- by Owen Morton
Good day to you all. I have today the solution to a problem that has been puzzling me for some considerable while: who was Sauron?
Sauron is, of course, the big baddy from The Lord of the Rings, that fiery eye that hovers at the top of his tower, the one that makes Frodo put on that stupid glassy-eyed look at each and every opportunity. But before he was the eye, he was that gentleman who wears the great big suit of armour at the very start of the first film, and it is that Sauron which I wish to discuss today.
The Sauron to which I refer is surprisingly difficult to find a picture of on the internet, and the best I was able to come up with was the picture that you see above this paragraph, which is actually of the Sauron action figure. (I wonder how long it'll be until they release an action figure of the eye version of Sauron.) But this picture will suffice for our purposes, which is, of course, to identify who Sauron was and exactly what his motivation was.
Okay, well, if you read the Silmarillion (which is not an easy read, and is not something that I have read), or if you read one of the numerous websites that attempts to summarise the Silmarillion into something not so bloody boring, you will find a vague explanation of Sauron's identity. I quote from the 'Encyclopedia of Arda':
"Originally a Maia of Aulė's people, Sauron was early corrupted by Melkor and became his most trusted lieutenant. In the Wars of Beleriand, Sauron was the most feared of Morgoth's servants, but after the War of Wrath and the expulsion of the first Dark Lord, Sauron rose to become the greatest enemy of Elves and Men in the Second and Third Ages."
That doesn't mean an awful lot to me, but I'm sure it's a satisfactory explanation to some people. Unfortunately, it still doesn't really tell us anything, because we don't know what a Maia was. The Encyclopedia of Arda informs us that these were "spirits of lesser stature than the Valar (though they were still powerful) who were known as the Maiar." Okay. Basically, noncorporeal lifeforms, yes? This fits with the great big eye on top of the tower, since he doesn't have a physical body there. But the Sauron to which I refer does have a body, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to make an action figure out of it.
And Sauron's motivation is mysterious, isn't it? Yes, he wants to conquer Middle Earth, but what on earth for? What does a great big eye want from Middle Earth anyway? And of course, the only other person I know who goes about attacking mythical planets with a complete lack of motivation is ... Skeletor! We all know he has very little to gain from his activities other than being beaten up by He-Man, even if he wins.
So Skeletor is very like Sauron, except that Sauron actually comes close to winning on at least one occasion. Probably because Aragorn is a bit of a wimp compared to He-Man. The conclusion being that after Sauron's major defeat in Middle Earth, he completely lost his mind, dressed up as some idiot skeleton in a blue jumpsuit, and ran away to another planet where he lived out the remainder of his days bossing even stupider people about and trying to conquer some stupid castle for no very good reason. Such is the eventual fate of all would-be world dominators, I'm sure.