Sauron: A Character Study

who is Sauron is he just a two-dimensional bad guy or is there something more going on there what's his history and what does he want hi everyone this is Robert welcome to in deep geek this video is brought to you by my wonderful patreon community I am now creating regular junior our Tolkien and Lord of the Rings content on this channel that's as well as the usual Game of Thrones West world and The Witcher videos Sauron is quite literally the Lord of the Rings we may think of the book as being about Frodo war the Fellowship or something else but Tolkien decided to name it after a character who we never actually see in real corporeal form or experience anything from his perspective he's a mystery we just always reminded that he is the bad guy he can't be allowed to win he seems the embodiment of evil and the antagonist of all that is good but who really is Sauron he has a long backstory in the appendices to the Lord of the Rings and in The Silmarillion so who is he what does he want what drives him let's start at the beginning Saren was one of them my are a sort of angelic being created to help shape the world my are our magical powerful immortal and spiritual so not restricted to one physical form something which will become important later on in Sauron story as we'll see we know a few other my are actually particularly the five wizards cerumen Gandalf radagast and the blue wizards they too were spiritual beings long before they were made flesh and Sauron started out as actually pretty good then he was called my ron which means the admirable he was one of the most powerful my are and particularly skilled as a Smith he was a great craftsman we don't know huge amounts about his character back then that he was good and creative and importantly loved order and perfection he was such a good craftsman because he didn't settle for second best he always wanted better I'm sure his workshop was immaculate and the quality of his end products worthy of marvel he hated waste of course a love of order and perfection are all well and good when combined with an apparently incorruptible good nature but it turned out that Myron was not incorruptible enter Morgoth the original Big Bad in Tolkien's legendarium who saw in myron a potential powerful ally he corrupted him and turned him into his most loyal left tenant and to start with spy Myron kept his change of allegiance of secret and fed intelligence to Morgoth it was only when more Agathe established himself in middle-earth that Myron declared himself also quitting Valinor and taking his place at Morgoth side that's when Myron became known as Sauron Myron as we've said means admirable clearly that was no longer my appropriate name for a traitor and rebel starting with the elves those opposed to him instead started calling him Sauron which means the abominable the opposite of his original name during the wars that followed in the first age of middle-earth sarens greatest role was in leading the fight against the elves while his master went off to try to corrupt the newly awakened humans saren was initially successful capturing the elven island of tol syrian and turning it into a werewolf island these weren't classical werewolves turning from humans to wolves and back but instead were large wolf like creatures with intelligent spirits trapped within them these however could not protect Saren from a challenge from the legendary lúthien and the wolf hound who an Sauron even disguised himself as a where Walter try and kill lúthien but who on captured him so Sauron yielded gave up the island and escaped apparently disguised this time as a vampire again this appears not to have been a classical vampire but a large intelligent bat-like creature but our information is a bit limited here anyway Sauron then goes a bit quiet the wars continue but Sauron isn't really involved perhaps he was keeping a low profile after he had failed in his task for Morgoth perhaps Morgoth had lost some faith in him or perhaps Saren was just licking his wounds if you remember back to what we know of his character a perfectionist their complete a finisher and so on this defeat will have stung he had been tasked with taking on the elves and he had failed this fits in with what we see much later elaborate plans and plots to finally drive the elves from middle-earth Saren wanted to finish what he started eventually though Morgoth was defeated and Saren himself begged for mercy from the victorious host of the West this wasn't forthcoming and rather than be taken off in Chains to the utter West to be judged he escaped again he's good at escaping his sauer where exactly he went and what form he took is a bit of a mystery because he disappears for half a millennia and it was a full thousand years before he really started to do anything noticeable building the Tower of Babel door raising armies of Orcs and trolls and corrupting the hearts of humans like the have a Grimm and the easterling's despite this it's clear that he felt he still had unfinished business with the Alps which is where his cunning plan with the rings of power came into play I've done a whole other video on that if you're interested in the details of the plan and exactly what powers the One Ring had because they aren't always obvious in the books or films but his basic plan was to disguise himself as an ATAR the lord of gifts ingratiate himself with the elves make rings of power for the most powerful people on the continent and then make a master ring that had control over those rings if it had all gone to plan Sauron would have had control over humans dwarves and elves in one swoop this may sound like quite a convoluted plan but it is totally within character remember he was a great Smith and artisan and here this is all about him making things powerful magical items and he was a perfectionist someone who was about control trying to control people through things he made is exactly how he liked to operate Morgoth may have been all about destroying and conquering and Saren wasn't averse to that when he felt it necessary but Saren preferred the subtle art of control anyway the plan obviously didn't go to plan the elves smelt a rat and in any event Saren made the fatal mistake of not being personally involved in making the three rings of the elves so the direct connection to him wasn't there when he put on the master ring which should have given him control of the other rings the elves took off their rings and hid them he was left with no option than to launch a quick invasion of a virgin where the Rings were in an attempt to reclaim all of them he got the seven for the Dwarven lords and the nine for the humans but not the three for the elves although the seven dwarf Lords seemed largely impervious to his influence just becoming more greedy and digging deeper and deeper into the earth in search of riches the nine that went to humans worked perfectly as we saw and Sauron slowly built his empire to spare most of middle-earth but was eventually defeated by the númenóreans the great power of the time we can probably add persistence or perhaps sheer bloody mindedness to Sirhan's list of qualities here because although he had been defeated again he didn't give up he went back to Mordor licked his wounds and slowly began to build his strength back up again again he took hundreds of years over it but Sauron was undaunted and he had a new foe he needed vengeance against the númenóreans in a way the númenóreans weren't a completely new foe l Ross the first king of númenor was the great-grandson of lúthien who had defeated Saren back in the first age Aragorn incidentally was from the same line much much later so the completionist part of sarin would have seen defeating Numenor as something worth doing not just because they had defeated him but also because this was lúthien Zaire so to speak the númenóreans only got their land and name because of their ancestors role in defeating Morgoth back in the first age so now sarin had to come up with a plan to defeat númenor as well as the elves my videos on númenor and the second age detail exactly what he did so please check them out if you're interested but briefly he got himself captured and taken to Numenor where he wiggled and seduced and maneuvered his away from the prison cell to a position of great influence over the king ar-pharazôn the númenóreans had been slowly moving away from the elves for centuries but Sirhan's influence just accelerated this more dramatically and disturbingly he got them or many of them anyway to start worshipping Morgoth his old master and turn away from the worship of the one true God Aroo eluveitie he eventually persuaded the king to attempt an attack on Valinor itself in direct contradiction of the one stipulation the númenóreans had been given by the Valar never to sail west of númenor as Saren must surely have anticipated a rural avert are cast down fiery destruction on the númenóreans not just the invading Navy was destroyed but the entire island of númenor only the faithful few anticipating what was to come managed to escape to middle-earth sarens cunning plan to enact revenge on the númenóreans was a success but it was also a Pyrrhic victory it cost Saren more than he was expecting he survived the destruction of númenor his spirit fled back to Mordor but his body was destroyed and with it his ability to change his shape into beautiful and seductive forms he'd used that trick in both the forging of the Rings and the downfall of númenor again Sauron regrouped and rebuilt and when he discovered that some faithful númenóreans had survived went on the attack we know what happened then we saw it in the flashback at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings films in the decisive battle Sauron killed a Lendl and gil-galad his old númenórean and elven foes but Isildur Lindell son cut the One Ring from saurons finger and Sauron was defeated once more sarens spirit fled but by now you know what Saren does when he is defeated he hides takes on a new identity this time becoming known as the necromancer hiding in dull gold or in southern Mirkwood slowly rebuilds his strength then focuses his energy on gaining his revenge on those who have wronged him so by the time of the Lord of the Rings we know exactly how he likes to operate he prefers to use the arts of influence and power to get his way rather than immediately launch a full-scale invasion the bulk of sarin's force remains within Mordor throughout most of the events of the story of The Lord of the Rings instead the ring wraiths under his control search for the One Ring he corrupts cerimon as he had our phallus on all those years earlier and generally holds back until he has provoked into action he is provoked into opening the Black Gate and sending his army forth of course by a challenge from Aragorn the air of Isildur ándale ándale and Numenor lover of arwen the daughter of Elrond and niece of L Ross the first king of númenor It was as if the ghosts of all of Saiyans old foes were challenging him to one last confrontation but we also have to remember that the Sauron we see in the Lord of the Rings is not the same as the sarin we see back in the first or second ages he is a broken hollowed-out so on we've already noted that he had lost his ability to choose his physical form but with the loss of his ring he had also lost the better part of himself the one Rings power came from the fact that Sauron had poured so much of himself and his power into it at its creation without it he was diminished hugely sarin at the time of the Lord of the Rings is still powerful and can control many other powerful forces that ring wraiths for example but his threat is not so much because of his own strength but because his enemies have weakened so much the elves by this point have been diminishing and passing into the West for some time one of the scenes in the extended version of the Fellowship of the Ring actually shows a troop of elves on their way to the Grey Havens for this very purpose Frodo and Sam see them when they are on their way out of the Shire and the humans at the end of the Third Age are also weaker than they were Newman or the greatest civilization of its age fell centuries ago and its glory had never been regained so here we have Sauron powerful but broken hollowed out figure at the end of the Third Age just a shadow of his former self in his younger or earlier days he was not just incredibly powerful but a craftsman of immense ability a lover of order patient and resilient and preferring to use guile to brute strength to get his way but also vengeful and uncaring and dismissive of those of less power he wanted control the battles against Sauron are not to therefore just a two dimensional good guys versus bad guys scenario they're just as much about those in favor of compassion and liberty against those in favor of uncaring power and control it is a mark of Tolkien's great skill as a writer that sarin's great strengths bring with them great weaknesses blind spots and hubris he is defeated in turn not by Baron the great warrior but by lúthien the famed beauty not by a Lendl who he hated but his son Isildur and he was finally destroyed not by Aragorn or Gandalf or any of the mighty of middle-earth but by two humble hobbits his greatest victory causing the downfall of númenor was also a crushing defeat causing him to lose a portion of palace far from being a two-dimensional bad guy it is sarang's weaknesses and faults and contradictions that complete him and ultimately destroy him if you'd like to see more videos in the world of JRR tolkien and the Lord of the Rings please click on the link to the playlist on the left of your screen or if you'd like to support this channel or get access to some content I produced just for my patrons please click on the link to my patreon page on the right of the screen thanks for watching that's all for this time I'll see you again see

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Keywords: in deep geek, deep geek, lord of the rings, the lord of the rings, sauron, who is sauron in lord of the rings, who is saurons master, mairon, lord of the rings sauron, maiar, sauron powers and abilities, sauron all powers, sauron lord of the rings lore, sauron lore, middle earth, morder, tolkien, tolkien sauron, what did sauron look like, why did sauron turn evil, why did sauron die, why did sauron make the ring, who is sauron

Id: -v8sa6jr6tA

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2020