Sauron is not a fully developed character in The Lord of the Rings but is instead portrayed as an embodiment of evil.

Sauron isn’t a character in The Lord of the Rings I was reading some usual right-wing culture war rant against moral ambiguity in modern fantasy. Good fantasy, we are told, isn’t interested in these morally ambiguous characters, and hence the example of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings as a being who is just evil incarnate. Now, true, Sauron in The Lord of the Rings is just plain bad, but…he’s also not really a character. He doesn’t have any lines1; he doesn’t really appear except as a lidless eye. In The Silmarillion, he is more complex, but by the Third Age, he’s just the embodiment of evil. In terms of actual characters (people we meet, who interact with the central characters, people with personalities and motives), The Lord of the Rings is absolutely jam-packed with morally ambiguous characters. Tolkien goes out of his way to create a wide spectrum of people who either lack some virtue or are genuinely evil but with complex motives. At one end, we have various hobbits from the just vaguely unpleasant Sackville-Baggins family, to the Shiriffs who help enforce Sharkey’s regime in the Shire in the final book of The Return of the King. I don’t think Tolkien would endorse the idea that all cops are bastards. Even so, people forget that insofar as The Shire has law enforcement, it is co-opted and cooperates with the brief interlude of authoritarian rule. None of these hobbits are irredemably or intrinsically evil people. This twist in the story, in which the heroes find that their home has also felt the corruption against which they fought, would be undermined if it were simply due to there being a subset of evil hobbits bent on evil. In between, we have all of the characters who, to some degree or other, are impacted by the creeping corruption of the one ring. Tolkien clearly believed in the idea of good and virtuous people, but he also repeatedly emphasised that simply is not enough. Core moral values, or practised virtue, might mitigate the impact of the ring, but prolonged exposure to its influence would corrupt anybody. The only exception is Tom Bombadil, who is also useless in terms of actually doing anything about the ring. Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and to some degree, Faramir employ something else against the corrupting power of the ring: moral reasoning. This is not the same as them being more virtuous than others, but rather understanding that they will fall if they become too proximate to the one ring’s power. This is not without consequences. They avoid being corrupted, but as a consequence, their capacity to directly act against the ring becomes more limited. There is a shitty, dangerous, and potentially morally corrupting job to do, and each of them has to let that burden sit on Frodo’s shoulders. That is presented as wisdom, because it is, but it is still a kind of moral pragmatism. Each of them helps Frodo, but they choose to limit the help they give because they have to. Each of them is ostensibly more capable of facing the hardships that Frodo will face, but they don’t take that option because they know (or reason) that they will fail. Intrinsic goodness isn’t enough. Tom Bombadil is as saintly as possible, which makes him incapable. Gandalf is a quasi-divine being on a kind of mission from God, and makes clear from the start that he can’t even touch the ring directly without putting Middle-earth in danger. Galadriel has actually lived in heaven. Aragorn is the rightful king and an especially noble offspring of a noble lineage of people. Faramir is a version of the noble knight of medieval Arthurian romance. Tolkien sets things up so that people who narratively might be seen as especially good in the kinds of stories he was drawing from, and who are unequivocally good people in the story, have to step away from the influence of the ring. The power to shape the world for goodness is still power, and Tolkien keeps hammering away at the same point that to use power, even to do good, is corrupting. Which takes us to the people who are corrupted by the close influence of the ring: Boromir and Gollum, obviously, but also Bilbo and Frodo. I find it bizarre that people would claim that The Lord of the Rings has no moral grey when part of the underlying horror of the story is that even lovely old Bilbo is corrupted by power. Not irredemably corrupted, of course, but that in itself is another sign of the moral, ideological and theological confusion this modern right-wing analysis of The Lord of the Rings takes. Yes, there is good and evil in the book, but redemption is also a central and recurring idea. You can’t have redemption without accepting that even apparently bad people are capable of change. Furthermore, you can’t have a story in which redemption is a theme without characters who are morally complex and yes, morally “grey”. Frodo eventually succumbs to the corrupting power of the ring. The moment is brief because Gollum bites Frodo’s finger off, but it happens. It is important that it happens because it informs Boromir’s own corruption (and redemption in death). Boromir is not a paragon of moral virtue; although he might think he is, he is ambitious and arrogant. He is not a bad man, but he definitely is not a wise man. The character quality that Tolkien pitches as the strongest defence against the power of the ring is humility. Boromir lacks that. Let’s be clear, Gandalf is hardly humble either, but as noted above, what he lacks in humility he makes up for in brains. Boromir is neither humble nor wise; that he has other virtues (brave, loyal to his country and father) is no defence against the ring. We don’t really know much about how Smeagol was before he was influenced by the One Ring. He murdered Deagol almost immediately on encountering the ring’s influence, which suggests that he was particularly susceptible to its influence. The vice at the heart of his susceptibility to the ring would appear to be avarice. He does like to have things. Gollum is a pitiful figure, a point that Tolkien underlines over and over. Gollum is pitiful in the pejorative sense, but also, we are told explicitly that he is somebody who deserves our pity. Tolkien adds another twist here. Gollum is a being deeply corrupted in appearance by the ring, but he is still a physical being, and he is still a person. He is quite different from the Witchking of Angmar, the leader of the ring wraiths; a former king of men, corrupted by the lesser rings of power. The Witchking has some fragments of what we might call a character. We get some insights into his thinking, but he really has very little agency and is effectively a dead spirit controlled by Sauron. I’m not across the timeline of the rings enough to know how much longer the Witchking had his lesser ring compared to Smeagol’s control of the one ring, but I still think it is notable that Gollum is still very much flesh and blood. That’s partly as a consequence of making the story work, but it also emphasises that distinction. Smeagol turned to murder very quickly, but also he wasn’t interested in worldly power. Aside from Bombadil (who is immune to the ring but also useless to do anything about it), who has the qualities most able to resist the power of the ring? Sam Gamgee. Sam has no interest in wordly power; he is a humble hobbit from a humble background. He is also primarily motivated by love. To some extent, he is motivated by duty also, but in that regard, he is not unique, and Boromir’s sense of duty was not sufficient to protect him from the ring. I don’t want to claim Tolkien for progressive politics. It is absolutely correct to see him as a writer with conservative views. There are many aspects of The Lord of the Rings that are regressive, including large quantities of racism. However, Tolkien’s perspective of morality is so sharply at odds with modern conservatism and that of the right-wing culture warriors who want to claim The Lord of the Rings as theirs as to make my head spin. No, The Lord of the Rings isn’t an example of Grimdark fantasy, but not because it has some rigid black-and-white morality. No, rather it is a novel in which compassion and redemption are pitched against judgment and the desire for worldly power. The racist assumptions Tolkien builds into his world include the positioning of the forces of good as westerly, and the forces of evil as eastward and southerly. It is baked into the novel in a way that creates issues for modern adaptations. That is an aspect of the novel that attracts the modern right to the books. Despite all that, and without denying Tolkien’s own racist assumptions, Sam resists the framing, much as he resists the ring. In The Two Towers, not long after Sam and Frodo meet Faramir’s rangers in Ithilien, the hobbits witness an ambush by Faramir’s men of Southron forces allied to Sauron. Sam sees a Southron warrior die from arrow wounds in front of him. “It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace – all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind.” Tolkien, J. R. R.. The Lord of the RingsSam’s thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of an oliphant, but the passage is another reminder that compassion in the face of moral complexity is central to Sam. He is more than capable of seeing that, simply because this dead man had ended up on the side of evil, that there may be more to his choices than simply “evil”. The dead Southron is again, not a character as such, but Sam imagines him as a person who could have been a character – a person with a name, and a set of events and decisions that led the warrior to this place. Sam’s capacity to see the enemy as people is part of why he is capable of resisting the influence of the One Ring. Of all the people who have possession of the ring in its whole history, Sam is the one who most easily gives it up. True, he also has it for the shortest time, but he passes a moral test that only Bilbo passed (and not without effort and the direct intervention of Gandalf) and which others failed without even having possession of the ring. Yes, The Lord of the Rings is manifestly a book full of moral virtues informed by Tolkien’s cultural background and religion, but it is not in any sense a book of black and white morality. Partly this is because illustrating virtue ethics in narrative form necessarily requires complex morality and complex moral choices. A world of simple categories of right and wrong is a world in which morality can be reduced to simple sets of rules to follow. Compassion is the antidote to the corruption of power, and Tolkien practically underlines and circles this point almost without subtlety, with the additional emphasis that this includes COMPASSION TOWARDS YOUR APPARENT ENEMIES. I wonder where he got that idea from?2 As has been pointed out, there are some lines that are likely Sauron in Pippin’s encounter with the Palantir. ↩︎A rhetorical question. ↩︎ #bookReview #books #fantasy #lotr #tolkien

Sauron isn’t a character in The Lord of the Rings I was reading some usual right-wing culture war rant against moral ambiguity in modern fantasy. Good fantasy, we are told, isn't interested in these morally ambiguous characters, and hence Sauron in The Lord of the Rings is just evil incarnate. Now, true, Sauron in The Lord of the Rings is just plain bad, but...he's also not really a character. He doesn't have any lines; he doesn't really appear except as a lidless eye.… https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2026/04/25/sauron-isnt-a-character-in-the-lord-of-the-rings/