Sauron is the evil principle in the LotR.
But as evil principles go, he's pretty tasteless and formless (
). A bit dull one indeed. There's no personality, no great integral problems, traits or characteristics. Just the evil principle. Abstract and lacking of any believable or interesting persona or individual identity.
But in the Silmarillion he he comes more alive, more interesting and somewhat contradictory - which I always regard as a mark of a believable character.
One may call him the deceiver in the LotR, but he
is a deceiver only in the Silm. In the LotR he's just the faceless bad while in the Silm he's a poet, a certain sweet-talker who needed to put everything at stake; a smith unparalleled, a subordinate gaining power living alongside his master all those millenia, one who needed to flee away only to take revenge for his cause...
Is it just that these are written afterwards and the Sauron of the LotR is just the immature and incomplete version of the Sauron to whom Tolkien finally had time to invest and think about later?
What say you?