Sauron Was Good Once. That's the Point.

SECTION: Elrond's Warning Was About Himself

October, in the year thirty eighteen of the Third Age. A porch at Rivendell, a council of Elves and Dwarves and Men, and a small gold ring on a table in the middle of them.

Boromir of Gondor has just said the sensible thing. His city is bleeding, the enemy is across the river, and there's a weapon lying on the table in front of everybody.

"Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need?"

Elrond says no. And in the middle of saying no, he says something that we'll keep coming back to.

"For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so."

That sentence is almost always referenced in isolation. It's quoted as a warm little fact about the Enemy.

"even the Dark Lord started out fine, isn't that something?"

But let's think about where Tolkien wrote it.

"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. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it."

From that angle, the sentence has a job.

The subject of that speech is the Wise, the people in that courtyard, and the argument runs in four quick steps. Nothing begins wicked. So Sauron didn't begin wicked. So simply beginning well doesn't protect anybody. So Elrond, sitting a few feet from the Ring, can't be trusted with it either.

Sauron works as a cautionary tale here because he's the extreme case. If even he wasn't rotten from the start, then nobody's start is a defense. And Elrond turns that on himself immediately. "I fear to take the Ring to hide it." The word that matters there is hide. He won't even agree to be its custodian.

And Elrond is probably the last person in that courtyard you'd expect to say it.

Elrond was born in 532 of the First Age, at the Havens of Sirion. By the Council he's somewhere around six and a half thousand years old - the math is rough, because the First Age's closing year is approximate. In that span Sauron has cost him about as much as a person can lose. In sixteen ninety-five of the Second Age, Gil-galad sent Elrond east with a relief force to save Eregion, and Elrond got there too late. The smiths were dead. The city was ruin. He fell back north with the survivors and founded Imladris in sixteen ninety-seven - the same valley he's standing in while he speaks. Seventeen centuries later he was Gil-galad's herald at the Last Alliance, and there, he watched Gil-galad die.

Elrond also keeps the books. The history of the Rings is written down, Tolkien says, "even as Elrond himself set it down in his books of lore." Elrond is the archive.

So the person in that room with the most cause to hate Sauron, and the best records with which to hate him, is the one insisting Sauron began clean. That's caution more than generosity. If the Enemy was born the Enemy, then wickedness is a species, and Elrond is safe from it by birth. But if the Enemy was made, then Elrond is a man standing very close to the machine that makes them.

SECTION: Why Tolkien Refused to Write Absolute Evil

You could write Elrond's claim off as an old loremaster's charity, except that Tolkien said the same thing in his own voice, outside the story.

In early 1956 Tolkien sat down to write notes on a review W. H. Auden had published of The Return of the King, and partway through he stopped defending the book and started explaining the machinery underneath it.

"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."

Zero.

That's a strange word to pick. It's a claim about arithmetic. Evil in Tolkien's system is a subtraction - what's left when something good has been taken out - and you can't build a thing out of subtraction alone. A being made entirely of absence couldn't want anything, or scheme, or lose.

A few lines later, Tolkien defines Sauron with a limit instead of a label. Sauron "represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible." Near. He chose that word deliberately. Sauron gets closer and closer to zero and never arrives, because arriving would mean ceasing to be there at all.

Tolkien then built the consequence into the world as something close to a physical law. Whatever the dark makes, it doesn't really make.

Frodo says it in the orc tower above Cirith Ungol, which is a deliberately terrible place to be saying it - he's in orc-mail, just carried out of an orc prison. "No, they eat and drink, Sam. The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them."

Treebeard says it from a completely different culture, about a different species: "Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves."

And the root of it sits in the opening pages of the Silmarillion, in Ilúvatar's answer to Melkor's discord. "No theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me... he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument."

A hobbit, an Ent, and God, all saying the same thing. That's Tolkien defining the physics of the place for us rather than one character's opinion.

There's a second consequence, an odder one. If evil is subtraction, then the further a being falls, the less of it there is. So how much power a being has and how much good is left in it turn out to be the same number.

Tolkien wrote that out in a nineteen-fifties essay called Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion. "Sauron was greater, effectively, in the Second Age than Morgoth at the end of the First. Why? Because, though he was far smaller by natural stature, he had not yet fallen so low."

The lieutenant ended up bigger than the master, because the master kept spending himself down. And Tolkien metered the spending. In a 1957 letter he notes that after Gil-galad and Elendil brought Sauron down, "Sauron took a long while to re-build, longer than he had done after the Downfall of Númenor," and gives the reason in a parenthesis: "each building-up used up some of the inherent energy of the spirit." Every rebuild is paid for out of the same account, and what's in that account is the being's own original decency...the goodness being depleted.

Morgoth is what that looks like at the far end. He poured his power out into the world itself, until "the whole of Middle-earth was Morgoth's Ring," in Tolkien's phrase. Everywhere in the world, and almost nothing left of himself. "Evil is fissiparous," Tolkien wrote at the end of that essay. "But itself barren."

SECTION: Sauron the Reformer in a Hurry

If nothing starts out bad, then something in Sauron was good first, and Tolkien doesn't leave it vague. He names the virtue, and it's the least romantic quality anyone could pick.

In September of 1954 a man called Peter Hastings, who ran a Catholic bookshop in Oxford, wrote to Tolkien complaining that The Lord of the Rings had theological problems. Tolkien wrote a long reply, then put "Not sent" at the top and filed it. That unsent letter probably holds the best sentence anybody has on this question, and most of the time it is quoted, its second half cut off.

Let's look at the whole thing. Sauron at the start of the Second Age "was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape - and was 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."

Reformers in a hurry.

That's the bracket Tolkien puts the Dark Lord in. People who want to fix things faster than consent allows. And he's careful about the sequence - the reformer isn't wholly evil even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat him up.

Impatience arrives first, and the pride turns up afterwards to feed on it.

In the Notes on Motives essay, Tolkien names the quality outright, and puts the argument in a parenthesis. "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."

Sauron's virtue, and therefore the cause of his fall. Same sentence. The good side is the bad side, seen later.

It also explains the recruitment, in a parenthesis people skip over: "It was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him."

Melkor's appeal was competence. He got things done, he was decisive where the Valar were slow, and to a mind that hates wasteful friction, decisiveness looks a lot like virtue.

Tolkien then traces the failure as a mix-up of ends and means. The only real good in all that planning, he says, was the good of everyone in Arda - and then, "his plans, the idea coming from his own isolated mind, became the sole object of his will, and an end, the End, in itself."

The plan stopped being for anyone else and became the point in itself.

Then there's a footnote. It might be the most counter-intuitive thing in the essay.

Sauron's ability to corrupt other minds was "a residue from the fact that his original desire for order had really envisaged the good estate, especially physical well-being, of his subjects."

His power to ruin people is a leftover of his goodness. He can persuade because some part of him genuinely wants his subjects fed and governed well, and people can hear it. Something with no good left in it couldn't talk anybody into anything.

Tolkien put the thesis of his whole legendarium in one sentence, in a long 1951 letter to a publisher. "This frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others - speedily and according to the benefactor's own plans."

Two qualifiers carry that sentence. Speedily. And according to the benefactor's own plans. It's the desire to help fast, and your way.

The same letter gives Sauron his self-justification, and it's the one every reformer uses. He began "with fair motives: the reorganising and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-earth, neglected by the gods." That's his story about himself: the Valar walked away from this continent, and somebody had to stay and run it.

Sauron believed it for a long time. In a late note on his own languages, Tolkien says Sauron's original name was Mairon - admirable, excellent, splendid - and that others altered it after Melkor suborned him. But Sauron went on calling himself Mairon the Admirable, privately, for over three thousand years, and stopped only after the downfall of Númenor. The self-image and the beautiful body died in the same year. Every name he chose for himself was a compliment.

Sauron, the Abhorred, came from his enemies.

SECTION: Eönwë's Offer and the Pardon Sauron Refused

Around the year 590 of the First Age, the War of Wrath ended. Thangorodrim was pulled down, Morgoth was chained and thrust out, and the Valar's army stood on the wreckage of a continent.

And Sauron walked in and surrendered.

"Sauron put on his fair hue again and did obeisance to Eönwë the herald of Manwë, and abjured all his evil deeds. And some hold that this was not at first falsely done, but that Sauron in truth repented, if only out of fear."

Repented. If only out of fear. Tolkien wrote both halves into one hedged sentence on purpose, and spent the rest of his life glossing one half or the other.

Then Eönwë declines to decide. "It was not within the power of Eönwë to pardon those of his own order, and he commanded Sauron to return to Aman and there receive the judgement of Manwë."

Eönwë may have been able to finish him there and then. Instead he refers the case upward, which means the offer is real - a road to Aman, a judgement at the end of it, and Manwë hasn't decided how to answer.

So here's what Sauron turned down.

"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; for under Morgoth his power had been great."

Nobody threatened him with destruction. He was facing probation: years of ordinary service, in the open, until the Valar believed him. He'd been a lord under Morgoth, and the price of coming back was being small again where everyone could see.

Sauron couldn't do it. He walked away. He hid in Middle-earth instead.

If this sounds familiar, its because the Valar had made that offer before, to somebody worse, and it had gone catastrophically wrong.

Melkor spent three ages in the Halls of Mandos, then was brought before the Valar at Valmar and begged - "vowing that if he might be made only the least of the free people of Valinor he would aid the Valar in all their works." Nienna, the Vala of pity, spoke for him. Mandos said nothing.

And Manwë let him go. The Silmarillion tells us what was in the Elder King's mind, and it's Elrond's sentence seven thousand years early, almost word for word.

"It seemed to Manwë that the evil of Melkor was cured. For Manwë was free from evil and could not comprehend it, and he knew that in the beginning, in the thought of Ilúvatar, Melkor had been even as he."

Melkor had been even as he. The wisest being in the world acted on the doctrine, the doctrine was correct, and he was still wrong.

What were the consequences? Well, they were not minor.

The Two Trees killed. The Silmarils stolen. Finwë murdered on his own doorstep, the first killing in Valinor. The Noldor in rebellion, the Kinslaying at Alqualondë, and six hundred years of war that ended with Beleriand disappearing to the bottom of the sea.

So this approach has a body count. It's a dangerous idea in Tolkien rather than a comfortable one, already misapplied at the highest level by the being least equipped to see it coming. Manwë was free from evil and could not comprehend it. Goodness as a blind spot.

And still the Valar didn't abandon the principle. That's the part that gets me. Six hundred years after the Darkening of Valinor, Eönwë is standing on the ruin of Beleriand with Morgoth's chief lieutenant kneeling in front of him, and the policy is still mercy. Manwë, Tolkien says, "had commanded Sauron to come before him for judgement, but had left room for repentance and ultimate rehabilitation." The procedure had tightened, but the principle hadn't moved. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice though?

And it does work, at least once. Melkor offered Ossë, a Maia and a vassal of Ulmo, the whole realm and power of the sea. Ossë took it, and the tumults he raised wrecked coastlines. Then Uinen restrained him and brought him before Ulmo, "and he was pardoned and returned to his allegiance, to which he has remained faithful."

And then Tolkien adds the words that make the system honest. "For the most part; for the delight in violence has never wholly departed from him."

Ossë is Sauron's road not taken. A servant of Melkor did turn back, was forgiven, and stayed loyal - with a scar that never healed. Coming back is possible here, and it leaves a mark.

The cleanest comparison is a Vala. Aulë committed something very like Sauron's crime - impatient for the Children of Ilúvatar, he made the Dwarves in secret, before their time, without permission. Caught in the act, he said this: "And in my impatience I have fallen into folly... But should I not rather destroy the work of my presumption?" Then he raised a hammer over his own creation, weeping, and Ilúvatar stopped his hand - "because of his humility."

Tolkien retold that scene in a 1958 letter he never sent, and the wording is the giveaway. Aulë "humbled himself and asked for pardon." Set that beside the sentence about Sauron from the Hastings letter: he "could not face the humiliation of recantation, and suing for pardon." Same root, four years apart, opposite endings. Humility, and humiliation.

Morgoth is the one being Tolkien puts past the door entirely - "there was no repentance or possibility of it." Sauron never gets that verdict. Tolkien keeps him, deliberately, on the near side of the line.

SECTION: Why Sauron Had to Ask Permission

All of this comes with a practical consequence, and it's what makes Sauron dangerous.

If the dark can't create, and can't reach into a free will and flip it, then it's stuck in the persuasion business. It has to be invited in. Like a vampire. Almost everything Sauron achieved, he achieved by getting somebody to say yes.

Tolkien gives us the underlying rule as a general law, in a 1958 letter about power. "A man who wishes to exert 'power' must have subjects, who are not himself. But he then depends on them."

That's a tyrant's structural problem. A nihilist needs nobody. A ruler needs a realm, and a realm is other people who have to be brought along. The part of Sauron that still wanted an ordered world with working subjects in it is the part that made him need consent.

And that's what Sauron spent his best centuries doing. Around twelve hundred of the Second Age he came to the Elves of Eriador in a fair form, calling himself Annatar, Lord of Gifts - and Aulendil, devoted to the service of Aulë. He introduced himself as the Smith's man.

His pitch reads like a real-estate development proposal. "Wherefore should Middle-earth remain for ever desolate and dark, whereas the Elves could make it as fair as Eressëa, nay even as Valinor?... Is it not then our task to labour together for its enrichment?"

Without having the context, that's unobjectionable. Tolkien explained why it worked: "his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands." Partly together. The lie wasn't a lie all the way down, which is what made it strong. Tolkien tells us the real story too - "it was really a veiled attack on the gods."

One land said no. Lindon refused Sauron entry: "Gil-galad and Elrond doubted him and his fair-seeming, and though they knew not who in truth he was they would not admit him to that land." Elrond never met Annatar. He just declined to open the door - and Sauron knew whose door it was, because he named Elrond in his recruiting speech to everyone else.

Eregion's doors were more welcoming.

I wouldn't confuse this as a portrait of a misunderstood idealist. Here's what happened in Eregion when persuasion ran out. Celebrimbor withstood Sauron on the steps of the great door of the Mírdain and was taken alive. "Then Celebrimbor was put to torment, and Sauron learned from him where the Seven were bestowed." About the Three he learned nothing, "and he had him put to death." Then, "bearing as a banner Celebrimbor's body hung upon a pole, shot through with Orc-arrows, he turned upon the forces of Elrond."

That's the same Sauron who asks for things politely. Tolkien's own note: Sauron "endeavoured to keep distinct his two sides: enemy and tempter."

Which brings us to what might be the most flawless victory in the legendarium. Sauron took the greatest kingdom of Men without fighting a battle for it.

In thirty-two sixty-one of the Second Age, Ar-Pharazôn landed at Umbar with a host so overwhelming that Sauron's own servants deserted him. And Sauron came out of Barad-dûr and "made no offer of battle." The Akallabêth is clear this was a decision: "he was crafty, well skilled to gain what he would by subtlety when force might not avail. Therefore he humbled himself before Ar-Pharazôn and smoothed his tongue; and men wondered, for all that he said seemed fair and wise."

He gave himself up. In front of a mortal king.

Sauron couldn't do it in front of Manwë, where it would have cost him a term of honest service and given him his life back. But he could do it in front of Ar-Pharazôn, where it cost him nothing and bought him passage. Humility, for Sauron, was always a tactic. Tolkien was blunt about it: "Ar-Pharazôn conquered a terrified Sauron's subjects, not Sauron. Sauron's personal surrender was voluntary and cunning: he got free transport to Numenor."

Then there's the timetable. Sauron arrives as a prisoner in thirty-two sixty-two, and the Tale of Years covers what follows with a single entry: thirty-two sixty-two to thirty-three ten.

"Sauron seduces the King and corrupts the Númenóreans."

Fifty-seven years of patient work on one man and one culture. Within three years, Sauron was invited into the King's secret counsels, and every councillor was fawning on him except one - Amandil, lord of Andúnië. Amandil was Elendil's father. The line that eventually cut the Ring off Sauron's hand runs straight from the only man who didn't fawn.

Tolkien wrote down the method, in some ofthe plainest language he ever used. "To wean one of the God-fearing from their allegiance it is best to propound another unseen object of allegiance and another hope of benefits; propound to him a Lord who will sanction what he desires and not forbid it."

Give the man a god who says yes.

SECTION: Where the Doctrine Breaks: Orcs and Ungoliant

Everything so far has been the case for Elrond's claim. So let's take the other side, because Tolkien could never quite make it cover his own world, and he knew it, and as with every rule, there are exceptions.

Start with the orcs...

The problem is easy to state and impossible to solve. In Tolkien's world a creature with a fëa - a soul, the rational spirit - has free will, so it can always in principle turn back. A creature without one can't be guilty of anything. No more than a wolf can. So if orcs kept their souls, they can't be past saving, and the heroes have spent three books killing thousands of beings who could have come back. And if orcs lost their souls, they can't be blamed for what they do, and the war stops being a moral event at all.

Tolkien went round and round on this in the mid-to-late fifties, in drafts he never finished. He tried orcs as corrupted Elves, which is the version that made it into the published Silmarillion. He tried them as beasts with speech, animals Morgoth had deformed and taught to talk like parrots, with nothing rational inside. He tried them as a mixture of Elves and Men, and as corrupted Men. Every solution broke something else already in print. Christopher Tolkien's summary says a lot here: his father "saw the problem, and collected parts of a solution. He did not, however, assemble the parts."

The claim is easy for one fallen angel. It's very hard for a species bred for war and who has heroes kill them by the thousand.

Then there's Ungoliant, and Tolkien's handling of her is a small masterpiece of hedging. She comes out of the dark to help Melkor kill the Two Trees, drinks the light, then turns on him - and the Silmarillion refuses to say where she came from. "The Eldar knew not whence she came; but some have said that in ages long before she descended from the darkness that lies about Arda."

Some have said.

We covered this deeply in an episode about Ungoliant.

In the earliest version, written around 1919, the uncertainty feels scarier. There the Valar don't know Ungoliant's origin either, and the text floats the idea that she was never made at all - that she has simply always been. If that had stayed, Tolkien would have an evil in his world with no beginning, which blows his whole mindset apart. Over the following decades he narrowed the ignorance from the Valar down to the Elves, and Ungoliant became a Maia whose fall nobody happened to witness. That's Tolkien tightening of the doctrine over forty years. Not really a hole he missed.

There's a third crack, in his own hand. In that same 1956 letter, a sentence after the Zero line, Tolkien writes: "Satan fell. In my myth Morgoth fell before Creation of the physical world."

Before Creation. So nothing within the world's history began wicked, but the first fall happened before the history started. Elrond's sentence covers everything in the world and doesn't quite reach the world's own origin story.

And then the Ring, which might be the biggest problem of all, because Elrond brings it up himself. Four sentences before he says nothing is evil in the beginning, he says the Ring "is altogether evil." Altogether. In one speech, the same man says nothing begins wicked and that the object on the table is rotten through and through.

You can defend it. The Ring is gold and Sauron's own power, and both began clean, so its evil is borrowed rather than original. But the story treats the Ring as something with a will, pressing on Frodo from outside, and at the Cracks of Doom that pressure simply wins.

People have argued about this for decades, and the usual verdict is that Tolkien holds two incompatible theories of evil at once and never picks. One says evil is an absence, something gone wrong inside a person. The other says it's a real external force pushing on the world. The debate rages on...

SECTION: How Would Elrond Know Any of This?

So that leaves us with a final, more meta, question. We do know Sauron was good once. Tolkien answers that saying: Sauron "was of course not evil in origin."

The real question is the one that gets asked less. How would Elrond know?

Elrond is stating a law that covers every created thing in existence, and stating it as settled fact in the middle of an argument about who gets to hold a weapon. So what's he standing on?

Tolkien did think about this. In the same essay he stops the philosophy and describes what kind of document we're actually holding. "It has to be remembered that the mythology is represented as being two stages removed from a true record. It is based first upon Elvish records and lore about the Valar; and these have reached us, fragmentarily, only through relics of Númenórean traditions."

Two stages removed. Elves writing about the Powers, then Men copying the Elves.

And Tolkien doesn't stop there. The second stage is compromised: the Númenórean tradition "could not altogether escape the darkening of the picture due to the hostility of the rebellious Númenóreans to the Valar." He says the damage shows in the text - when the Valar look selfish and idle, that's the distortion, and "we are all in some degree affected by the shadow and lies of their Enemy, the Calumniator."

The author is telling us his own scripture is a translation of a translation, made by people with a grievance.

There is a harder limit, that record-keeping can't get around. In the same essay Tolkien lays down a rule about minds. "No one, not even one of the Valar, can read the mind of other equal beings... indeed the innermost being of all other minds, great and small, was hidden from him."

Nobody in Arda can look inside Sauron. Not Elrond. Not Gandalf. Not Manwë, who is the reason Melkor got out of Mandos. The interior of another rational being is sealed, by design, at every level of creation. So "even Sauron was not so" is a claim nobody was in a position to check.

And Elrond's own footing is mixed. He's the archivist, and the history of the Rings is in his books in his own hand. He's an eyewitness to the whole second half of the Second Age - Eregion, Imladris, the Last Alliance, Sauron's hand and the Ring coming off it. Nobody in that room has better sources.

But Elrond never saw Sauron in fair form. Lindon shut the gate. What Elrond actually saw of Sauron was a burned city, a friend's body carried on a pole, and a battlefield in front of Barad-dûr where his king died.

So he's doing something other than testifying about Sauron's inner life. He's stating a law he believes governs everything ever made, and staking the last free peoples of the world on it, with no way to verify it.

That's not a fact he inherited. It's a bet he's making.

And this goes both ways. If the law holds, the Ring has to go in the fire, because anyone who takes it ends where Sauron ended. If the law fails - if some things really are bad all the way down - then Boromir is right, the Ring is a tool like any other, and the sensible move is to use it on the enemy.

Tolkien never lets anyone settle it. He put the doctrine in the mouth of a hobbit and an Ent, and in the mind of the Elder King. He wrote its cost into the pardon that killed the Two Trees. Tolkien wrote the exceptions and couldn't resolve them, and he handed his most quoted line about evil to a character who couldn't verify it.

And so, whether Sauron was ever good has a short answer. Yes.

Did anybody really know the answer to that question though? I'm not sure. The question remains right where Tolkien left it. In a room in Rivendell, with a ring on the table, and Elrond saying the one thing that lets him refuse it.