LotR Sauron vs. Silm Sauron?

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

So Tolkien had a history in real life of giving names and identities to shapeless horrors....

What is religion but giving names (LotR) and stories (Silm) for different forces & ideas; hopes & fears? Trying to reach the unreachable by uttering it?

[Aiwendil]

Interesting topic! Just to correct one point, though:

Originally Posted by Nogrod

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...

It was actually closer to the other way around. The cunning 'deceiver' Sauron of the Silmarillion is pretty well established in the pre-LotR writings. The first version of the 'Lay of Leithien', written between 1925 and 1931, is, I would say, the first place where Sauron as we know him in the Silmarillion is clearly portrayed.

So if anything, we have Tolkien moving from a vividly characterized villain to a faceless one, rather than the other way around. However, it's worth noting that in the post-LotR material, particularly the extensive revisions to the 'Lay of the Leithien', 'deceiver' Sauron is retained; in other words, post-LotR Sauron is more like pre-LotR Sauron than he is like LotR Sauron.

Given this, I think the differences between his portrayal in LotR and the Silmarillion have more to do with his roles in the respective works than with any re-thinking of the character by Tolkien.

[Morthoron]

Well, the faceless Sauron of LotR is purposeful by Tolkien, as the 'Great Eye' description and the 'Mouth of Sauron' are indicative of the facelessness and impersonalized abstraction of the Dark Lord. This is perhaps Tolkien's manner of showing the diminution of the heroes of LotR in comparison to Sauron himself.

The heroes directly involved in the conflict, such as Aragorn and Gandalf (and even more so the Hobbits), are no longer on par with Sauron, or at least the egoistic Dark Lord feels he no longer needs to meet his foes face-to-face; whereas, there was a danger imminent in previous encounters (with Gil-Galad and Elendil, Pharazon, Huan and Finrod, for instance), that either precluded intermediaries from involvement or required direct intervention on Sauron's part.

In his megalomania (for I believe Sauron had become megalomaniacal, as opposed to over-confident or conceited, as those persons with megalomania also worry, mistrust and suffer paranoia), Sauron would not deign to meet in combat these 3rd Age has-beens and never-wases; instead, he imbues the WitchKing and Nazgul with powers necessary to marshall his troops, and he trots out the Mouth of Sauron to treat with sarcasm and disrespect the little lords of Gondor and their toy army at the Morannon.

By the end of the 3rd Age, Sauron has become a living symbol of incarnate evil, godlike in power and unapproachable. A symbol, not a personification.

[Lalwendë]

Morthoron has given me a thought there with that good post. If you think about what Tolkien was trying to say about Totalitarianism with Lord of the Rings, then it makes sense that Sauron is 'faceless' as he is indeed a virtually symbolic evil figure.

If you contrast him with other megalomaniacs, both real and fictional, he stands up well against them, being the kind of leader who instead sends his henchmen out to be his 'public face' while he hides in Barad-Dur acting as master of puppets.

Like Big Brother in 1984 we don't need to 'meet' him as readers, we just need to know he is there watching the protagonists; and like Hitler he has no need to go onto the battlefield as he has his untermenschen to do that. Modern monsters do not show their faces, they just need to be an 'icon', that is more than enough to scare everyone into submission. Taking this argument to its extreme edge, you could say that Sauron is the best 'brand name' in Middle-earth; instead of golden arches he has a golden ring, and instead of a little tick, he has an 'eye'...

[radagastly]

Origianlly posted by Nogrod:

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?

Actually, the Sauron of "The Sil'" pre-dates the Sauron of "The Lord of the Rings." Tolkien began to write "The Simarillion" back in the twenties! I think that the answer, at least in this case, lies in the fact that Tolkien wanted to specifically obscure the evil force, in order to make it generic. Any personality he may have been tempted to add was deleted in early drafts to make Sauron deliberately a 'force' instead of a villain. If you give him a personality, he becomes a villain, rather than a force for evil. "The Lord of the Rings" was 'deliberately Catholic, in the revision.' As much as he claimed to hate allegory, he was creating a miracle play, a medieval allegory anyway. After all, he was a teacher. What better way to get faceless pupils (readers, out in the world) to actually think about his work, rather than just read it as a great adventure? Clearly, he had a greater purpose than just telling a wonderful story, or else his work would have been just as obscured by 'Harry Potter' as 'Harry Potter' has been recently obscured by the "Twilight" stories. We're all still here because Tolkien's story has more to offer than just a great adventure (not that it's not a great adventure! but it is so much more.)

I'll admit, I would like to see Sauron in person, resplendent with ego and dark doubt, but that would obscure his purpose. 'The Sil' (as published) was written over the couse of sixty-plus years. "The Lord of the Rings" was written specifically for publication, as a single story. It was not even meant as a trilogy. The publisher simply could not afford the amount of paper, after WWII, to print the whole thing at once. The trilogy divisions were artifically imposed by Tolkien out of practical necessity.

I think that Tolkien used the 'device' of the Hobbits' point-of-view to keep Sauron deliberately obscure in order to make him symbolic rather than specific. He clearly knew who Sauron was, after years of thinking and writing about Middle-Earth in terms of 'The Sil'. I feel he very specifically wanted to make the villains with personality just pawns in the greater scheme, like Saruman, or Ted Sandyman. 'Sauron' as a villain was just a symbol, not a character.

Besides, it's scarier when you never see the bad guy. Don't forget, you're two-thirds of the way through the movie 'Jaws" before you ever see the Shark! Even then, it's just glimpses until the climax! Now that's scary!

[Lalwendë]

Another thought....maybe Tolkien chose to make Sauron quite impersonal in Lord of the Rings in order to deliberately avoid readers making analogies with any particular one of the various 20th century dictators? He's more a symbol of totalitarianism than an allegory of any one dictator.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

Another thought....maybe Tolkien chose to make Sauron quite impersonal in Lord of the Rings in order to deliberately avoid readers making analogies with any particular one of the various 20th century dictators? He's more a symbol of totalitarianism than an allegory of any one dictator.

A nice viewpoint indeed!

And one might only add to the 20th century dictators also the idea of the Evil itself which should not be personated or anthropomorphicized - like the principle of good (=God) shouldn't?