alia-andreth:

Hi! 🙂

I actually wasn’t sure about this one.  I had to think about it…which is why it took so long in responding…sorry about that.

I think you might have a point, and that changes things.

On the one hand.  The Nazgul really don’t seem to have free will, they seem to be Sauron’s appendages.  They’re what he sends out when he can’t go in person himself, which, post his defeat in the War of the Last Alliance, is nearly everywhere.  After the end of the Second Age, I personally believe that Sauron’s physical form was extremely unstable (as well as butt ugly, but I digress); he was rather to fragile to travel widely.

In the First Age, Morgoth and Sauron had a similar kind of relationship–it seemed to be that Morgoth chilled in Angband while Sauron dealt with the troops on the ground, but Morgoth’s reasoning seems different.  He hadn’t suffered a series of crippling defeats in which his ability to take physical form was weakened, as Sauron has.  His lack of proactivity seems to be a lifestyle choice (tbh I can relate).  He doesn’t have to take care of things himself, so he doesn’t.  And Sauron seems to have a measure of free will, of control over what he does.

My objection to Sauron being a slave to Morgoth is the same as my objection to Sauron being in love with Morgoth: if this was the case, how was Sauron able to repudiate Morgoth at the end of the First Age, and why did he waffle for 1000 years before returning to work?  Granted I’ve never enslaved anyone, but that seems an undesirable situation from the perspective of the enslaver.  It certainly does not point to Sauron being an appendage of Morgoth the way the Nazgul were of him.

But you said “kind of controlled” by him, not “totally controlled,” and there are many different kinds of slavery.  To use real world analogies, which I know are the construct of cultural systems instead of some kind of magical power, but bear with me: there’s chattel slavery.  There’s the evil system used in the American South before the civil war.  There’s Russian serfdom.  There’s the relationship which the Turkish sultans had with the Janissaries, in which the Janissaries were still owned but were high-ranking slaves with powerful positions in the military and administration, even capable of controlling the sultans at times.  I think Sauron occupied an analogous position.

I think Sauron chose to serve Morgoth of his free will, or at least thought he did, and continued to believe himself free to act on his own for all time afterwards.  So.  Perhaps we’re looking at an Oath of Feanor kind of situation.  @easterlingwanderer and I had a longish thread a while back where we talked about how the Feanorians really had no way out of their oath and the only way to escape fate (more accurately, DOOOOOM) is by dying, which neither elves nor maiar are able to do.  I think now that when Sauron chose to serve Morgoth it triggered the same situation, where Sauron believed himself in control of his own actions but was nevertheless compelled to work for Morgoth and couldn’t stop even if he wanted…I’m not sure how aware of this Sauron was.  I think it was extremely important to him that he believed he was acting on his own, and if Morgoth tried to overtly enslave him he would have taken it very poorly.  And he may not have been able to free himself, but he’d certainly’ve tried to take Morgoth down with him.