Nowhere and Back Again: Barad-dûr (Part 1) (Patreon)

Here I discuss Sauron's characterization to contextualize Barad-dûr.

Names: Barad-dûr (Sindarin: “dark tower”), Lugbúrz (Black Speech: “dark fortress”), Taras Lúna (Quenya: “dark tower”), Lúnaturco (Quenya: “Dark Stronghold”)

Description: a gargantuan fortress near the Ered Lithui (Ash Mountains), on the northern Plateau of Gorgoroth in Mordor, approximately 30 miles east of Mount Doom. Our trek has led us across Gorgoroth, an arid but fiery wasteland choked with ash and cinders. Built as a revival of the spirit of Morgoth, the primeval force of caprice and destruction in Middle-earth, Barad-dûr is a morass of towers and pits, perched in the heart of Gorgoroth, itself a throne for the Eye of Sauron, which surveys the world around it. One of Tolkien’s most iconic creations, it serves as an indomitable paean to Sauron’s power and the architectural body of Sauron himself in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy.

An often-observed aspect of Sauron is that while he’s The Lord of the Rings’ titular character and antagonist, he is a functionally invisible figure. He lacks a consistent physical body, has no dialogue, is only seen in characters’ visions or through great distances, and can hardly be said to be a character so much as a cipher of Middle-earth’s iniquities and caprice. For all intents and purposes, Sauron is cipher rather than a person, defined by his presence alone, having long abjected personhood to incarnate as a shapeless mass of power and domination, extant only for the decadent excesses of power and kept alive purely through those trappings.

The details of this are predictably vague. Tolkien, a more esoteric writer than his reputation would suggest, is reticent on the nuances of whether Sauron has a physical incarnation. The perennially unfinished mythology of Middle-earth offers conflicting accounts of Sauron’s body. In the Akallabêth, The Silmarillion’s myth of the fall of Númenor, the great kingdom of Men, Sauron is said to lost his primal holy form and constructed his own visage in Mordor, like a terrifying cherub going through a hardcore punk phase:

But Sauron was not of mortal flesh, and though he was robbed now of that shape in which he had wrought so great an evil, so that he could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men, yet his spirit arose out of the deep and passed as a shadow and a black wind over the sea, and came back to Middle-earth and to Mordor that was his home. There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dûr, and dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise; and the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure.

In “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age”, Tolkien provides a similar, if even more abstract account of Sauron’s physical form:

[In Mordor] now [Sauron] brooded in the dark, until he had wrought for himself a new shape; and it was terrible, for his fair semblance had departed for ever when he was cast into the abyss at the drowning of Númenor. He took up again the great Ring and clothed himself in power; and the malice of the Eye of Sauron few even of the great among Elves and Men could endure.

Tolkien’s portrait of Sauron amounts to departure from material personhood. What identity he has left is fragments, obviated and consumed by avarice and sheer hunger for power. Like the Nazgûl after him, his primal identity vanishes as he erases it bit by bit.

This narrative of disappearance comes to a head with Sauron’s ostensible death at the hands of Isildur, when Sauron loses the One Ring, at which time he “forsook his body, and his spirit fled far away and hid in waste places; and he took no visible shape gain for many long years.” As he “let a great part of his owner former power” manifest in the Ring, it could be said that the Ring is Sauron’s body, serving as a great part of his physical form. In a frankly gut-busting letter to Catholic bookstore owner Peter Hastings in which Tolkien castigates Hastings for taking The Lord of the Rings too seriously, Tolkien elaborates on his theodicy as expressed through Sauron:

“...At the beginning of the Second Age [Sauron] was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape — and was indeed not wholly evil, not unless all reformers who want to hurry up with ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganization’ are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up.

Threats to the natural law make up the core of Tolkien’s theodicy. Morgoth’s original sin was throwing off the creator Ilúvatar’s genesis song by introducing harsh noise into the mix. Yet Sauron’s manifestation is sheer power, a mass of towers and military assaults and political allegiances. He takes the trappings of royalty and power for himself with none of the holiness of, say, Aragorn or Théoden. As a great lord of Middle-earth, Sauron fills the same role as the Lords of Men. Structurally, he possesses power and strives to secure it, merely doing so from a cultural position diegetically opposed to that of Gondor. Just as importantly, he appears to have some husk of a body, as Gollum seems to infer to Frodo:

‘It was Isildur who cut off the finger of the Enemy’ [said Frodo]. ‘Yes, He has only four on the Black Hand, but they are enough,’ said Gollum shuddering.

Gollum’s testimony to Sauron’s form only hints at Sauron’s physical nature, but it’s enough to suggest that Sauron is a husk of his former self, retaining some vestige of his previous form until his spirit is blown away when Gollum destroys the One Ring. Gollum is the only visible character in The Lord of the Rings who’s seen the interior of Sauron’s Dark Tower. In a way, Gollum is the character closest to Sauron, having worn his Ring for centuries and been reduced to a husk of his former self.