Motives of Evil: Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman

[Music] hey squad welcome back today i want to take another look at evil characters in tolkien's writing specifically at what drives them to the dark and destructive choices that eventually consume their whole being to understand tolkien's heroes their struggles failures and triumphs it's necessary to understand the nature of the foes they face and understanding evil is one of the surest ways to understand what is and is not good but most importantly it's something that i find fun tolkien is often described or sometimes accused of portraying a black and white absolute morality in his fiction but this is really only accurate when speaking of the pure ethics of middle earth while choices and actions can typically be ruled either right or wrong characters are almost all portrayed as having mixed traits and motives gollum for instance is villainous but also tragic torn between his lust for the ring and his growing relationship with frodo frodo himself the hero of the story fails to complete his quest and claims the ring for himself even when we look to the inor middle earth's equivalents of angels and demons we find shades of nuance the likes of monwe and varda may be unimaginably holy and powerful especially seen through human or elven eyes but tolkien affirms they remain imperfect every finite creature must have some weakness that is some inadequacy to deal with some situations monwe must be shown to have his own inherent fault and even morgoth the original corrupter of arda and dark foe of the world cannot be considered a hundred percent evil in response to a review tolkien noted in my story i do not deal in absolute evil i do not think there is such a thing since that is zero i do not think that at any rate any rational being is wholly evil tolkien takes a negative view of evil not negative as in bad but negative as in having no independent positive reality of its own everything that is is created by eru and as such is created good insofar as it continues to exist it remains good or at least redeemable insofar as it turns away from what is good it's turning away from existence itself therefore according to this dictum what appears to be the presence of evil is actually a morbid twisting or warping of something that at its core is still participating in a good creation this all sounds very nice in theory but it's difficult to accept that characters like morgoth or sauron or even their junior in depravity saruman retain any vestiges of their once good natures and these fallen inure provide much clearer examples of moral decay than other characters for three main reasons first einer are primarily spiritual creatures elves men dwarves hobbits and the like are all born into their bodies and are meant to experience life as the union of body and soul as such their physical needs impulses and limitations affect and shape their thoughts and feelings einer are not generally subject to the same concerns so their minds and emotions remain unclouded second while the knowledge of the inor is finite it's vastly more complete than even the most erudite of the elves in general valar and mayar would understand with much greater certainty all the possible dimensions and repercussions of a given event or choice morgoth may be able to trick men into sincerely believing he is the most powerful creature in existence but morgoth himself cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for his own actions third einur have access to much greater power over the fabric of reality than incarnates this means their actions typically have more dramatic and thus more easily observable consequences and it means they are more likely to achieve whatever goals they've decided on with minimal compromise so if we're trying to understand how evil itself arises and operates the fallen inor will be the example subject to the fewest variables and mitigating circumstances a corollary to tolkien's statement that pure evil by definition literally does not exist is that evil is sterile it can't come up with anything new but just retreads the same tired old territory desecrating instead of innovating and as a result everything evil tends toward a dreary uniformity growth renewal and revitalization is a function of good therefore while there are many possible expressions of goodness evil actually limits one's potential and all evil tends toward the same null and state what this means is that in some respects morgoth sauron saruman and their servants are all on the same path motivated by the same motive domination the denial of any will power or value other than one's own and the thing that orients them all toward this goal is some kind of pride the original and fatal error of turning away from the great theme and placing oneself above the will of eru but while all these characters wind up in nearly the same place they get there from different starting points and since none of these characters ever achieves pure evil even in the depths of their near identical depravity they each retain distinctions that are the final faint expressions of their native goodness and tracing these distinctions highlights how corruption pursued to its bitter end may take different appearances but is still the same process when speaking of a person or character's unique motivation there's a few different things to consider as i see it motivation is determined by a character's goals but also by the tendencies and emotions that stem from their unique personality traits essentially it's a combination of what a character wants and why they want it which in turn will determine how they pursue it we also have to take into account that personalities evolve over time and goals tend to shift accordingly so let's begin with what we can glean about the original personalities of our soon to be fallen einor i discussed in an earlier video how melkor like his counterpart fenor is originally characterized by the drive to create and moreover to excel his brethren in creation by bringing into genuine being ideas that stemmed holy from his own mind very very early on of course this trait is warped by his growing pride and becomes a self-serving obsession the good desire to create becomes resentment when he realizes the limitations of his own existence and the relatively harmless enjoyment of being praised for his accomplishments something that owlette for instance shares becomes a consuming self-regard now bitterness and arrogance are traits that eventually become dominant in every corrupt character remember all evil tends in the same direction but melkor is notable for developing them so early at the very beginning of his devolution almost as if he were predisposed to them sauron and saruman don't seem excessively dominated by these traits until they have traveled quite far down the garden path of darkness the other outstanding trait melkor shows is his haste evidence of a tremendous amount of energy that hasn't been properly controlled he has an affinity for extremes and tends toward intemperance though his mind was swift and piercing tolkien says he was impatient and overweening too quickly he assumed that he had grasped all the nature of a thing or all the causes of an event and his plans and works often went miss for that reason but he learned no wisdom from this and charged his failures ever upon the malice of the valar or the jealousy of eru and emotionally we know that he can swing very quickly from love to hate and from hate to possessive desire he wants varda to be his wife but when she rejects him he becomes her bitterest enemy when he sees the beauty of valinor and the joyful splendor of the eldar he immediately decides to ruin it as thoroughly as he can basically this dude has worse impulse control than a 10 week old kitten faced with a twitchy piece of string and he gives even less warning before savaging the hand that pets him thus it is that melkor thirsting to excel in raw creativity attempts to approach divine levels of power and when he finds that as a finite created being such an aspiration is both unlawful and impossible he suffers one of his characteristic mood swings fury and resentment consume him and he convinces himself there must be some way around the little obstacle of the created order of reality finding that some rules can be broken he leaps to the conclusion that he can break any law if he tries hard enough even the ones upon which his own existence depends in his beginning and in the days of his great might the most ruinous of his violences came from his endeavor to so order aya that there were no limits or obstacles to his will but this he could not do from this precedes his unceasing and unappeasable rage and since he's reckless and not inclined to introspection every frustration he suffers just causes him to abandon his current scheme and concoct a new one without inspiring him to maybe re-evaluate some of his foundational assumptions the resulting negative feedback loop steadily increases in not only evil but in futility if we were looking for a contrast to these traits we could hardly find a better example than sauron whose character evolved during the writing of the lord of the rings to become morgoth's chief lieutenant and originally the most powerful of the class of spirits known as the mayar sauron is seduced to the dark side from the surface of owlette so he shares the craftiness common to most of tolkien's evil and corrupt characters but sauron's not exactly a tornado of unfettered and directionless creativity like melchor seems to have been tolkien tells us he has a driving need for order and efficiency it had been his virtue and therefore also the cause of his fall and of his relapse that he loved order and coordination and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction he is first drawn to melkor not in despair and bitterness but paradoxically with a degree of optimism it was the apparent will and power of melkor to affect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted sauron to him melkor as the morgoth wants to fulfill his desire and doesn't really care if the result will be in his own or anyone else's best interests sauron justifies his actions on the ground that they're in the service of a higher good a good that he conveniently gets to define he really believes that following morgoth's methods are what's best for the world i can easily imagine him half sincerely defending some of his more wants and atrocities in the first stage on the grounds that they were painful necessities to bring about some utopian future state even at the beginning of the second age tolkien wrote that his motives were not indeed 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 the other important distinction between melchor and sauron is that melkor starts out as the mightiest of the valar and as far as we know the most powerful created being in existence it's actually somewhat plausible for him to resent his inability to ascend to godhood because i mean he's already more powerful than anyone else sauron on the other hand is a mere maya even at the height of his power he's well aware that multiple other people could easily defeat him moreover the maya are defined by their role as assistance to the great valar who elementally shape arda sauron enters morgoth's service he doesn't start out in pursuit of his own personal goal but rather makes it his goal to achieve another's will and he's lured by the prospect of being given the authority and freedom to do this as efficiently and mechanically as physically possible disregarding such pesky considerations as compassion and ethics this acceptance of his own limitations keeps him a bit more grounded in reality than morgoth tolkien says that even his calculated promulgation of melkor as a figure of worship in numenor may have been the residue of a state that was in a sense a shadow of good the ability once in sauron at least to admire or admit the superiority of a being other than himself as a result sauron had never reached the stage of nihilistic madness that morgoth did it reminds me of the phenomenon of bronze medalists being happier than silver medalists those who come in second place are tormented by the knowledge of how close they've come to being first those who come in third are far enough removed from absolute victory that they're just happy to have made it onto the podium and speaking of rank hierarchy and inferiority complexes we now must consider saruman the history of the astari is textually complicated and of the astari we know most about gandalf's character so there's always a degree of guesswork involved in analyzing saruman on the other hand when we encounter him in the narrative he's still relatively close to his original state which makes him a bit easier to quantify original of course does not imply flawless remember even monwe has limitations in his understanding and judgment and it seems pretty clear that saruman had more than his share of hidden insecurities even before he set foot on the shores of middle-earth tolkien tells us he like saron was of the people of owe and like sauron and melchor both he is originally in an elevated position the chief of the astari that is higher in the valinorian stature than the others even gandalf affirms that saruman is the head of his order and more advanced in lore yet those characters with particular insight everyone from galadriel to varda herself recognize that gandalf has the greater nobility and you have to assume that if this is apparent to others saroman himself must also have an inkling that gandalf excels him by some mysterious but important metric this puts saruman in something of an awkward position he's been given authority over and responsibility for the mission to defeat sauron but people don't seem to think he has the right stuff for the job so although his temperament and preferences are similar to saurons the first sign of his moral deterioration mirror melchors taking the form of jealousy and resentment when faced with someone who seems innately more powerful than he is melkor externalizes this problem and convinces himself that he only lacks the secret fire to become aru's equal not realizing that the secret fire is with aru that is an innately divine attribute and melkor's not going to just discover it hidden behind a galaxy or something likewise saruman becomes obsessed with emulating gandalf's attributes to the point of paranoia he suspects that gandalf has the ring naria and attempts to craft a ring of his own he learns gandalf spends a lot of time in the shire among hobbits and starts infiltrating their society gandalf teases him about his disdain for pipeweed and he not only decides to try it but gets secretly addicted to it there's also the complicating factor of saruman's incarnation while they are indeed mayar the astari agree to be bound to their bodies in much the same way the children of alouvatar are which has the effect of dimming their wisdom and knowledge and confusing them with fears cares and wearinesses coming from the flesh the fact that saruman agreed to undergo this sacrifice shows just how committed he once was to completing the task the valor set him whatever it was that spurred him to accept it in the first place but maybe once alienated from his mayaran insights and subjected to corporeal emotions the resulting confusion extended to saruman's understanding of his role in relation to gandalf none of these characters begin with inherently evil motives and each one reaches the point of corruption from different directions but since we are discussing evil and evil crushes uniqueness into conformity the fatal decisions they make are identical to pursue their own designs regardless of the consequences and to elevate their own will above anyone else's and the results of this decision quickly start to look very similar until while they all still believe they're pursuing different goals their immediate objects are the same accumulating worldly power and knowledge and subjugating anyone who might resist them even in the smallest particular they all become increasingly deluded morgoth seems to have convinced himself that he really has a shot at usurping god himself sauron while his aspirations to godhood are purely performative believes that everyone is as cynical and self-serving as he is and thus becomes incapable of anticipating his enemies strategies and even after his armies are defeated his fortress laid in ruin and his staff shattered saruman still believes that he has a chance of outlasting gandalf and sauron and getting the ring for himself which despite all his ring lore is something he still somehow thinks will end well for him now it might be objected that even at the peak of their degradation morgoth sauron and saruman are all still working toward distinguishable ends part of this has to do with the level of evil each attains morgoth is so consumed with envy that he really doesn't have much personality left at the end and his only goal insofar as he has one is to destroy the objects of his wrath morgoth would no doubt if he had been victorious have ultimately destroyed even his own creatures such as the orcs when they had served his sole purpose in using them even left alone he could only have gone raging on till all was leveled again into a formless chaos sauron did not object to the existence of the world so long as he could do what he liked with it something that suggests the benefit of his relative humility relative compared to moroth that is his plan again insofar as he still has one involves ruling all of middle-earth as a god-king all for the sake of the greater good of course just as soon as he's made an example of everyone who's ever inconvenienced him and removed any elements that have outlived their usefulness saruman for all his loathsomeness is actually less advanced and evil than the other two and remains convinced that his true motivation was to more effectively oppose sauron up until sauron is actually defeated the reality is saruman had long ceased to desire sauron's overthrow for its own sake what he'd really been pursuing was an increase in his own prestige and glory and a silencing of those pesky whispers both internal and external that gandalf was actually the better man for the job so paradoxically sauron's defeat the very achievement he'd been working for casts him into despair but though he retains the sense to appreciate his wretched position he continues to set goals escaping orthanc despoiling the shire taking revenge and of course enjoying as much psychoactive plant matter as he can but at this point all these aims are really just abstract justifications that mostly vary in scope morgoth wants to destroy all of creation sauron wants to destroy anything that has ever been or could ever be a threat to his hegemony which is a very lengthy list at this point saruman isn't capable of much anymore but he wants to destroy whatever he can that will cause the most grief to his enemies they're also consumed by evil that spite is their sole motivation they're each so focused on their immediate target crushing resistance and taking revenge that they've lost all perspective and have only the vagus awareness of their supposed long-term goals saron abruptly acquires the clarity to appreciate this in his final seconds the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare from all his policies and webs of fear and treachery from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free the recognition of the positive traits and motives of the characters who become most wholly consumed by evil reinforces tolkien's emphasis on the morality of actions rather than characters it's not that motivations are irrelevant but even the best goals especially the best goals will be twisted and abandoned when achieving that goal becomes an end in itself instead of being pursued in service to others if you enjoyed this video please be assured that whatever your motives hitting the like button can never be an evil action consider subscribing unless of course the very existence of the world so offends you that your rage is ceaseless and unappeasable and thank you for watching you

Channel: GirlNextGondor

Views: 46,892

Keywords: lord of the rings, silmarillion, tolkien, tolkien lore, ainulindale, morgoth lord of the rings, sauron second age, saruman, white council, istari

Id: uZmLNmy9VXA

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022