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Originally Posted by Skip
Well, one thing about LotR and TH is that we never get to see the bad guys succeed with anything. This isn't the case in CoH or the Silm, where it's the baddies that stand strong and united while the good guys quibble and fight amongst themselves and ultimately fail. I suppose it has something to do with the format of storytelling, the first two being fairy-tales, the latter epics.
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Originally Posted by Lal
But then how Sauron works as an enemy I think is by the things which he does and causes. We see Orcs, Balrogs, Fell Beasts, Ringwraiths, Trolls, and of course, the effects of those Rings. Sauron in that respect does not need a 'face'. Like many other evils that have ridden the psyches of this world (fears of reds under the bed, terrorists, bogeymen in the wardrobe, global warming etc) we don't always need a face, it's enough to be scared witless by possibility and our own fears eating us up.
In LotR, he's almost become so evil that he doesn't even need to be seen any more. Now that's real evil power!
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I think you are hitting the nail right to the head here!
The evil principle introduced metaphorically under the name of Sauron couldn't be "meaty" or "juicy". It would have to be formless and behind the curtains so that we only meet his minions. And maybe the prof. was thinking like that when he wrote the LotR? It sounds plausible indeed - until someone with the "letters" comes forwards and proves me just downright wrong...
But when he was writing the Silm he realised that he could not keep up with that allegory of evil as such as there was Melkor and all that "actual history" there making Sauron more like a minion himself than the Real Thing. So he had to write Sauron as a personality that fitted the overall history and took his place there?
Or whatever the order of these writings are...
But what bugs me - and even if I didn't think of this explicitly yesterday when I opened this thread - it feels like Melkor in the Silm is much more flesh and blood even if he should be the embodiment of all evil if anyone is (or to be more exact: the abstraction, the concept of evil itself looked at from the point of view of the "fallen angel" legend). But Sauron as his minion feels like a great abstract principle more than flesh and blood in the LotR... and still fits his role as a "meaty character" in the Silm.