# Sauron's Body



## Erestor Arcamen (Sep 11, 2018)

It's been a while since I've asked a question in here .

I was reading an *article* from Michael Martinez (who I think may be banned from TTF, though I could be wrong). I never really liked the way Sauron went out with a bang in PJ's movie. What do you think became of Sauron's body? Why would he create a new body with only nine fingers? I'm assuming Gollum didn't know the entire details of the Last Alliance so wouldn't have known Isildur cut the Ring from Sauron's finger and been able to describe his hand as missing a finger.



> *'He has only four on the Black Hand, *but they are enough.'



Also, do you agree with Mr. Martinez's order of events if the body was still intact after his "death" and then cast into the fire?



> Sauron attacked Gil-galad on Mount Doom, slaying Gil-galad
> Elendil attacked Sauron, mortally wounding him
> Sauron retaliated against Elendil, slaying him
> Elrond, Cirdan, and Isildur came up as Sauron died
> ...


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## Miguel (Sep 11, 2018)

I'd like to think the 9 finger thing had something to do with the Nazgûl to try to make sense out of it, or as a symbolic reminder to himself that he had to regain the one ring.


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## Alcuin (Sep 11, 2018)

Elrond and Círdan were quite aware that Sauron was a Maia. They had to have planned how to deal with Sauron prior to the opening of the War of the Last Alliance, and that planning was surely done in concert with the Noldor who knew and had dealt with Maiar and Valar in Valinor, Glorfindel and Galadriel among them. They must have been aware that they could only “unhouse” Sauron, not destroy him.


Sauron had already been unhoused once, and that relatively recent when Isildur took his Ring. When Númenor was destroyed, so was Sauron’s original body. He returned to Middle-earth with his Ruling Ring (how Tolkien does not say, though he notes it), which prevented his power from being scattered: this is how he was able to rebuild a new body, an avatar if you prefer.


Elrond had been in close contact in Rivendell with the surviving Mírdain, the Noldorin Ring-smiths of Eregion, for 1600 years. He knew about their making, and probably understood that the only way to dispose of Sauron was to destroy his Ring: at least, if anyone in Middle-earth knew it, Elrond was the one in the best position to know it. I think that’s why he and Círdan so urgently pressed upon Isildur to destroy it.


In “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” in _Silmarillion_, Tolkien puts into Isildur’s mouth the words,


> This I will have as weregild for my father’s death, and my brother’s. Was it not I that dealt the Enemy his death-blow?


The death-blow was not rolling Sauron’s body into the lava: that isn’t a blow. It is surely the strike Isildur made with the hilt-shard of his father’s sword Narsil.


> …Sauron … was thrown down, and with the hilt-shard of Narsil Isildur cut the Ruling Ring from the hand of Sauron and took it for his own. Then Sauron was for that time vanquished, and he forsook his body, and his spirit fled far away and hid in waste places; and he took no visible shape again for many long years.


It sure sounds as if once Isildur cut the Ring from Sauron’s hand and seized the Ring for himself, Sauron’s body was also destroyed: it fell apart, dissolved, vanished, decayed, what have you.


Consider for a moment Saruman’s body when Wormtongue cut his throat at Bag End: it deteriorated in a moment to withered flesh and bones, all its years exposed at once, while Saruman’s spirit appeared as “a grey mist …, … rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure”. I think the Valar themselves embodied Istari, so Saruman had a physical body not entirely of his own making: when he was disembodied, what he did not make was left behind.


And when Huan the Hound of Valinor defeated Wolf-Sauron, Lúthien threatened to have Huan unhouse Sauron. At that time, before Númenor, Sauron could still shift shape.


So the question is, is there anything left of a Maia’s body after the Maia is driven out of it? Would it not rapidly decay or deteriorate? Men and Elves don’t make their own bodies, their own _hröa_ so that when their _fëar_ depart, the _hröa_ remains. But a Maia is by nature a spiritual creature: in the sense of Elves and Men, pure _fëa_. The Maiar form their own bodies. When the spirit or if you will the _fëa_ of a Maia departs, will not the body the Maia made with its innate power swiftly vanish?


My thinking is that when Isildur cut the Ring from Sauron’s hand, “Sauron was … vanquished, … forsook his body, and his spirit fled far away,” and Sauron’s body soon vanished on its own. There was soon no physical residue left behind except the clothes and armor and weapons he bore that were made of the physical stuff of Arda. Otherwise, surely Elves or Men could recover the broken body and accoutrements of Durin’s Bane after Gandalf threw it from the peak of Celebdil.



Now maybe Michael Martinez is aware of writings Tolkien left behind that I am not, and maybe in those writings Tolkien describes the scenario Michael lays out. But I don’t think so. I think this is Michael’s own notion of how things worked: that Sauron left a body behind. I think he’s correct _to a point_: Sauron wasn’t “dead” _until_ Isildur cut the Ring from his hand. He was “thrown down”. If you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons, the analogy would be “he ran out of hit points”, but the Ring regenerated him, so that had the Allies left his body alone, Sauron would have been up again on his own in a few hours. Now that’s a loose analogy, and I don’t want to suggest that Tolkien was using D&D rules (especially since the game came about around the time of his death), but I think it makes clear the idea: Sauron was “vanquished” (“died”) _after_ Isildur took the Ring, and that’s why Isildur tells Elrond and Círdan, “Was it not I that dealt the Enemy his death-blow?”


Isildur cuts the Ring off Sauron’s hand and takes possession of it. Sauron abandons his body, as he was nearly forced to do with Huan the Hound, as he _was_ forced to do in Númenor, his spirit flees, and his body vanishes. Peter Jackson has Sauron’s body explode. I think it vanished.


Finally, and maybe this is a bad comparison, consider the death of the Witch-king. The Witch-king has moved physically into the wraith-world, the spirit realm. Other beings can be seen there that are not evil: Glorfindel, for instance. When Éowyn cuts off his head, his body, which had been occupying space in his clothes and armor, vanishes, and the clothes and armor and accoutrements all fall flat on the ground.


I think that’s exactly what happened to Sauron’s body when Isildur cut the Ruling Ring from his hand.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 11, 2018)

Some of those speculations by Martinez edge close to fan-fic-- unless, as Alcuin says, he has access to writings no one else seems to.

Sauron's body was _hot -- _so much so that it apparently blackened his skin. Why this would be so isn't stated; perhaps because he had become such a spirit of hate. In any case, it was enough to kill Gil-galad when he wrestled with him, and caused the Ring to burn the hand of Isildur. Whether his body, without a spirit to regulate its fires, consumed itself, as in cases of "spontaneous combustion", or slowly cooled, until it disintegrated, isn't said, but either seems to me more likely than having to roll it into the volcano. But that's _my_ fan-fic. It may have simply vanished, as Alcuin suggests, but of course, there's the matter of the Ring, which raises questions. Which I won't go into.

Saruman is another question. Maiar _normally _create their own physical forms, but the Istari were a special case; they were prohibited from revealing their power, and so came "in the guise of old men", "in shapes weak and humble". Whether they created these forms under "direction" or had them fashioned for them is another unknown, but clearly was a deliberate restriction imposed by the Valar. Maybe Alcuin is right in suggesting a "combined" creation.

His "withering" though, could be an "unnatural" effect of the many years he spent being "eaten up" by hatred and jealousy. His opposite, Gandalf, didn't wither or decay after his death on Celebdil; or at least, that was the conclusion we drew from the discussion on a recent thread. I'd suggest, however, that that imagery drew on legends of the uncorrupted bodies of saints.

Erestor's question of why the nine fingers is a reasonable one; if you can remake your body, why make a mutilated one? A hint may lie in this part of Letter 200:

_After the battle with Gilgalad and Elendil, Sauron took a long while to re-build, longer than he had done after the fall of Numenor (I suppose because each building-up used some of the inherent energy of the spirit, which might be called the "will" or the effective link between the indestructible mind and __the realization of its imagination. _ (My emphasis).

It could be that, in addition to the loss of "energy", the trauma of the loss of the Ring (into which, we must remember, he had poured much of his ancient power), together with the violent manner in which he lost it, caused a psychic "scar" of a kind, which prevented him from recreating that finger -- sort of a reverse, or mirror image, of phantom limb syndrome.


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## Miguel (Sep 11, 2018)

Alcuin said:


> Elrond and Círdan were quite aware that Sauron was a Maia. They had to have planned how to deal with Sauron prior to the opening of the War of the Last Alliance, and that planning was surely done in concert with the Noldor who knew and had dealt with Maiar and Valar in Valinor, Glorfindel and Galadriel among them. They must have been aware that they could only “unhouse” Sauron, not destroy him.
> 
> 
> Sauron had already been unhoused once, and that relatively recent when Isildur took his Ring. When Númenor was destroyed, so was Sauron’s original body. He returned to Middle-earth with his Ruling Ring (how Tolkien does not say, though he notes it), which prevented his power from being scattered: this is how he was able to rebuild a new body, an avatar if you prefer.
> ...



It seems to me that Thû was the only Maia capable of re-housing back (at will) after being physically destroyed, since apparently all the Umaiar that were defeated in the 'Years of the Trees banished from Arda, this was only because of the ring right?.

So, Sauron (with the ring) would turn into a mist after being physically broken while any other Maia would leave in this manner?:


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## Alcuin (Sep 12, 2018)

I don’t think Sauron turned to mist when Isildur cut the Ring from his hand. I think he did what the Witch-king did: I think he vanished. 

Besides Sauron and Saruman, the deaths of Gandalf, Durin’s Bane, Gothmog Lord of Balrogs (Ecthelion skewered Gothmog with the spike on his helmet during the Fall of Gondolin: presumably it looked like an old Prussian helmet), and the Balrog that attacked Glorfindel in Crissaegrim are recounted. We are not told what became of the Balrogs’ bodies, but Gandalf’s body, which I assert was (at least) not (entirely) his own work, remained on Celebdil when he abandoned it and passed into Maia death: it seems he even left Arda altogether, not returning to Valinor; and the same is true for Saruman, who seems to have departed Arda altogether. Tolkien doesn’t tell us what happened to the corpses of the Balrogs. Gandalf’s body died indeed (Tolkien confirms that in _Letter_ 156) and lay inert on the mountain-top until Eru sent his spirit back to Arda. Saruman’s body died, decayed immediately, and the Hobbits saw his spirit rise like smoke. 

Sauron had a physical body, too. I think it is safe to presume it was destroyed either when the Ring was destroyed or the immediately after when Barad-dûr was destroyed. Sauron briefly appeared as “a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky.” Then the “a great wind” blew it away. Tolkien even painted a picture of it. (Wikipedia currently sports a copy of Tolkien’s painting in its article.) That sounds very like what happened to Saruman. 

In _Letter_ 131 to Milton Waldman (the longest of Tolkien’s letters; not all of it is in _The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien_; the rest is published in Hammond & Scull’s _Reader’s Companion_), Tolkien describes the scene on Mount Doom:


> Gil-galad and Elendil are slain in the act of slaying Sauron. Isildur, Elendil’s son, cuts the ring from Sauron’s hand, and his power departs, and his spirit flees into the shadows.


“And his power departs” really tells us very little – vanishingly little, in fact. 

Perusing _Letters_ I came across _Letter_ 200, which contains this passage:


> [The Ainur] often took the form and likeness of the Children [of God (i.e., Elves and Men)]… It was thus that Sauron appeared in this shape. It is mythologically supposed that when this shape was “real”, that is a physical actuality in the physical world and not a vision transferred from mind to mind, it took some time to build up. It was then destructible like other physical organisms. But that of course did not destroy the spirit, nor dismiss it from the world to which it was bound until the end. After the battle with Gil-galad and Elendil, Sauron took a long while to re-build, longer than … after the Downfall of Númenor (I suppose because each building-up used up some of the inherent energy of the spirit, which might be called the “will” or … link between the … mind and … the realization of its imagination). The impossibility of re-building after the destruction of the Ring is sufficiently clear “mythologically”…


But again, this doesn’t specify what happens to that physical body when the spirit behind it is removed from Arda. I say the body vanishes when the spirit leaves Arda, but I cannot prove it. 

I don’t mean to pick at Michael – he’s _very_ knowledgeable – but I rather think Sauron, whom I presume fought with a mace as did Morgoth his master (so did the Witch-king at Pelennor), clobbered Elendil, who died and fell on his sword, breaking it, but was then skewered by Gil-galad with his spear Aeglos, who burned to death pressing home his attack. Sauron collapsed, and while he was down, Isildur came up and cut away his Ring with the hilt-shard of Narsil: the Elves must have explained to Elendil and his sons the significance of the Rings of Power. In fact, I strongly suspect the Ring-rhyme, _Three rings for the Elven-kings &tc_, is a rhyme of lore from Arnor. After all, the Mírdain of Eregion didn’t make nine rings for Men or seven for Dwarves: they made all the Rings of Power for themselves. But again, maybe Michael Martinez is aware of some writing by Tolkien that I am not: I’ve learned much from him. 

I haven’t thought of Kull in decades.

I’m sorry, *Squint-eyed Southerner*, but I was so focused on replying to *Miguel* I overlooked this.


Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Sauron's body was _hot -- _… Why this would be so isn't stated; perhaps because he had become such a spirit of hate. In any case, it was enough to kill Gil-galad when he wrestled with him, and caused the Ring to burn the hand of Isildur. Whether his body, without a spirit to regulate its fires, consumed itself, as in cases of "spontaneous combustion", or slowly cooled, until it disintegrated, isn't said, but either seems to me more likely than having to roll it into the volcano.


I’d go with consumed and be satisfied. The Balrogs could go the same way. If we’re not told, we’re speculating anyway. 

The Balrogs are demons, fallen angels. They’re filled with the destructive fire of Morgoth. (“Flame of Udûn,” i.e., of hell.) On his return from Númenor, Sauron can only take a form similar to (but not identical to) those of the Balrogs. 




Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> there's the matter of the Ring, which raises questions. Which I won't go into.


The Ring is why Sauron cannot be altogether vanquished: it holds his spirit just as the needle holds the spirit of the sorcerer Koschei the Deathless. One of the stories of Koschei appears in Andrew Lang’s _The Red Fairy Book_, which Tolkien kept on his bookshelf. _The Red Fairy Book_ had a profound impact upon Tolkien when he was a child. Koschei is also the villain in Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 ballet _The Firebird_, arguably the most famous of Stravinsky’s works (if you have never heard the finale, you really should listen to it here! and notice Stravinsky doesn’t bother with a baton) with which Tolkien must have been familiar. 



Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Erestor's question of why the nine fingers is a reasonable one; if you can remake your body, why make a mutilated one? … It could be that, in addition to the loss of "energy", the trauma of the loss of the Ring (into which, we must remember, he had poured much of his ancient power), together with the violent manner in which he lost it, caused a psychic "scar" of a kind, which prevented him from recreating that finger -- sort of a reverse, or mirror image, of phantom limb syndrome.


I agree. I think that’s a hat-tip to mythological tradition: Sauron cannot rebuild the finger because it was the proximate cause he lost his Ring: he’s permanently damaged in that regard. 



Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Some of those speculations by Martinez edge close to fan-fic-- unless, as Alcuin says, he has access to writings no one else seems to.


Don’t tell him that! But yes, Michael often uncovers obscure material. For instance, he quotes David Salo in his essay “Where Did Aragorn Come From?”:


> There is a short but hardly legible note which Tolkien wrote for insertion into the story of Aragorn and Arwen (and which was not in the event used); it includes information about the location of the Dunedain. Because of the difficulty of the note, the information is not entirely clear, but it suggests that the Dunedain lived in woodlands between the Mitheithel and Bruinen. Source: microfilms at Marquette University, Series 3, Box 9, Folder 3.


The quote is Salo’s; Martinez cited it. He didn’t find the citation himself, Salo did; but he found Salo’s note and made it widely known, so much so that many people cite Martinez as the source, though Michael never claimed it and properly cited Salo.


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## Erestor Arcamen (Sep 12, 2018)

Thanks for the replies, they were fascinating to read. I agree that Martinez seems to "know" more than what a lot of people do and presents ideas that I've never read before in Tolkien's writing or anywhere else. It makes sens to me that the body dissolved when he was vanquished because the spirit that created it/was holding it together fled so what's there to keep it intact?


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 12, 2018)

So Alcuin, does Martinez present documentary evidence of the agreement to destroy Sauron's body by throwing it into the fire? It would seem from your post that he doesn't. In which case, his ideas would come under the same definition as ours: speculation.

I'd also characterize one of his other points differently, although it might be thought a difference merely of semantics: Isildur _claimed_ the Ring, certainly, but I wouldn't necessarily say that he _"succumbed"_ to it. The difference may seem slight, but, although he may have learned something of it from the Elves, he, unlike they, had not been directly affected by it, as they had been. Nor had he ever seen it before -- as, indeed, they had not -- but they had felt its power, in a very direct manner, as they no doubt had felt Sauron begin to "see and govern the very thoughts of those that wore them".

I set out my reasons for Isildur's claiming the Ring on another thread, so I won't repeat them here, but I feel that the somewhat automatic assumption that anyone who takes or accepts the Ring has "succumbed" to it leads to what I called the "black hole" concept of the Ring: that anyone who gets close enough is "sucked in". I've seen the idea expressed on this forum and others, as well as in books on Tolkien, but it conflicts with the events of the story.

Oh, yes -- I've heard The Firebird -- another performance is always welcome, though!

PS: It's considered, by a surprisingly large segment of the classical music audience, to be the last "real" piece of classical music.


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## Erestor Arcamen (Sep 12, 2018)

From the blog post where I read this in the first place, he says this first but doesn't supply the writing from Tolkien to back it up:



> All that said, there are _two_ versions of the account of Isildur’s cutting the One Ring from Sauron’s body. Tolkien’s account is vague. He doesn’t explain where, exactly, Isildur and Sauron were when that happened. But what he does seem to say is that Sauron was already dead when Isildur took the Ring. In the movie prologue, it is Isildur’s sword-stroke that slices the Ring from Sauron’s hand, causing him to die by explosion. The film death of Sauron is very dramatic and everyone was impressed with how he ended.



And here is where he discusses Elrond and company dumping the body into the fire, emphasis mine:



> For that reason, I think that Elrond, Cirdan, and Isildur must have been faced with a problem after Sauron’s defeat: what to do with his body. If you think about it, no matter how complete Sauron’s military defeat was at the end of the Second Age, there _had_ to be some of his followers left somewhere in Middle-earth. And, in fact, the histories bear out that fact. Orcs ambushed Isildur’s 200 Númenoreans as they marched back toward Rivendell. And other evil creatures survived elsewhere, too. Hence, it was vital that no trace of Sauron remain anywhere in Middle-earth.
> 
> *And for that reason I believe (but cannot prove in any way) that Tolkien envisioned that Elrond, Cirdan, and Isildur (and perhaps Thranduil and Amroth for good measure) must have sent or conveyed Sauron’s body to the Fire.* The Sammath Naur might have been the only place where they could reasonably dispose of Sauron’s remains. Sure, Sauron could have turned to ash on the battlefield. There is some precedent for that in the stories. But if you assume that they had to dispose of Sauron’s body then Isildur’s decision makes a little bit more sense.



So really it's his own speculation that the body was sent to the furnace.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Sep 12, 2018)

OK, that confirms it -- thanks!

Edit: BTW, I meant to add something to my first post concerning the Witch-King, which could also (I think) apply to Saruman. Since that post has already been responded to, I append it here: in _Author of the Century,_ Shippey has a very interesting and suggestive discussion of the etymology of the word "wraith", and the implications of the concept of "wraithing". I highly recommend a read.



Alcuin said:


> Ecthelion skewered Gothmog with the spike on his helmet during the Fall of Gondolin: presumably it looked like an old Prussian helmet



Oh, no -- now you've got this picture of Ecthelion "stuck" in my head!


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## Miguel (Jun 1, 2019)

Gorthauro prepares to meet Huan:
_





_

A traditional animation format for a _QuentaSil _might work better than anything else.


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