Earlier this year, as I was trolling The Lord of the Rings for a paper I was writing, I came across this moment in “The Taming of Smeagol.” It reminded me of how deeply frightening I found the novel, and what a capable horror writer Tolkien would have made. It’s a subtle type of horror, one that settles in and gnaws at you quietly, and it follows Frodo more closely than any other character. Perhaps understandably: Frodo is the Ring-bearer, carrying some displaced and literally objectified portion of Sauron’s actual being around his neck. And it follows Gollum…for a similar reason:
He got up and clenched his long hand into a bony fleshless knot, shaking it towards the East. ‘We won’t!’ he cried. ‘Not for you.’ Then he collapsed again. ‘Gollum, gollum,’ he whimpered with his face to the ground. ‘Don’t look at us! Go away! Go to sleep!’
‘He will not go away or go to sleep at your command, Sméagol,’ said Frodo. ‘But if you really wish to be free of him again, then you must help me. And that I fear means finding us a path towards him. But you need not go all the way, not beyond the gates of his land.’
Gollum sat up again and looked at him under his eyelids. ‘He’s over there,’ he cackled. ‘Always there. Orcs will take you all the way. Easy to find Orcs east of the River. Don’t ask Sméagol. Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away long ago. They took his Precious, and he’s lost now.’
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, “The Taming of Smeagol”
Gollum is caught in a vice, crushed between the ancient, never-lifting weight of lust for the Ring and the torture of his belief that he can never escape the gaze of the Eye. He is like those deprived of darkness, deprived of sleep, or deprived of privacy (“thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shriveled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye”).
Sauron, of course, cannot literally see Gollum here. But for Gollum (who has had the misfortune of experiencing Sauron both via the Ring and in person) Sauron—the nameless “He”—is always there. This may not be literally true: “His” gaze both is and isn’t; Sauron may not literally be able to see Gollum, but what difference does that make to Gollum, so long as Gollum believes he can?
[Frodo] claims the Ring, and the reader is given the first real glimpse into the tower at the center of the panopticon, observing the observer. Suddenly, the entire panoptic mechanism breaks down, the Eye is withdrawn and Sauron’s armies falter.
That Sauron’s Eye and Sauron’s Tower might be likened to Bentham’s Panopticon is a road that has been tread1. The oppression of the possibility of his gaze is but one manifestation of the diffuse, continent-wide reach of his influence and the many tactics and policies of his reign of terror, some of it real and some of it just smoke and mirrors meant to frighten and intimidate (“His arm has grown long”—even the fellowship is unsure if the weather on Caradhras is his doing).
How many times does the narrator explicitly enter into Sauron’s present perspective, giving us certainty about where that gaze actually lies in the moment and what it is that Sauron really knows? It’s been an embarrassingly long time since my last full reread, but I can’t think of a moment until the end when Frodo, at last overcome, turns, metaphorically speaking, towards the Eye. He claims the Ring, and the reader is given the first real glimpse into the tower at the center of the panopticon, observing the observer. Suddenly, the entire panoptic mechanism breaks down, the Eye is withdrawn and Sauron’s armies falter.
When that moment comes and we watch Sauron figure it all out (far, far too late) all the weight of all those thousands of years of planning, all those schemes, all the force of an oppressive and smothering will spread thinly across the face of Middle-earth, all of it inverts, like a mountain suddenly turned upside down, and every last bit of that weight is suddenly balanced on its point on Frodo, poor Frodo, who made it as far as anyone ever conceivably could, but ended up right back where he started: unable to throw that Ring into the fire. But then Providence intervenes, and the reader at last knows exactly what it is that Sauron (hidden and obscured as an individual through the whole of a book that’s named after him) watches from afar: the last moments of his own Fall, down into the fire.
For those drawn into the deadly spiral of desire and despair that is having borne the Ring, Sauron indeed becomes the axis of the whole world, fittingly enclosed high in his tower, a north to which their internal compass will always point.
Is Sauron’s greatest weapon how he can change the perception people have of the world, of themselves, of each other? It’s a fitting skill for a sorcerer, a necromancer, a seducer. The most potent example of its use may be retained for the Ringbearers. For those drawn into the deadly spiral of desire and despair that is having borne the Ring, Sauron indeed becomes the axis of the whole world, fittingly enclosed high in his tower, a north to which their internal compass will always point.
Talk about remaking the world in your image.
I found this entire dynamic so deeply horrifying that not long after my first read of The Lord of the Rings I had what is still one of the most vivid dreams I have ever had. I don’t remember why, but I was attempting to sneak into the Dark Tower. The logic of the dream (whatever there may have been) is long gone, but I still remember the assault it mounted on my senses and my emotions: the sights, the sounds, the cold of the stone floor, and the pulsing, smothering sense of utter dread from somewhere high above me. And that was just it: like Gollum, I knew. I could feel that suffocating, sickening, deadening presence. I could have, If I wasn’t careful, like the needle of a compass, turned without thinking towards the Eye.
Notes
- Garrett Van Curen’s essay “Scouring the Shire: Panoptic Power and Community Healing in Foucault’s ‘Panopticism’ and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” and Jane Chance’s Mythology of Power both make this connection, as does this 2019 comic from the website Existential Comics. This quote from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish makes the validity of the comparison clear: “Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. […] The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.” — ‘Panopticism’ in Foucault, Michel Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228.
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