Silm fandom is probably the least concerned fandom of all (that I know of) when it comes to such relationships; but I’ve seen TONS of fanworks where both Maedhros and Fingon are judged by their families for their “incest” or something. Or not judged, but somebody still comments on it. But would it had been a problem in canon?
We have some examples of cousins in love. Or at least one-sided love. Like Maeglin and Idril.
Cousins. Too close to marry. “The Eldar wedded not with kin so near“. That’s a problem. Okay.
We also know that in Tolkien’s later writings Celeborn was not from Doriath, but a Telerin Elf, grandson of Olwё. He still married Galadriel, tho, and left Aman with her.
Aaaand they’re cousins. Apparently, that’s not a problem now. So what do “Laws and Customs” say about close kin relationships?
…okay then. So cousins CAN marry (like Galadriel and Celeborn); and I suppose the biggest problem in case of Idril and Maeglin was Idril’s strong dislike of the latter. And Maedhros and Fingon are not even first cousins, they’re… half-cousins? Second cousins? Idk how this mess is called.
We also have another example, also with Fёanor’ and Fingolfin’s children. It is said that Aredhel “was often in the company of the sons of Fëanor, her kin; but to none was her heart’s love given.“ Like. Maybe my English is too bad, but to me this phrase looks like she could have a relationship with one of them, but didn’t want to.
So what I’ve learned today is that while people on Tumblr have a really harsh policy towards incest, Elves didn’t give too much shit. Also Russingon is canon now, I suppose.
Imagine, if you will, Angband. You got your impregnable underground base with a good ol’ industrial slag heap the size of three mountains on top. One Dark Lord. His lieutenant, sometimes, when he’s not working out of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. 5-7 Balrogs. A handful of dragons. Probably a few dozen werewolves and vampires and numerous other critters. An untold number of orcs. And thralls. Hundreds to thousands of thralls. Now my question is: how? WHAT’S KEEPING THEM ALL ALIVE??? At least temporarily. New orcs can be bred, new thralls can be captured, but dragons are probably heckin expensive to replace, ditto for werewolves, and vampires need, y’know, blood. In other words, what do they eat? A few nights ago, my boyfriend and I had a brainstorming session. We came up with a list of possibilities.
1. The most realistic explanation is that Angband has some kind of facilities for producing all the food it needs. Greenhouses are Things That Exist, and if anyone in Arda has the tech/magic to build them, Melkor does. Problem is: rolling underground fields of grain and cabbages and turnips put a slight damper on Angband’s image as a Formidable Dungeon. Also crops and greenhouses require someone to tend them, which means there must have been thousands of orcs or slaves or prisoners or somebody deployed to nourish baby plants with love and care. Probably this is what they made Maedhros do, sometime between waterboarding him and hanging him up by the wrist on the wall of Thangorodrim. If only because I get a kick out of imagining Maedhros wearing a straw hat and overalls as he resentfully waters Sauron’s rhubarb.
Now you might point out that orcs seem to be carnivorous. Why would they be eating vegetables? Maybe so, but that wouldn’t make the problem go away. Then we’re looking at livestock, and livestock needs to be kept alive somehow. Melkor’s Evil Cows would need a steady diet of Evil Corn.
Or maybe Angband took a weird Science Fiction turn, and all its food is grown in labs. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Some kind of pink sludge is cooked up in pits out of some chemical cocktail and ladled out for all the orcs in the mess hall. Tasty.
2. Food is imported from somewhere. The sheer scale of Angband and its isolation from the rest of Beleriand would make this difficult. Not to mention Iron Age technological limitations. You’d need a heck of a supply line stretching from Angband to the food-producing regions of southern Beleriand, and I don’t think the elves would take too kindly to this. This explanation also produces in my mind the image of Sauron sneaking in disguise to the farmer’s market in Hithlum to buy 5,000,000,000 cherry tomatoes.
3. It’s eat or be eaten in this dog of a world. When an orc or thrall dies, they get cooked up and fed to everyone else. While I can’t think of anything more horrifying than being forced to choose between cannibalism and starvation, something tells me this is not a reliable long-term strategy. Starved prisoners are not very nutritious. Also if you require a significant portion of your population to be constantly dying in order to keep the rest of your population alive…I think you’ll run into problems.
4. Some people don’t need to eat. Melkor and Sauron and at least a few other members of the gang are spirits. Maybe they can metabolize the air, or the energy of the universe, or something, which in my childish mind produces images of Melkor and Mairon doing this:
Yes. The Silmarillion and Spongebob Squarepants have just been united in unholy matrimony.
This is still a problem, however. Morgoth and Sauron might not need to eat, but everyone else does.
5. Finally. They all subsist entirely on Tide Pods.
what she means: the words “christmas tree” are used in the hobbit, and since we know that bilbo is the author of the hobbit, hobbits must have christmas which means there must be a middle earth jesus. but hobbits seem to be the only ones who have the concept of christmas which means it was probably a hobbit jesus. but frodo says in return of the king that no hobbit has ever intentionally harmed another hobbit so who crucified hobbit jesus?? were there other hobbit incarnations of religious figures?? was there hobbit moses?? did jrr tolkien even think about this at all??
Wait wait I might actually have an answer
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore
Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude
But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work
This is the version we know and love today
BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore
If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found
To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit
The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior
Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies
So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written
Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah
Not only all that, but Tolkien was also working within a frame narrative that he wasn’t the real author, but a translator of older manuscripts; so, in-universe, the published The Hobbit isn’t actually Bilbo’s book, but rather Tolkien’s copy of an older copy of an older copy of an older copy of Bilbo’s book. So when errors and anachronisms came up, he would leave them there instead of fixing them, and he may have even put some in intentionally; what we’re supposed to get from the “Christmas tree” bit is that the first scribe to translate the book from Westroni to English couldn’t come up with an accurate analogue for whatever hobbits do at midwinter.
Yes. Another example of tolkien doing this is him using, for instance, Old High Gothic to represent Rohirric – not because the people of Rohan actually spoke that language, but because Old High Gothic had the same relationship with English that Rohirric had with Westron (Which is the Common Language spoken in the West of Middle-Earth). There’s tons of that stuff in the book.
Like, Merry and Pippin’s real names (In Westron) are Kalimac Brandagamba and Razanur Tûk, respectively (to pick just one example of this). Tolkien changed their names in English to names which would give us English-speakers the same kind of feeling as those names would to a Westron-speaker. Lord of the Rings is so much deeper than most readers realise.
tolkein’s entire oevre is just one epic in-joke with the oxford linguistics department imo
One of the things in Tolkien’s works I will be forever disappointed in is the seduction of Mairon.
I mean, this guy is scarily loyal to his master, even when his master is no longer there; morever, he is genuinely evil. This is the guy that caused the fall of Numenor for the sole purpose of a chance to save his former master, and then laughed as the entire island descended into the sea. This is the guy that managed to convince the Numenorians to make a church for Melkor and make human sacrifices of their own people there. Granted, the Numenorians were already leaning towards their fall all by themselves and someone could argue that all Sauron did was give them a push.
But seriously how can the descendant of the great kings think that human sacrifices, proposed by a very powerful Dark Lord, could ever be a good idea?
Anyway, my point is that Sauron went to unbelievable lengths to bring Melkor back, because he was that loyal to him. In stories,usually when you have an all powerful Dark Lord and his lieutenant, the lieutnant is trying to do everything to get rid of his master and take his throne kind of like with kings and their advisors, Numenor anyone?
But not Sauron.
Sauron tries to bring his master back. Why? Because he’s evil, and because he’s loyal to the point of damnation. He practically died at the fall of Numenor.
So what happened? Was Melkor really just that attractive and persuative? Loyalty seems to be the very definition of Sauron/Mairon, so what happened in Almaren while he was in the service of Aule that made him change sides so completely?What was it?
Most heroes in Tolkien’s legendarium are motivated by the same thing – it comes back to love in one form or another. Fingon loves Maedhros. Lúthien loves Beren. Frodo loves the Shire. Sam, Merry, and Pippin love Frodo. For love, people will dare the impossible. They will risk their own bodies and lives.
Sauron may be evil, but that doesn’t mean he can’t love. In going to unbelievable lengths to bring Melkor back, he’s doing exactly what we see the heroes do. If he had been doing it for anyone but Morgoth, we’d be cheering him on.
This. Absolutely this.
And he’s such a fascinating character for it.
I can’t stop thinking about the ‘Grond’ scene in the LoTR movies. That’s a perfect example of Sauron’s loyalty to his master. The way those orcs chanted the battering ram’s name as it was brought into battle always gives me goosebumps. It had the precise effect Sauron wished for: it evoked the memory of Melkor’s own ancient weapon, striking fear and terror into the hearts of the enemies.
And can we take a moment to appreciate Ian McKellen’s performance in that particular scene? Gandalf knows who Grond was and what happened when Morgoth wielded it in battle, so the look on his face upon hearing that name is pure gold.
And also, Melkor offered Mairon power. He made him lieutenant. Second in command. Protege. That’s a big deal. And to someone whose name means “admirable” and who longs to see his ideas come to life, this is important. Melkor was Mairon’s master, but he allowed Mairon to make choices and act and have a say (we know that Sauron had a part in all Melkor’s works and we see him running his own area in the whole Beren and Luthien story). Under Aule, Mairon was just a single cog who had to do what he was told. Naturally, Mairon being who he is, he chafed under that.
It isn’t all explicit in canon, but I think there are a lot of things you can figure out from what we see of the characters in canon. We know some things about who Mairon is and also who Melkor is. We know things about their relationship. We can extrapolate from there (though different people may take it in different directions). For me, it is pretty clear that Melkor shared power with Mairon and that Mairon was the one most like him. It is also clear to me that Mairon enjoyed evil. Once he switched sides, he was happy in everything he did. So that can’t have come out of nowhere. Melkor must have seen something in Mairon that spoke to him.
I wonder if Tolkien knew just how much he gave us with that one line about Sauron having a part in all of Melkor’s works.
I mean, some things Melkor did were ridiculously petty and not remotely useful for the cause. And we don’t ever see Mairon being quite that petty on his own. And yet, Mairon is like “you want it, I’m in. Sign me up.” That’s a strong bond. That’s devotion. That’s love.
I think I realized why Sauron works as a villain, at least for me.
Sauron is often seen as the prototypical example of the Dark Lord, the excruciatingly boring stock villain of classic high fantasy. He’s the dark component of a reductive black-and-white morality. He sits in a tower and wants to conquer and/or destroy everything. His tools, his servants, his lands are all foul, ugly, barren and evil. No real motivation, no personality to speak of. (Especially in contrast to the secondary villains and anti-villains in LOTR, who all have their stories and all but overflow with personality.)
Real Tolkien buffs, the ones who are buffer than me, will tell you that Sauron has an incredibly complex backstory, mostly contained in the Silmarillion, with bits and pieces all over Tolkien’s writings. Sauron has led a long and complicated life, going by various names and identities, serving evils greater than himself, getting destroyed but surviving multiple times, doing evil, repenting, faking repentance, doing evil again, going native in various ancient civilizations then contributing to their destruction, etc. If you read all the supplementary material, piece it together and fill the gaps with your imagination, Sauron is a noble, interesting, complex villain.
Very little of that comes through in LOTR itself, but I think it doesn’t need to. I think Sauron functions as a fantastic villain in LOTR exactly because we know so very little about him. Sauron has no POV chapter, except for a few paragraphs, and no POV characters ever encounter Sauron in a direct and comprehensible way. He mostly acts through proxy, his captains make war for him, his proxies speak for him. The reader never feels that his characterization is insufficient, because he *has no characterization*, he’s too far away and too high up, unknowable. Mostly Sauron is spoken of in the abstract, as the ‘enemy’, as the cause of evil, not as a specific evil person to be defeated. After all, it’s pretty clear he cannot be defeated, not in person. And when someone has a real and somewhat more direct encounter with Sauron, either via a palantír or in a vision, Sauron is too powerful to register as an individual person: he is an eye, a flame, a force, a will, a seeking attention. He is too big and too close to see as a whole, he is in your head, intruding, terrible.
So the narrative places Sauron in a context where he is either a distant menace, or an immense, incomprehensible mindfuck. Although he feels emotions such as wrath or fear, and he makes cunning stratagems, he doesn’t read as a strong clever evil person, he mostly reads as a force, as sheer power that only seeks more power. And on the whole, I feel that he *is* just that: not a person, but a power-hunger itself. It is stated in text that he’s a diminished, weakened, wounded version of himself, that during his different attempts (and failures) to subjugate others, he kept losing parts of himself, first his ability to assume a pleasing form, then to embody himself at all. I get the implication that he used to be a complicated entire whole person, and his struggle for power slowly eroded him, sanding off quirks and traits and individuality, costing him his patience for beautiful craft and his interest in beautiful languages, until he could no longer even pretend to be a fellow-person and not a *power*. Until he became an creature made of, and by, his own power. He was a person but power ate him and now he’s gone: this is the threat and the lure of the ring, which Sauron made of, and for, himself. Interactions with the ring are the closest thing we come to genuine interactions with Sauron, or to insights into Sauron’s mind – and interactions with the ring are uniformly horrifying, except maybe the one time Sam is small enough and kind enough to laugh it off. And seeing that, it’s clear that the ring needs to be destroyed, and Sauron’s power needs to be destroyed, for Sauron’s sake too. Only when he’s cut off from his power can his lost houseless spirit find its way through, to redemption or even just to rest.
TLDR: I don’t usually dislike villains who seem to seek power for power’s sake, but Sauron feels like a fantastic deconstruction of that: after all, LOTR is mostly about the risk of individual people becoming corrupted by power and becoming the vehicle of mere power-seeking-power-for-power’s-sake, and Sauron is someone to whom that already happened.
Glorfindel’s battle with the balrog is hella heroic, I’m sure we all agree. But so were many of the deeds performed in the First Age. Many good and valiant people did incredible things in horrific circumstances – Glorfindel’s bestie Ecthelion also duelled a(n even tougher) balrog to the death during Gondolin’s fall. So why is Glorfindel so fucking special? Why did he get sent back?
He didn’t.
Some blond dude rocks up claiming he’s the Lord of the House of the Golden Flower and who’s gonna gainsay him? The real Glorfindel fell with his city which was, we must remember, famously isolationist. Of the survivors of Gondolin, many died when Sirion was sacked, during the War of Wrath, and the sinking of Beleriand. Of those survivors, many accepted the pardon of the Valar and returned to the West. Of those that stayed, there was that nastiness in Eregion that culminated in the Battle of the Last Alliance and a massive loss of Elven life. Who’s left to identify him?
Elrond, for all that he’s elvenwise and the descendant of Turgon and Idril, has nothing but stories to go on. Galadriel might remember the real Glorfindel from the Helcaraxë but even if she did, I’m not she and this Glorfimposter ever meet. We don’t know Erestor and Lindir’s histories and Gildor Inglorion is even more suspicious than Glorfindel. Gandalf must, surely, know who he really is, but Gandalf fucking loves not telling people shit for their own good, you know he’s in on it and laughing behind his beard.
So who is he really? The Glofimposter is undeniably mighty and an elf come out of the West. Who do we know that’s blond, hella powerful, has a grudge against Sauron, loves the shit out of mortals, and has, explicitly, been released from the Halls of Mandos (despite there supposedly being no way of knowing this)?
It’s Finrod, returned to sate his manlust. He’s assumed a false identity to avoid an awkward reunion with his sister.
so this all came from frodo being constantly mistaken for a mini elf and described as having “elvish features” so here we go
similarities between elves and hobbits include (but are not limited to)
pointed ears
love of learning
love of home
love of growing things
stealth
poetry/music making
etc
similarities between dwarves and hobbits include (but are not limited to)
love of food
love of living underground or in holes in the ground
height and build
(probably) hairy feet (will elaborate)
large feet
etc
My theory would explain why so few people know about hobbits as dwarf/elf relationships would probably be taboo, and the offspring of such a relationship was hidden in basically the corner of the world.
This does not, however, completely rule out human ancestry (though the original hobbits most likely did not have any.) It’s possible that the humans in Bree would have mixed with the hobbits. This could have been why they have shorter lifespans than Elves or Dwarves.
Some families like the Tooks would probably have human blood which would explain their height (Bullroarer Took, for example) and their love of adventuring. While the “respectable families” like the Baggins family would likely have more Elvish blood which would explain their love of their home and their desire to stay there. Bilbo came from both families which would explain both aspects of his character as well as his love of Rivendell (I mean, other than the fact that Rivendell is just a really chill place.)
Then there are the more dwarfish families like the Gamgees and the Stoors who actually grew beards. It could be that Dwarves are more used to their little Elvish relatives as they seem to have a better understanding of their culture and are more likely to be seen throughout the Shire.
Thorin once said to Bilbo, “May the hairs on your toes never fall out.” This could contribute any number of things to this theory. While it’s possible that he was simply taking a dwarfish blessing and applying to the hobbit, it’s also possible that this was just a completely unedited saying. Also within the realm of possibility is that this was an ancient hobbit blessing that had been adapted from a dwarfish one before. (As Dwarves would have been more accepting, the hobbits might have learned more of their culture.)
Another interesting thing is that hobbits are often called halflings. This could refer to either their height OR their genealogy (or both).
In conclusion, Elves are pretentious and disowned their descendants, but that’s okay because Hobbits went on to be more advanced than the Elves anyway, but that’s another talk for another day.
Anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk and reading my jargon! Feel free to add!
SAM GAMGEE IS DESCRIBED AS “LOOKING VERY MUCH LIKE A DWARF” I CRACKED THE CODE
So there’s that scene in The Two Towers where everyone’s holed up in Helm’s Deep and are super outnumbers and probably gonna die.
To bolster their forces, they decide to arm the old men (ok, fair enough) and … the young boys? Meanwhile all the women cower in the caves.
What.
Like excuse me, in what way is a nine year old peasant boy with no training, who can barely see over the battlements, and who can probably barely lift a sword … in what way is that small child a more suitable combatant than an angry peasant woman who’s been slinging haybales and taming horses and rolling big barrels of mead and lifting pigs under her arms for all thirty years of her life. At the very least she can see over the battlements and lift a weapon. Depending on her place in society she almost certainly knows how to hold a rake or a scythe or a hammer or lift logs. She knows how to butcher animals, and has likely done so many times with giant knives and gotten covered in gore and viscera. Give her a cleaver on a stick and say “have at it, ma’am.”
Nobody in Helm’s Deep should be giving a flying fuck about “gender roles” when there’s an army about to come in and slaughter them to the last child. They should be thinking strategically. And strategically, arming untrained children is a bad idea, and arming strong adults with a basic grasp of how to wield a big weapon is a good idea.
Very simple – strategic! – explanation, though not really nice either.
TL;DR:
It’s not about “women can’t fight”. It’s more about “kids can’t rebuild a kingdom”.
The idea is basically that if the desperate defense works out after all, a lot of the warriors will nonetheless be killed. Then somebody will be needed to rebuild what’s left of Rohan. This is not going to be the children, who lack the strength, the skills and probably the wisdom. Also, just possibly, the emotional stability.
Moreover, if the Kingdom of Rohan is meant to be re-established, somebody will have to produce a new generation of Rohirrim, and that’s not something the little boys can do either. Even once they hit puberty, all they can do is get someone pregnant. You need rather more females than males to repopulate a country. (Though you might probably want to send a couple of strong teenage boys along, in case there are no surviving warriors.)
So basically, at this point they hope that throwing the boys into battle will give the people with the uteruses a chance to escape and take refuge… wherever. If there are any male survivors of the battle, they can then try to find the women and restart Rohan. For both these reasons, the womens are not so much judged too weak, but rather too precious. They’re vital to preserving the blood of Rohan – ultimately, even if they end up enslaved.
So that’s the gender roles that actually are at play here, and why they think it’s a better idea to sacrifice untrained (or at least, physically weaker) boys than to send the strong women into battle.
They only get thrown into battle when there is absolutely no hope of survival.
This. The Rohirrim were thinking strategically.
They knew their women weren’t too weak or too delicate to fight.
But they also knew the battle they were facing was going to be ugly.
Knowing they will have high casualties, the Rohirrim are trying to ensure the survival of the women so that even if the death toll is high, the Rohirrim as a people will be able to rebuild. The men are more expendable, biologically speaking. You only need a few of them for reproductive purposes. But humans are not like cats or dogs – women usually only grow one new human at a time, and between pregnancy and breastfeeding, you’re looking at minimum 11-15 months between births and more likely two years or longer. (Many traditional societies recognize that pregnancies spaced too closely lead to bad outcomes for both mother and child, and ‘bad outcome’ all too often involves one or both dying.) So to rebuild a population, you want as many women of childbearing age as possible. For the Rohirrim, that means keeping the women out of battle as long as there’s any hope whatsoever of winning without them.
What about the women above childbearing age, you may ask. Those women will also be needed, as a resource for the younger women. Pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding, weaning, early childhood diseases, etc. aren’t matters of total instinct. They go smoother when you have people around who know the ins and outs, and can troubleshoot the most common problems (and may have seen some of the uncommon ones too.) Having older women around increases the odds that the younger women and their offspring survive and thrive.
Also, the movie may have milked the drama of the boys being handed swords, but those boys could still be useful. Putting them on the front line would not have been Plan A. The youngest boys would be used for lesser but still necessary tasks to free up the warriors and men in their prime. (Think medieval pages or early modern naval powder monkeys.)
In the context of Helm’s Deep, I would expect to find them running messages, ferrying supplies to and from the front line (presumably there are reserves of arrows, during the wait torches may need to be replaced and drinking water needs to be run to the men on the walls, wood needs to be kept out of flaming arrow range, but will have to be run up as needed once battle begins for shoring up walls/gates/etc…) and helping move the wounded back out of the way or slapping bandages on wounds that aren’t immediately life-threatening.
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.
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