What Sauron Feared

SECTION: The Fear That Built a Tower

Let's start at the end of the First Age, in the wreckage of Beleriand.

Morgoth has been beaten, chained, and tossed out through the Door of Night. The host of the Valar is going home, and Eönwë, the herald of Manwë who led that army, is standing in what's left of the north taking surrenders.

And then...

one of Morgoth's lieutenants walks up and bows.

It's the first thing Tolkien ever tells us about Sauron in the Second Age, and here, his exact words matter.

"And some hold that this was not at first falsely done, but that Sauron in truth repented, if only out of fear, being dismayed by the fall of Morgoth and the great wrath of the Lords of the West."

If only out of fear.

That's the narrator, not a character with an agenda, and the motive he gives us is dread. Sauron bows because he's just seen what happened to somebody stronger than him.

Then Eönwë tells him to sail west and stand judgment in Aman.

But he won't.

"Then Sauron was ashamed, and he was unwilling to return in humiliation and to receive from the Valar a sentence, it might be, of long servitude in proof of his good faith."

So he hides in Middle-earth instead.

The order of those two moves is the pattern for the next six thousand years. Dread gets him to bow, pride gets him to run, and neither one changes what he is. Tolkien said as much in a letter: when Morgoth fell, Sauron abandoned him "but out of fear only," and never went near the Valar again.

So what does that dread look like once he's out there on his own?

Well, it sort of looks like construction.

So let's jump ahead about six hundred years.

Ships start appearing off the coasts of Middle-earth. Númenóreans, the Men the Valar had rewarded with an island and long life, coming ashore to look around. Sauron watches them with a keen eye for four centuries.

Then, around the year one thousand of the Second Age, he acts. Tolkien tells us what he did and why in the same breath: Sauron, alarmed by the growing power of the Númenóreans, chooses Mordor as a land to make into a stronghold. There he begins the building of Barad-dûr.

The arithmetic here is a bit strange. The Dark Tower goes up around the year one thousand, and Ar-Pharazôn's armament doesn't land against him until 3261. He built the most famous fortress in fantasy literature as an answer to sails on a horizon, then waited twenty-two centuries for that reckoning.

The same wariness shows up as a line on a map. In Lindon, in the far west, the Elf-king Gil-galad held the coast and the Grey Havens, and Tolkien writes that "Sauron dared not as yet to pass the Mountains of Ered Luin nor to assail the Havens."

Dared not.

There's a mountain range he won't cross.

Around the year 1200 he tries the soft, sneaky approach. Wearing a fair face and calling himself Annatar, Lord of Gifts, he offers to teach the Elves. Gil-galad refuses to see him. But the smiths of Eregion don't. And that's where the Rings of Power come from.

And when it finally comes to open war, from 1693 to 1700 in the Second Age, the outcome is the one his caution predicted. Tar-Minastir sends a great navy from Númenor to Lindon, Sauron is defeated, and the next year he's driven out of Eriador entirely.

So by the time we reach the famous surrender at Umbar, he isn't guessing about these people. He's already lost to them once, fifteen hundred years earlier, and his own army knows it. Tolkien says the Númenóreans in their prime were so overwhelming that "the servants of Sauron would not withstand them."

For twenty-five centuries you can map Sauron's caution. It's a tower he keeps building and a border he won't cross.

SECTION: The Day He Knelt

Then, in the year thirty-two fifty-five of the Second Age, Ar-Pharazôn the Golden takes the sceptre of Númenor.

He's the twenty-fifth ruler of the line of Elros and the last, and Tolkien calls him the proudest and most powerful of all the Kings, a man for whom nothing less than the kingship of the world would do. Word reaches him that somebody out east is calling himself Lord of the Earth. Ar-Pharazôn decides that title is taken.

Six years later he sails. He lands at Umbar with an armament so large that the countryside empties out ahead of him. Nobody meets him. The orcs are gone. Tolkien is blunt about it:

"Sauron's own servants deserted him."

And then this happens.

"And Sauron came. Even from his mighty tower of Barad-dûr he came, and made no offer of battle."

He walked out of his own fortress, alone, across open ground, to a hill covered in blue and gold and white tents, and knelt to a mortal man. Tolkien gives us the reasoning too. "For he perceived that the power and majesty of the Kings of the Sea surpassed all rumour of them, so that he could not trust even the greatest of his servants to withstand them."

Surpassed all rumour of them — he'd been watching Númenor for two and a half thousand years, he'd lost a war to them already, and in person they were still bigger than his intelligence had said.

There's a version of this scene Tolkien wrote and then cut, printed in the drafts his son published decades later. Sauron's servants fled away, and though Mordor was fortified so strongly that he wasn't worried about a direct assault, "he was in doubt now, and even the Barad-dûr seemed no longer secure." That's draft material and should be treated as draft material. It's also the bluntest thing anyone wrote about what was going on inside him that week.

Bending the knee was the smartest thing he ever did.

The line right after the surrender is this: "And he was crafty, well skilled to gain what he would by subtlety when force might not avail." Ar-Pharazôn, not entirely fooled, decides to carry Sauron home as a hostage, to guarantee the good behaviour of every servant he's left behind. Sauron agrees like a man with no choice.

"To this Sauron assented as one constrained, yet in his secret thought he received it gladly, for it chimed indeed with his desire."

Tolkien summed the whole manoeuvre up later in one gleeful line. Ar-Pharazôn conquered Sauron's terrified subjects, not Sauron. The surrender was voluntary and cunning. He got free transport to Númenor.

And when he sees the place, the reaction is what you'd expect from someone who's just been badly out-matched. He arrives at Armenelos in its glory "and he was astounded; but his heart within was filled the more with envy and hate."

Then he goes to work.

Before three years had passed, the prisoner of war was closest to the secret counsels of the King. And from that chair he spends the next several decades dismantling the most powerful nation of mortal Men that ever existed, from the inside, using nothing but conversation. The annals date the corruption from 3262 to 3310.

Forty-eight years, hostage to architect.

So his reading of the balance of force was right, the surrender was right, and everything he did with it afterwards was right.

There's no cowardice in any of it: when he was frightened, he was usually frightened of the correct thing, and he usually did something clever about it.

Which is what makes the rest of this story so interesting.

SECTION: The Wrong Lesson

Sauron's Númenor operation runs for nearly fifty years, and it works better than anything else Sauron ever attempts. He talks the King out of his own religion, gets the White Tree cut down and burned, and builds a temple at Armenelos with human sacrifice inside it, preaching that Eru doesn't exist and that the real chief of the gods is the one who dwells in the Void.

At one point lightning shears the dome of that temple open with Sauron standing on the pinnacle, and he "defied the lightning and was unharmed; and in that hour men called him a god and did all that he would."

This is not a being who is worried about his future power.

So Ar-Pharazôn builds the Great Armament and sails west to take immortality by force. Manwë lays down the government of Arda and appeals to Ilúvatar directly.

And Eru answers.

He changes the fashion of the world, and a great chasm opens in the sea.

The island goes down. The fleet goes down. Aman is taken out of the physical world altogether, and the world is bent into a sphere so no mortal ship could ever find the way again. Sauron is standing on the island when it happens.

Then Tolkien writes this.

"For Sauron himself was filled with great fear at the wrath of the Valar, and the doom that Eru laid upon sea and land. It was greater far than aught he had looked for, hoping only for the death of the Númenóreans and the defeat of their proud king."

Tolkien is specific about the limit. Sauron wasn't surprised the Númenóreans died. That's what he'd engineered. He was expecting a drowned fleet and a humiliated king. What he wasn't expecting was Eru bending the world.

Right after that sentence come the three laughs. Sauron in his black seat, laughing at Ar-Pharazôn's trumpets, laughing again at the thunder of the storm, laughing a third time at his own thought about a world rid of the Edain, and then taken "in the midst of his mirth" as the temple falls into the abyss. The laughter is real. It also comes one sentence after "filled with great fear," on the same afternoon.

The cost of this was permanent.

Sauron survives, because he isn't mortal flesh, but the body burns off him and his spirit crosses back over the drowned sea as a shadow and a black wind. He could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men. The face he'd used on Ar-Pharazôn and on the smiths of Eregion was gone for good, and his power thereafter was through terror alone.

So what did he learn from it?

The wrong thing. And Tolkien tells us so himself, in an essay published long after his death.

"It would appear that he interpreted the change of the world at the Downfall of Númenor... in this sense: Valar and Elves were removed from effective control, and Men under God's curse and wrath."

From where he was sitting, the referee had walked off the field. The West was sealed away behind a bent world, and mortal Men were unprotected and out of favour. Tolkien finishes the thought a page later: "he had ceased to fear God's action in Arda."

That's the tragedy in miniature. The one occasion his alarm was proportionate to reality, the one time the thing he dreaded turned out exactly as terrible as he thought, he took the lesson backwards. He came out of the Downfall less careful than he went in.

This arrogance costs him almost immediately. He's back in Mordor by thirty-three twenty. A hundred and ten years later he attacks Gondor, takes Minas Ithil and burns the White Tree. Tolkien's verdict on that decision is five words long.

"But Sauron struck too soon."

He struck before his own power was rebuilt, while Gil-galad's had grown the whole time he was away. The Last Alliance forms, he loses the field at Dagorlad in thirty-four thirty-four, and after a seven-year siege, Elendil and Gil-galad die while killing Sauron in thirty-four forty-one. Most of us know this part of the story. It ends with Isildur cutting the Ring off Sauron's hand.

SECTION: The Rival on the Throne

Fast forward another three thousand years.

We're at a council in Rivendell, where Boromir of Gondor makes the suggestion everyone else has already decided against.

Why not use it? "Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy. That is what he most fears, I deem."

"It" is the One Ring.

He's wrong about what to do and completely right about the diagnosis. That is what Sauron feared most. It wasn't paranoia but an accurate reading of a flaw he had engineered into himself.

Tolkien laid the mechanism out in a letter to a publisher in 1951. The One Ring made Sauron enormously powerful, but it did that by putting a large part of his native strength into an object. And objects can be taken.

"Unless some other seized it and became possessed of it. If that happened, the new possessor could, if sufficiently strong and heroic by nature, challenge Sauron, become master of all that he had learned or done since the making of the One Ring, and so overthrow him and usurp his place. This was the essential weakness he had introduced into his situation."

The essential weakness is something he had introduced into his own situation. That's Tolkien in his own voice, not a character guessing. Sauron's nervousness about the Ring surfacing was a correct risk assessment of his own design.

Gandalf says the same thing out in the field. Sitting with the survivors of the Fellowship in Fangorn, working out what the Enemy is thinking, he lands here: "Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place."

It's worth thinking a bit deeper about that worry, because retellings get it backwards. He isn't scared of the Ring. Tolkien was emphatic when a reader asked him: "Sauron would not have feared the Ring! It was his own and under his will." The object was his child. What kept him up at night was the hand it might end up on.

Which is a rational thing to worry about, and Elrond confirms it in the same council. Elrond isn't arguing that the Ring wouldn't work — he's arguing that it would. "If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear."

So both sides of this war ran the same forecast. Put the Ring on a strong enough hand, and Barad-dûr changes management. The Wise called that a catastrophe, Sauron called it a coup, and the prediction underneath was identical.

That shared forecast is what Gandalf eventually builds a war plan out of. In the last council before the Morannon he explains why the Enemy won't simply sit behind his gates and wait, which would be the safe play. "He is not yet sure, and he has not built up his power by waiting until his enemies are secure, as we have done... he will look for a time of strife, ere one of the great among us makes himself master and puts down the others."

That's a sophisticated model of his opponents. He's assuming the Ring has been found. He's assuming the finders will fight each other over it, because that's what a group of powerful people does with a prize like that. He's assuming one of them wins, and he wants to move before that happens.

Every step of that reasoning is defensible. A good analyst could have written it.

It's also, start to finish, a description of a war that was never going to happen.

SECTION: The Name He Was Looking For

Up to this point, every one of Sauron's fears has been a category. A nation, a power, a hypothetical claimant. But one of Sauron's anxieties had an actual person attached to it, and a search running for centuries.

In the year 2850 of the Third Age, Gandalf slips into Dol Guldur in disguise and confirms who the Necromancer really is. He comes back with the Enemy's shopping list. Sauron is gathering all the Rings, and seeking news of two things — the One, and Isildur's Heir.

The heir was a living man, somewhere out there, descended from the person who cut the Ring off his hand.

The Wise took that seriously enough to build a child's entire life around it. When Aragorn's father died and Elrond took the boy into Rivendell, they didn't just hide him, they took his name away.

"But he was called Estel, that is 'Hope', and his true name and lineage were kept secret at the bidding of Elrond; for the Wise then knew that the Enemy was seeking to discover the Heir of Isildur."

There's a joke buried in that alias. In Tolkien's theological writing, estel is a technical term for the kind of hope that doesn't rest on evidence, the kind that trusts Eru when everything looks lost. They hid the Heir of Isildur under the exact word for the one thing Sauron couldn't understand.

The search ran for two thousand years and never succeeded. Aragorn spent eighty-seven years under half a dozen names without Mordor getting a fix on him.

And then, one night in early March of the year 3019, Aragorn took the palantír of Orthanc and let the Enemy see his face.

Tolkien never dates that scene, so this is a derivation, not a record. Aragorn says he looked in the Stone before he rode from the Hornburg, ten days after Frodo left Rauros. Both clocks land on the sixth of March.

Hours earlier, Gandalf had held the same Stone and named this exact possibility. If Wormtongue wasn't fooled by the Rohan armour, Sauron might learn that an heir of Elendil had stood on the stairs of Orthanc. "That is what I fear."

Aragorn did it on purpose anyway. He looked in, said nothing, and showed the Enemy the sword.

"I am the lawful master of the Stone, and I had both the right and the strength to use it, or so I judged. The right cannot be doubted. The strength was enough - barely."

Barely.

He came out of that room shaking and called it grimmer than the battle of the Hornburg. But he won. He won based on more than willpower. Tolkien says the palantíri were far more amenable to legitimate users, most of all to true Heirs of Elendil, as compared to Saruman, or Sauron. Aragorn had the crown rights to that Stone. Sauron had stolen his.

It would be easy to oversell Aragorn here, but Tolkien refused to. Asked whether Aragorn could have taken the Ring and beaten Sauron with it, he wrote that of mortals, no one could have withheld it from him in Sauron's presence. Not even Aragorn.

But Sauron didn't know any of that. What he saw that night was Isildur's heir, and Isildur's sword made whole again.

"Sauron has not forgotten Isildur and the sword of Elendil. Now in the very hour of his great designs the heir of Isildur and the Sword are revealed; for I showed the blade re-forged to him. He is not so mighty yet that he is above fear; nay, doubt ever gnaws him."

That word "yet" gets dropped almost everywhere the line is quoted, and it's doing real work. Aragorn isn't saying the Dark Lord can never be beyond such things, only that he isn't there today.

The answer came back in nine days. Gandalf lists the three signs eating at the Enemy in that final council, and the one he puts first is "the Sword that robbed him of his treasure re-made." On the fifteenth of March the assault on Minas Tirith broke on the Pelennor.

Aragorn had meant to pull the Eye west, and it worked, and it nearly cost him the city he was riding to save. Aragorn afterwards is almost rueful. "If I had foreseen how swift would be his onset in answer, maybe I should not have dared to show myself."

SECTION: What Fear Did to His Clock

So we have a pretty strong record of Sauron's fears. Let's pressure test it though, because a case this one-sided usually has something wrong with it. We can start with what alarm actually did to him, which was ironically, never caution.

In the year 3017 of the Third Age, Sauron let Gollum go. He was expecting Gollum to lead Sauron's spies back to the Ring. Instead Aragorn caught Gollum in the Dead Marshes and handed him to Thranduil. Tolkien's account of the reaction is flat and specific: "Now Sauron learning of the capture of Gollum by the chiefs of his enemies was in great haste and fear."

So now Sauron has to make a move. In June of 3018 he throws two punches on the same day at opposite ends of the map: orcs north against Thranduil to get Gollum back, and the Lord of the Nazgûl at Osgiliath in the south.

Both move fail.

By September the wrath and fear of Sauron was mounting, and messengers come out of Barad-dûr carrying threats to his own Ringwraiths so severe that they filled even the Morgul-lord with dismay.

And then comes the decision that I think, loses him the war.

"Speed alone would now serve, and secrecy must be abandoned."

Sauron sends the nine Nazgûl out into the open, riding for the Shire. Nine of the most terrifying beings in the world announcing themselves across Eriador, which is how Gandalf, Aragorn and eventually Elrond all work out where the Ring is and roughly how long they've got. Sauron's panic actually became their intelligence briefing.

It's the same move Sauron made at Minas Ithil three thousand years earlier, the one Tolkien dismissed in five words:

"But Sauron struck too soon."

If you frighten Sauron he doesn't dig in, he accelerates. And every acceleration hands his enemies information.

Now for a complication that Tolkien explains to us. The alarm didn't only misfire by going off too easily — sometimes it went quiet at exactly the wrong moment.

From the same essay, on what Sauron got out of Gollum's interrogation:

"Sauron's fears were much allayed when he perceived from Gollum's account that Baggins must have been a creature of the same sort."

Much allayed.

A hobbit has the Ring, and that news made him relax. Out of the relaxation came what Tolkien calls possibly the most important mistake Sauron made. He assumed Baggins came from somewhere near the Misty Mountains, where Gollum had lived. But if it wasn't for that error, the Nazgûl would have reached the Shire weeks sooner.

Weeks. The entire quest exists inside a gap opened by a wrong guess about geography, made by a mind that had just stopped worrying.

He misjudged in the other direction too, probing Gondor's defences and finding them greater far than he had hoped.

And there are long stretches where none of this applies, where nothing troubles him at all.

Gorlim, back in the First Age, is the clearest case. He betrays Barahir's outlaws to get his captured wife back, and the wife turns out to be a phantom, conjured to trap him, dead the whole time. "Nonetheless I will grant thy prayer," Sauron tells him. "Thou shalt go to Eilinel, and be set free of my service."

Then he has him killed.

Cruelty for its own sake, with nothing at stake and nobody watching.

Or the Morannon, where the plan for the army outside was that "he had a mind first to play these mice cruelly before he struck to kill." Or the flat answer his herald gives when Gandalf asks for terms.

"Surety you crave! Sauron gives none."

Tolkien added a line in one of his letters that reads like a warning to anybody making an episode like this one. Sauron should be thought of as very terrible.

The most useful corrective runs the opposite way. Before the Wizards were sent to Middle-earth, Manwë asked Olórin — who becomes Gandalf — to go, and Olórin said no. He "declared that he was too weak for such a task, and that he feared Sauron."

Manwë told him that was all the more reason.

So the one fear in this story that is documented, named, and admitted out loud runs from Gandalf toward Sauron.

That's what the fear looks like.

An extremely dangerous being carrying an alarm system that fired too easily in some directions, never fired at all in others, and fell silent at the worst possible moment.

SECTION: The Door He Made

So this leaves us one last thing. And this is the only fear that actually killed Sauron.

Everything discussed so far was something Sauron could model. A fleet, an army, a rival with the Ring, an heir with a claim. All the same event in different clothes: somebody wants what he has and comes to take it. He invented that story.

Gandalf named the limit of it at Rivendell.

"The only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning."

"The thought will not enter."

Gandalf didn't say that Sauron considered that possibility and just ruled it out. It isn't even in the set of things Sauron's mind produces when it asks what these people might do.

And that isn't just Gandalf being clever — Tolkien said the same thing in his own voice. If the Ring were unmade, Sauron's own being would be reduced to a shadow, a mere memory of malicious will.

Then, seven words.

"But that he never contemplated nor feared."

Tolkien even lays out Sauron's reasoning. The Ring was unbreakable by any lesser smithcraft, unmeltable in any fire but Orodruin's, and so addictive that no will could throw it away.

Then Tolkien adds three words that take the whole argument apart.

"So he thought."

The failure has a diagnosis. It isn't stupidity. It's appetite. Explaining why Sauron misread Gollum, Tolkien writes that Gollum was ultimately indomitable, except by death, "as Sauron did not fully comprehend, being himself consumed by lust for the Ring." He couldn't imagine anybody giving it up because he wanted it too much to picture it.

Which works right up until it meets somebody who isn't like him. He'd read Saruman perfectly, because Sauron "had, in fact, been very like Saruman, and so still understood him quickly." His cynicism about everyone's motives looked vindicated.

"Gandalf he did not understand."

Oddly enough, the thing that ruined Sauron started out good, Tolkien says. He loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction. He never wanted the world destroyed, he wanted it tidy, running properly, and his. Which is exactly why unmaking the source of order sat outside his imagination.

So he watched the wrong direction for the entire war. Gollum, who knew, told Frodo and Sam that the Eye attends more to some places than others, and "away down west He is not afraid."

Gandalf put it harder. "For imagining war he has let loose war."

And then two words for the most careful planner in Middle-earth.

"Wise fool."

Gandalf even spells out the road not taken. If Sauron had used all his power to guard Mordor, and bent all his cunning to hunting the Ring, hope really would have faded, and neither Ring nor Bearer could have eluded him long.

Instead he sent his armies out, and his eye went with them.

Meanwhile the thing he couldn't picture was happening a few days' march from his tower. On the wall of Cirith Ungol, with the Ring around his neck and visions of Samwise the Strong turning Gorgoroth into a garden, Sam worked out that he didn't want any of it. "The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due."

The refusal Gandalf said would never enter Sauron's heart happened inside Mordor, and nobody upstairs noticed.

Then on the twenty-fifth of March it all arrives at once. Frodo claims the Ring at the Cracks of Doom, Barad-dûr shakes from its foundations to its crown, and "the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash."

And there's a phrase in that passage worth reflecting on a bit.

His Eye "looked across the plain to the door that he had made."

"The door that he had made."

The Sammath Naur is his. He cut that chamber into the side of Orodruin, and the road up to it, and the entrance, because he needed somewhere to forge the Ring. It's the only place in the created world where the Ring can be destroyed, and when Frodo and Sam walked up it, there was no garrison on that road, no gate, not one orc sitting on a stool at the entrance.

The gap wasn't an oversight, or arrogance, or bad luck — guarding it would have meant first holding in his head the idea of somebody walking up that road carrying the most desirable object ever made and intending to throw it away. His imagination couldn't fathom that.

Tolkien gives him one last interior state, and after six thousand years of being frightened of the wrong things, it's the one he started with.

"Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him."