent with the very first writing on “the sequel to The Hobbit”) Thû at last is renamed “Sauron,” and he’s about to shift shape again to become the Lord of the Rings.

On the 3rd Day of Sauron Allen & Unwin gave to me: my single favorite novel, a book named after its antagonist even if he never actually appears in it—or does he? Writing officially began in 1937 and the story quickly darkened such that “even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge” (Letters 246).

During or just before the writing of The Lord of the Rings, Sauron receives what appears to be a new origin story (and with it the beginnings of yet another change in metatextual form), which Tolkien notes by scribbling the following note in the margins of “the earliest Silmarillion” manuscript: “Sauron his [Morgoth’s] servant in Valinor whom he suborned” (The Shaping of Middle-earth 152). Where Thû in “Leithien” and the early Númenor texts was characterized as always and wholly terrible, and as perhaps even a creation of Melkor, Sauron is not. In early drafts of “The Council of Elrond,” we see the following: “nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so” (The Return of the Shadow 403) and in 1951 he describes Sauron to Milton Waldman thusly:

“[Sauron] was a being of Valinor perverted to the service of the Enemy… He repents in fear when the First Enemy is utterly defeated, but in the end does not […] return to the judgement of the gods. He lingers in Middle-earth… Very slowly, beginning with fair motives: the reorganising and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-earth, ‘neglected by the gods’, he becomes a reincarnation of Evil, and a thing lusting for Complete Power—and so consumed ever more fiercely with hate…” (Letters 151).

This feels like a more interesting character than the one “whom Morgoth made” or “bred of evil,” particularly if he spent time in Valinor before he was “suborned.”

On the 4th Day of Sauron The Professor gave to me: a fuller account of Sauron’s massive Númenorean misinformation campaign (including his foray into flat earth conspiracy theories).

While working on The Lord of the Rings, during the period of 1945–1946, Tolkien began writing a new version of “The Fall of Númenor” called “The Drowning of Anadûnê” and “The Notion Club Papers,” a new frame story which would replace the fathers and sons of “The Lost Road.”

“The Notion Club Papers” is, to put it mildly, simply and wonderfully bonkers, and follows the members of an Oxford discussion group (with allusions to the real life Inklings) who, in the 1980s, start sharing experiences of lucid dreams about Númenor and the Drowning. “The Notion Club Papers” was never finished, but the innermost tale of Númenor would continue to develop as “Akallabêth,” the story as published in The Silmarillion. Many of the most memorable moments from “Akallabêth” already appear: Pharazôn’s sailing to Middle-earth to challenge Sauron who submits guilefully as a captive and Sauron’s elaborate misinformation campaign that, in this version, even includes him spreading flat-earther rhetoric against the teaching of the Elves that the world is, in fact, round.⁵ As always Sauron doesn’t waste any time getting what he wants:

Yet such was the cunning of [Sauron’s] mind, and the strength of his hidden will, that ere three years were passed he had become closest to the secret counsels of the King; for flattery sweet as honey was ever on his tongue and knowledge he had of many things yet unrevealed to Men. And seeing the favour that he had of their lord, all the counsellors, save Aphanuzîr alone, began to fawn upon him. Then slowly a change came over the land (Sauron Defeated 390).

What’s funny is that the Rings are never mentioned. One of my favorite things here, in light of the existence of Rings of Power already in writing at this time, is that the thing that Ar-Pharazôn wants more than any other—the get-out-of-death-free card—is something that this version of Sauron (the one being written during the 1940s) could, in a twisted sense, have given him. But he doesn’t.

The elongated existence (“butter scraped across too much bread”) of the Ringwraiths is ultimately nothing to be envious of, but Ar-Pharazôn doesn’t seem like a wise enough person to understand that. This absence may ultimately be an artifact of the creative process (when the story of Númenor was was first conceived there of course were no Rings of Power) or it may be the result of the Númenor tales of the 1940s being understood to be a Mannish tradition, written without knowledge of the Ring. But I’ve long thought the fact that Sauron doesn’t give one of the Seven or Nine to Ar-Pharazôn is a happy accident, a twisted irony that makes its villain somehow even more cruel (as if that were possible).

On the 5th Day of Sauron the Dark Lord gave to me: 20 Magic Rings! Let’s talk about Sauron, Galadriel, and the surprising number of character traits they have in common (and one they don’t). Galadriel has several backstories that attempt to incorporate her into the Legendarium.⁶ The largest differences between these backstories pertain to if, or in what way, or to what degree she participates in the Kinslaying, where she meets Celeborn, and her reason for refusing the summons to return to Valinor. Nearly all of these backstories paint a picture of a figure who, even at her most blameless and Marian, has some striking similarities to Sauron. Or at least the Sauron of the early 1950s and beyond, when Tolkien altered and expanded on both his backstory and his motives.

By this time period Sauron is conceived as originally a Maia under the tutelage of Aulë, a fitting origin for a being now responsible for crafting the One Ring and helping to craft most of the Rings of Power. As a particularly clever and powerful Noldo, Galadriel was also Aulë’s pupil. Sauron and Galadriel also both “defected” from under the Valar’s authority because they had their own ideas for how to order the world. Galadriel, we are told, “had dreams of far lands and dominions that might be her own to order as she would without tutelage” (The People’s of Middle-earth 478). Meanwhile Sauron’s “original desire for ‘order’ had really envisaged the good estate (especially physical well-being) of his ‘subjects’” (Morgoth’s Ring 471) and “[i]t had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall, and of his relapse) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction…” (396). Both Sauron and Galadriel are described as proud, and both refused a summons to return to Valinor at the beginning of the Second Age—Sauron because he was ashamed and too proud to become a penitent without the power he had enjoyed as Morgoth’s second-in-command and Galadriel (in all but her last and most Marian incarnation) “proudly refused forgiveness or permission to return” (Letters 407) We also know she had “felt confined in the tutelage of Aman” (Unfinished Tales 223).

Both Sauron and Galadriel are associated with “seeing”—Galadriel from her mirror and Sauron from his tower—and even “exposing” or “reading” people’s thoughts. They seem to war with each other, mind to mind, from across the leagues that separate Lothlórien from Mordor. In this Galadriel echoes Melian’s role in defending her realm of Doriath against Sauron from afar. This is fitting as Galadriel was Melian’s pupil and this echoing up and down scales (like the prose’s movement up and down registers) appears often in the Legendarium. But Galadriel and Melian both have something in common with Sauron. Melian’s Sindarin name, Melyanna, means “Dear Gift.” When Sauron comes to Eregion it is as Annatar (“Lord of Gifts”). And When Galadriel sends off the Fellowship, she does it with gift-giving.

Galadriel was also calculating and capable of viewing people, however much she might love and honor them as individuals, as parts in her plans: “She looked upon the Dwarves also with the eye of a commander, seeing in them the finest warriors to pit against the Orcs” (Unfinished Tales 226) Note both the parallels between Dwarves and Orcs as well as the parallel with Sauron’s choice to engage the Elves of Eregion as part of his “reform” and “restructuring” plans (however benevolent or malevolent we might imagine them to have been) to create the Rings of Power. Unlike Galadriel and Sauron, Melian is never described as desiring rule—for its own sake or otherwise.⁷ Galadriel, however, is explicitly interested in rule, and it’s during the Second Age when the Rings are being created that the most dramatic tension between who Galadriel thinks she is and wants to be and who she might become if she is not careful has the opportunity to shine. Unlike Sauron, she will ultimately reject her opportunity to become a Dark Lord when Frodo offers her the Ring, but it’s interesting to consider what she might have done had the opportunity arisen before she has had the time to grow wiser.

As we now know, The Rings of Power seems to have identified and taken up some of these parallels (if not others) into their story-building. Whether their choices have worked is a matter of contention, not all of it based on differing critiques made in good faith. Perhaps in Season two we will see more of Galadriel’s desire for rule rather than what appears to be characterized more as a desire for revenge.⁸

On the Sixth Day of Sauron, Tolkien gave to me: a conundrum about bleeding throats and missing fingers—remember on Day Two when Sauron, defeated by Luthien and Huan, flew off in the shape of a vampire with a wound dripping blood from his neck? Why is that? He’s a shapeshifter. He’s just transformed at least twice and at least one of those transformations is explicitly after he has escaped Huan’s jaws, but he can’t seem to transform away the wound. This won’t be the only time this will happen to Sauron. When the Ring is cut from his finger by Isildur at the end of the Last Alliance, Sauron will never be able to regrow it. As Gollum tells us in The Two Towers: “He has only four on the Black Hand, but they are enough” (The Lord of the Rings 641).

Morgoth will face a similar dilemma, but one with what may be slightly different rules. After his escape with the Silmarils he is never able to change his form again. Nor is he able to grow a new one, and this leads to his fearing his own “death” should his body ever be killed. While Sauron loses the ability to appear fair again after his body’s destruction during Akallabêth, he does not lose the ability to rebuild his body full stop, as evidenced by the fact that he does it twice more, though each time seems to drain more of his inherent potency. He simply cannot regrow the finger that was cut off—we might ask whether this means Sauron’s throat never fully healed either (and this has certainly been a point of speculation within fandom). Why the difference?

Valar and Maiar experience a unique type of link between their idea of their form and what their form, in fact, is. They are not embodied by nature, but the forms they take reflect their understandings of themselves, their nature and purpose, and their understanding of the Children of Eru.

During his revision of his Legendarium’s metaphysics, Tolkien eventually decides that certain activities that make use of an Ainu’s body within Eä cause it to become “locked” in a certain form. Melian’s choice to bear a child “locks” her in her physical form, but eating and drinking can do it, too, given repetition and time. Morgoth became “locked” in his form because of how he distributed his being across Arda in an effort to control or overwrite its very matter. But again, Sauron is explicitly not fully locked in this way. Some aspect of this difference may lie in the continuing existence of the Ring, but Morgoth had a Ring of sorts, too (we’ll get back to that). In a paper I presented earlier this year at ICMS Kalamazoo I delved into this topic via the lens of disability theory, and particularly “bodyminds” as elaborated by Margaret Price, to suggest that these wounds could be understood as the impairment of self-image (as a result of mental fixation) which is then reflected in the body.

On the 7th Day of Sauron, Morgoth gave to me: a Ring the size of a planet. It’s time to talk about “the Melkor ingredient” in matter and Sauron literally using bits of his old boss to craft the One Ring. Melkor had a Ring, too—except his was the whole of Arda. In an essay called “Notes on Motives in The Silmarillion,” published in The History of Middle-earth vol X: Morgoth’s Ring, Tolkien examines the metaphysics of Melkor’s effect on Arda and compares Morgoth’s motives to those of Sauron.

Melkor incarnated himself (as Morgoth) permanently. He did this so as to control the hroa, the ‘flesh’ or physical matter, of Arda. He attempted to identify himself with it. A vaster, and more perilous, procedure, though of similar sort to the operation of Sauron with the Rings. Thus, outside the Blessed Realm, all matter was likely to have a Melkor ingredient, and those who had bodies [had a tendency] towards Melkor: they were none of them wholly free of him in their incarnate form, and their bodies had an effect upon their spirits.

But in this way Morgoth lost (or exchanged, or transmuted) the greater part of his original angelic powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world. […] Morgoth’s vast power was disseminated. The whole of Middle-earth was Morgoth’s Ring (Morgoth’s Ring 400).

We could interpret this as Tolkien’s attempt to explain both moral and natural evil within Eä with a G-rated analog to the Augustinian take on Original Sin.⁹ Moral evil exists because the matter that makes up the bodies of the incarnates is “tainted” (literally) with Morgoth. Natural evil exists because Melkor both sang discord into the Theme used to instantiate Eä and because he has literally tainted the matter of Eä. This last part accounts for the mechanics of how the One Ring functions. The “Melkor ingredient” is especially strong in gold, the material of the Ring.

Sauron’s power was not […] in gold as such, but in a particular form or shape made of a particular portion of total gold. […] It was this Morgoth-element in matter, indeed, which was a prerequisite for such magic and other evils as Sauron practised with it and upon it (400).

It was by interfacing with this distributed network of Melkor’s incarnate Being that Sauron is able to create the system of domination that are the Rings. Mixing his own Being in the Ring with that of Melkor might also account for some of Sauron’s late 2nd and 3rd Age choices (more on that later).

On the 8th Day of Sauron, Christopher gave to me: my favorite vol of The History of Middle-earth, its Sauron character analysis, and the association between order and perfection. In the “On Motives” essay Tolkien describes Morgoth as desiring to dominate the physical material of Arda—to have what he seems to have wanted during Ainulindalë: sole and total authorship of reality, unshared with (or unencumbered by) any other mind or will. And barring that, total annihilation of anything that was not fundamentally him or his—something which was, as Tolkien points out, not actually possible. In contrast he describes Sauron as desiring to dominate not the physical matter of Arda but the wills of its inhabitants.

Day Five included a quick look at Sauron’s love of “order and coordination” as well as what Tolkien states is one of his motives during the early Second Age: ensuring the (economic) good estate of his subjects (Morgoth’s Ring 471). His desire to “order the world” to achieve this must have, naturally, bumped up against two problems: first, that other wills have different ideas about what constitutes their “good estate,” different from both Sauron’s idea & from each other’s, creating waste and preventing easy coordination. Second, Arda itself is highly disordered and its natural processes promote disorder through entropy. Hence, Sauron’s desires for Arda are fundamentally at odds with the nature of what Tolkien called “Arda Marred”: Arda as based on the Music that contains Melkor’s discord. I’d suggest the Arda Sauron wishes to create more closely resembles what Tolkien calls “Arda Unmarred.”

“Arda Unmarred did not actually exist, but remained in thought—Arda […] without the effects of Melkor becoming evil; but is the source from which all ideas of order and perfection are derived” (405).

Arda as Platonic ideal. Note the link between order and perfection.

The alternative to Arda Unmarred—and the hoped-for end to “Arda Marred”—is “Arda Healed” which is “the completion of the Tale of Arda which has taken up all the deeds of Melkor, but must according to the promise of Ilúvatar be seen to be good…” (405). Compare this description of “Arda Healed” to Tolkien’s comment that Sauron “deluded himself with the notion that […] Eru had simply abandoned Eä, or at any rate Arda, and would not concern himself with it any more” (397). Put together, what does that suggest about his motives? And consider: so many of Tolkien’s villains might be described as embodiments of the ways in which fundamentally good creative impulses can go wrong. Fëanor is possessive and hoards his creations. Melkor refuses the possibility of collaboration. What about Sauron? Tolkien suggests that his evil arose “from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others” (Letters 146). Perhaps in Sauron we can speculate a Fall that resulted from a struggle with the impossible task of producing order (understood as perfection). Essentially, a struggle with the Problem of Evil, itself: a struggle to “see as good” a fully unorderable Arda Marred while it is in the process of becoming an Arda Healed, a struggle lost to the desire for a (false) shortcut to this order via power and domination (The Machine). This is a far different kind of villain than Thû the Lord of Wolves.

This articulation and evolution of the concepts of Arda Marred, Unmarred, and Healed is also, I think, an interesting choice coming from an author who appears to have struggled with perfectionism and, I believe, was working through his own struggle with theodicy in the process of his very writing. It is this topic that formed the argument of the paper I presented at the Mythopoeic Society Online Midsummer Seminar in 2023, titled “Through Sauron’s Eye.”

On the 9th Day of Sauron, Tolkien gave to me: Sauron the conlanger (and calligraphy enthusiast?)—a look at Sauron’s attempt to “ordering reality” through language.

At some point during or after the writing of The Lord of the Rings, Sauron’s defection to Melkor is moved backwards in time from the Years of the Trees in Valinor to some time before the fall of Utumno. Perhaps for practical purposes: someone has to man Angband while Melkor is gone, after all. It also gives Sauron the opportunity to take part in more of Morgoth’s plans. As it says in The Silmarillion “in all the deeds of Melkor the Morgoth upon Arda, in his vast works and in the deceits of his cunning, Sauron had a part…” (The Silmarillion 2023), most of which works were completed before Melkor’s imprisonment in Valinor.

If Sauron’s “virtues” were in order and coordination, we can speculate that even the most horrible of this work involved these as its ends. In an issue of the journal Vinyar Tengwar, Melkor is said to have made a language for his servants. Sauron likewise created the Black Speech. “It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him, but he failed in that purpose” (The Lord of the Rings 1131). The Black Speech then was meant to function as a kind of lingua franca. Sauron was invested in becoming the god-king of the whole of the world by the end of the Second Age, suggesting that the Black Speech would have been everyone’s language. Between this and Sauron’s impossibly tall Dark Tower, images of Babel come to mind.

A single being creating a language from scratch imposes an order on the external world that is different than the order that would arise organically during natural language development—it has the effect of overlaying Sauron’s own understanding of the world on his subjects. These are frightening implications. But least we can say Sauron’s handwriting was nice: the Ring inscription is, afterall, his work—see image of Tolkien drafting possibilities of what the Ring inscription would look like in 1953.

A look at Sauron’s “great works” of the Second Age, including the Black Speech, was a part of the paper I presented at IMC Leeds in July of this year.

On the 10th Day of Sauron, Éomer gave to me: a funny comment about Sauron’s brand image and questions about just who (if anyone) Sauron is by the end of the Third Age. Sauron’s presence is all over The Lord of the Rings (“his arm has grown long”), and it’s a presence that is carefully crafted—he has a brand. But he’s practically a parody of a villain sometimes. His own tower’s name in Black Speech actually is “Dark Tower” (“Lugbúrz”). In Mordor Frodo and Sam see “Flies, dun or grey, or black, marked like orcs with a red eye-shaped blotch…” (921). His flies are literally branded! Aragorn tells Legolas and Gimli that Sauron does not allow his servants to use the name “Sauron,” though what name exactly they do use is unclear. When we do hear them speak of him, it’s with metonymy and other evasive forms of address perhaps used to circumnavigate invoking him. Tolkien says in one of his letters that “by the end of the Third Age […] [Sauron] claimed to be Morgoth returned” (Letters 454). This conflation is at least three-fold: the former use of “Morgoth returned,” the use of the name “Grond” for his battering ram, and his aesthetic choices regarding horses. Éomer tells Gimli Sauron sent his orcs to steal their horses, “choosing always the black horses: few of these are now left” (436). This is an event that recalls an abandoned plot point from The Book of Lost Tales Part One, where Melko[r] and his followers in Valinor steal Oromë’s black horses as they escape to the south. Sauron’s growing imitation of his former mater is quite literal.

Sauron, though far changed from Thû, is still a sorcerer and master of crafting images—perhaps most especially the image (or images) of himself. As discussed on Day 7, Melkor diffused his being across Middle-earth in order that he could control it. Sauron splits his being, pouring some of it into the Ring and making of himself an object. He does not spread his being any farther than that, but he does spread his image. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, while located materially at the top of his tower, he interfaces with Middle-earth (and the Reader) almost entirely through underlings, second hand accounts, legends, fear of The Eye. This Sauron is practically a gestalt entity, a negative space giving shape to terror. Meanwhile, those who fall under Sauron’s dominating will all seem to forget their names and lose their unique and diverse identities. The Mouth no longer knows his, I suspect the Nazgûl don’t either. They are extensions of him, in The Mouth’s case right down to his name. The end state of a Sauron who has turned to the domination of the Rings and the overwhelming oppressive force of his empire is the enforced identification of the entire world with him, his idea of perfect order, his language, and thus with his own despairing and degraded point of view.

Sauron as “gestalt entity” is the basis for a paper I have now presented twice: once at Popular Culture Association’s National Conference in 2023 and again for Tolkien @ UVM in 2024.

On the 11^th Day of Sauron, Quenya gave to me: Sauron’s actual, real—no joke—original name and the fact that it means things like “admirable, excellent, and… precious.” In a bundle of linguistic notes dated to between 1959-1960, containing lists of Quenya roots and glosses, and published in the linguistic journal Parma Eldalamberon in 2007, we learn that Sauron’s original name was “Mairon” meaning “The Admirable” (Parma Eldalamberon 17, 181). This comes from the primitive Quenya root MAY- meaning ‘excellent/admirable.’ Related roots include (A)MAY- (‘suitable, useful, proper, serviceable, right’); it’s inverse, PEN- (‘lack’); and MA₃– (‘serve, be of use’ but also ‘handle, manage, control, wield’ and ‘hand’).

Likewise derived from from MAY- are maira (adj: admirable, excellent, precious) and maina (noun: a thing of excellence, a treasure). Alternatively maira (adj: admirable, splendid, sublime. Only of great, august or splendid things). The name Mairon appears to be derived from maira.¹⁰ It’s not hard, however, to see a connection between Mairon and the glosses of the related roots. The association with usefulness makes sense for a being interested in order and efficiency, as does the idea of service, since the word “Maiar” also derives from “maira.” What might that tell us about Mairon himself? Might it be that Mairon, pre-fall, was a kind of exemplar of his order? Most Maiar served under a Vala or were considered their pupils or disciples. If Mairon exemplified this trait, this would go some way to explaining how and why he was so integral to Melkor’s early projects, and the veneration in which he appears to have held Melkor.

“While Morgoth still stood, Sauron […] worked and schemed for another, desiring the triumph of Melkor, whom in the beginning he had adored. He thus was often able to achieve things […] which his master did not or could not complete in the furious haste of his malice” (Morgoth’s Ring 420).

“[Sauron] spoke of Melkor in Melkor’s own terms, as a god, or even as God. This may have been the residue of a state which was in a sense a shadow of good: the ability once in Sauron at least to admire or admit the superiority of a being other than himself” (397).

But what about being admirable or precious? Like the name Melian (Dear Gift) to be admirable implies a relation and a direction to that relation. The “anna” in her Quenya name, Melyanna, (as well as in Annatar) means “gift” but also implies a direction: to or towards. From a giver and to a receiver. To be admirable implies the reverse: from the admirer and towards the admired. What was he admirable for? And to whom was he admirable? What about the fact that, unlike fellow Aulëan maia Curunir, his name has no connection to “devices.” And what about this line from The Fellowship of the Ring, which remained almost completely unchanged from the very first extant draft of this chapter, back when Frodo was called Bingo and the nature of the Ring and Bingo’s quest was still up in the air: “Frodo drew the Ring out of his pocket… It now appeared plain and smooth…. The gold looked very fair and pure, and Frodo thought how rich and beautiful was its colour, how perfect was its roundness. It was an admirable thing and altogether precious” (The Lord of the Rings 60 (emphasis mine))?

I will soon have presented three versions of a paper that examines the name “Mairon” in its context as a marginal note writen as a part of Tolkien’s post The Lord of the Rings revisions to his Legendarium as well as as part of a capsule narrative for Sauron through the lens of literary onomastics.

On the 12th Day of Sauron a list of the things that I hope The Rings of Power gives to me: most of which have to do with Sauron, Galadriel, metaphysics, and moral complexity. Of course, you’ve probably noticed I like Sauron. Not that I’d want to have tea with him or anything—that sounds like a bad idea—but I mean I enjoy him as a character, which is something a lot of people find odd. But villains can be very interesting, especially (I think) their Falls.

Sauron is relatively sparsely sketched relative to the overall effect he has on Middle-earth, and all that negative space is ripe for elaboration. When I learned we were going to get a series about the Second Age my immediate response was roughly half excitement and half trepidation. So much could go wrong! I have strong opinions, and no adaptation has ever truly made me happy. But also so much could go right! What could possibly be a more cataclysmic narrative and set piece than Akallabêth? What could delve into intermingled art-making and tragedy like the forging of the Rings of Power? There’s fertile ground there for moral complexity, romance, horror, adventure, nostalgia, (fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles). But it means allowing someone other than Tolkien write it. Ultimately, I’m less nervous about that than I was with a The Lord of the Rings adaptation, because I accept there is relatively little to go on.

When I first put together this series of tweets, I included the following wishlist for The Rings of Power. With season one in the bag, its clear I got a few of those things, but not others. Some I might still get—that remains to be seen. The show has, for me, been quite the mixed bag. So what did I hope to see at roughly this time two years ago in 2022? And how did season 1 deliver?

1. Wish: A world that holds together with an internal consistency that reflects the richness and solidity of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, that understands the importance of its tone and themes and metaphysics.
   Result: remains to be seen. My main disappointment regarding solidity regard the loose handling of time and place in season one. A careful handling of time, in particular would not only better reflect the sense of narrative craftsmanship of The Lord of the Rings, (which the show clearly wants to mimic) but would also fit better thematically with one of the two primary tales of the Second Age: the forging of the Rings of Power.
2. Wish: An adaptation that doesn’t cheapen the world, or pretend it isn’t dark and full of tragedy; an adaptation that struggles with the Problem of Evil as much as (I believe) the source does, but which also finds the beauty, joy, silliness, and light-heartedness in it as well.
   Result: remains to be seen. So far this tale has not presented much of a “dark age.” Most of the darkest events are of course yet to come, but the majority of the impetus for the creation of the Rings of Power is about the desolation of Middle-earth both on a practical (this is a post-apocalyptic landscape after the War of Wrath with most Men living in “savage” and “desolate” lands) and metaphysical level (Middle-earth is infused with the Morgoth ingredient, causing the Elves to fade at a faster rate than in Valinor). Naturally this ties in with point one above. And, yes, the Elves in The Rings of Power are fading, but how this works in the show is very odd and seems to fly in the face of how this fading works thematically in the Legendarium.
3. Wish: A complex Galadriel—like the one who refused an offer of pardon and wants her own land to rule (not just one that is strong or arrogant or fallible), but who, through however many seasons, grows and matures into someone wiser, first a mirror and then a foil to Sauron.
   Result: I may sound like a broken record, but remains to be seen. So far Galadriel’s arc has sidestepped her desire to rule and order, focused as it has been on her hunt for Sauron. I was not against the hunt for Sauron plot, but so far I’ve had mixed feelings about her characterization in general and her dialogue in several specific episodes. With the introduction of the Three Rings perhaps we may see more of her desire for rule.
4. Wish: An Ost-in-Edhil of hope and light and collaboration, of many peoples coming together as one, a place of art and science and love of knowledge, but not one that can’t be interrogated. What do those who aren’t a part of the Ring project think about it once it begins?
   Result: Certainly not in season one. I know the sudden recasting of Celebrimbor was probably at work here, but this has been one of my greatest dissapointments about season one. Limiting essentially the entire Eregion arc to one season seems far too little time there.
5. Wish: A Númenor that sinks to the depths shown in the Akallabêth. I know being a family friendly show limits what can be portrayed there somewhat, but I hope they do the best they can with the freedom they have. Akallabêth is a deeply grim look at just how awful Men can be.
   Result: Again, remains to be seen, but understandably so, as Númenor’s fall hasn’t played out yet.
6. Wish: A fair and nuanced portrayal of the lands we rarely if ever see in Tolkien’s own texts, those places to the East and South that have their own cultures and peoples and day-to-day struggles. Including the lands that would one day become Mordor.
   Result: This is one that I feel has at least been partly fullfilled. In fact that storylines about the Southlands, Adar and the orcs, and the Harfoots were among those that I found most interesting, maybe because, being new, they weren’t competing with my own ideas of the events involved. I am looking forward to seeing Rhûn this season.
7. Wish: A story that isn’t afraid to take its time. My biggest worry is with the time compression. I understand why it might seem necessary. But the long slow build to the dramatic Fall is one of my favorite things about The Second Age, and it’s a hard thing to lose.
   Result: Definitely not. In fact this may be my biggest complaint with season one. I know that must be an odd thing to hear for those who found some of the pacing too slow.
8. Wish: A chance to see the Second Fall of Sauron play out on screen. I want the whole gamut of who that character has the potential to be. I want the possibility of a redemption that slips away, a road that was almost taken but wasn’t, balanced on the same knife edge as Smeagol. I want TO WANT to see that redemption happen, and when it doesn’t I want to see a Sauron who becomes as fully horrible as Akallabêth shows him to be. I want a show that can make me pity even Sauron the way we are meant to come to pity Smeagol—a pity that saves the world. I want a show brave enough to explore the question of why and how a being who loved order and coordination and genuinely (on his good days) desired to do good by the Children of Eru ended up serving a nihilistic chaos god and committing uncounted horrific acts.
   Result: Mixed. It is possible the flashbacks will fill Sauron’s backstory and motives in a bit, but I fear we have already encountered the entirety of the “repentant” phase which I didn’t find very interesting.
9. Wish: I want it to feel real enough to walk through and yet just 3-degrees-to-the-left-of-that enough to feel like Faerie. I want Recovery, I want Escape, I want Consolation. I want to visit these places again in 15 years and cry when I see them like I do with Hobbiton.
   Result: I did find some of the production design both believably and enchanting (the “interior” shots of Lindon, the wide landscapes), but some of the rest I found artificial (the Harfoot encampment, Armenelos).
10. Wish: I want a show that doesn’t shy away from moral complexity. I don’t want anyone to be able to escape scrutiny. I don’t want a world where people are wholly bad or wholly good. I want everyone in this show to have to grapple with their choices.
    Result: Once again hard to say with four seasons to go, but I do think the Adar plotline is pulling a lot of weight here. I hope it is expanded upon in season two.

1. John Rateliff identified the similarities between Thû and the characters Fangli and Tu/Tuvo in his The History of the Hobbit. ↩︎
2. This, too, is identified in Rateliff’s The History of the Hobbit. ↩︎
3. Mercury Natis also did an excellent reading of Sauron which identified sources for his Akallabêth characterization in various biblical femme fatales. A presentation of that conference paper can be found here: https://youtu.be/dqkMj3PL3oA?si=nBXjWxc_eQXsS4gt ↩︎
4. A particularly interesting development in light of what has been called “Silmithril” in The Rings of Power. While I realize Amazon did not officially have access to the drafts that contain this idea, the parallel is striking. ↩︎
5. The shape and physical nature of Arda is something Tolkien would play around with until late in his life; he even produced an entire “round world” version of his mythos in contrast to that contained in The Silmarillion. ↩︎
6. For a great analysis of Galadriel and her character evolution check out this awesome set of two articles by Megan N Fontenot which traces the two main strands of her backstory through Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth: https://tinyurl.com/2snesryj, https://tinyurl.com/ancxkdvw) ↩︎
7. There are some interesting directions that can be taken as far as an analysis of women’s roles and personalities in the Legendarium, but that’s for another day. ↩︎
8. There are other critiques I could make about the handling of Galadriel, but that is not within the scope of this post. ↩︎
9. That Original Sin is passed from generation to generation through semen. ↩︎
10. This is noted by Helge Fuskganger in his A Name for the Dark Lord: https://ardalambion.net/sauronname.htm. ↩︎

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Works Cited

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• Tolkien, J.R.R., The Book of Lost Tales Part One, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Book of Lost Tales Part Two, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The History of the Hobbit: Mr Baggins and Return to Bag-End, ed. by John D. Rateliff, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2011). Kindle Edition
• — The Lays of Beleriand, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. by Humphrey Carpenter, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Lord of the Rings: One Volume Edition with the Appendices, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Lost Road, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — Parma Eldalamberon vol 17, ed. by Christopher Gilson (The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, 2007).
• — Morgoth’s Ring, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Peoples of Middle-earth, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Return of the Shadow, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — Sauron Defeated, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Shaping of Middle-earth, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — The Silmarillion, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition
• — Unfinished Tales, ed. by Christopher Tolkien, (New York: William Morrow, 2023). Kindle edition