# Sauron's greatest Blunder



## Parsifal (Jan 6, 2011)

There are many posts and questions about Sauron not simply guarding Mount Doom, suggesting this was an un-understandable mistake. It is clear however Sauron was convinced anyone who claimed the Ring would use it for himself. The thought that any creature could choose to destroy such a potent source of Power simply did not exist in his mind, which fits perfectly into his character

I spotted another blunder however, though on a much smaller scale, ultimately leading to his demise in sevaral ways.

Though all sides eventually found out the Ring was lost at the Gladden Fields, noone knew exactly were it was or wheter it had been found. Even after Bilbo took the Ring from Gollum, Gandalf needed a long time to even begin to suspect this could be the One Ring, though he mistrusted it from the start.

When Gollum ventured into Mordor and was captured Sauron was the first one to find out the whole truth. He now knew the entire history of the Ring after he lost it, knew were it was and had a good idea who had it.
Because of his (flawed) wisdom, that any creature would claim the Ring as his own, he set Gollum free, knowing that Gollum would never stop hunting the Ring. Gollum was no danger to Sauron ofcours, it would be much easier to take the Ring of him then of some Lord of Men or Elves, one of the Wise, or even a Great Orc. Either way, Gollum would leave behind another trail, making it easier for Sauron's hunters to locate the Ring-bearer.

In doing so however, Sauron also released his monopoly on information. He allowed Gandalf to capture Gollum and extract the same intel, and even worse, alarm the Wise of what he knew.
If he had not let Gollum go free, Gandalf would have never known for sure the Frodo's Ring was the One, and may not (or too late) have set him on his flight to Rivendell.
Even if this had happened anyway, without Gollum Frodo would still have failed at Mount Doom or even at the Black Gate, though that is all in hindsight ofcours.

Anyway, just giving the Wise a chance to find out what He knew was a magnificant blunder, and I find it hard to justify this one when measuring pro's and cons for Gollums release against each other.
Any thoughts on this?


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## Alcuin (Jan 6, 2011)

*Parsifal*, I think that’s a really good point. 

Sauron had a great deal of information: that _Baggins_ had “stolen” Gollum’s precious, that Baggins was a creature of the same sort as Gollum, that Baggins had passed with a baker’s dozen Dwarves through Mirkwood to Laketown shortly before Smaug was killed, and that Baggins was from “Shire”. Sauron’s spies could probably learn in Laketown that Baggins, in the company of Gandalf and Beorn, had returned when they came through Mirkwood. 

Now here’s the catch. How does Sauron find Baggins in _Shire_? What’s his best guess? “Shire” meant nothing whatsoever to Sauron: it was a common name for a place, not a particular name for the place, like saying someone was from “the town” in a region in which there was only one sizable town: it means something specific to the local inhabitants, but nothing to someone from outside.

Sauron himself had inhabited Dol Guldur in Mirkwood beside the Vales of Anduin: he might have known that halflings once dwelt there, had he ever paid any attention to them; the Nazgûl might have noticed; or he might have discovered this by research, sorcery, or simple guesswork: after all, that’s where Gollum was from. Besides, according to Gandalf, Sauron had previously overlooked Halflings, a pretty easy thing to do. (Pardon the pun.)

Unable to determine its location on his own, painfully aware that Saruman was hunting up and down the Vales of Anduin for the Ring (Saruman even found Isildur’s body and the chain and little box in which he had kept the Ring), Sauron released Gollum, expecting to be able to follow him, so that Gollum would lead him to Baggins. This was sometime in the year Third Age 3017. 

Shortly afterwards, Aragorn caught Gollum. He took him up the valley of the Anduin to Thranduil. Well, to Sauron, it must have seemed that “Shire” was still somewhere in the valley of the Anduin. 

Then Gandalf visited Gollum. What would Sauron think? Gandalf must be after the Ring, too! Saruman was after the Ring, and had probably already made contact with Sauron through the palantír of Orthanc. Sauron understood Saruman very well. Gandalf must be playing the same crooked game: what else could explain it? Sauron now had to act quickly, before Gandalf found “Shire” and Baggins. 

Laying careful plans, about three months before Frodo set out from Bag End, Sauron sent the Nazgûl to hunt for “Shire”, still supposing that this place and Baggins were somewhere in the valley of the Anduin. He combined this move with an attack on Osgiliath to mask his true intentions for the Nazgûl from the Wise (the Elves and the Wizards, including Saruman; as well as any Dúnedain in Gondor with whom they might be cooperating), since the fear that surrounded them could not be hidden. 

At the same time, he sent orcs to free Gollum from the Elves, but the orcs lost him in the forest before they got back to Dol Guldur. (After all, Gollum was still a hobbit, and extremely cunning.) That left the Nazgûl to hunt for “Shire” on their own.

The very first two paragraphs of “The Hunt for the Ring” in _Unfinished Tales_ read,


> …Sauron released [noparse][[/noparse]Gollum[noparse]][/noparse] and sent him forth... He did not trust Gollum, for he divined something indomitable in him, which could not be overcome … except by destroying him. But Sauron perceived the depth of Gollum's malice towards those that had “robbed” him, and guessing that he would go in search of them…, Sauron hoped that his spies would thus be led to the Ring.
> 
> …Sauron had never paid heed to the “Halflings,” even if he had heard of them, and he did not yet know where their land lay. From Gollum, even under pain, he could not get any clear account, both because Gollum indeed had no certain knowledge himself, and because what be knew he falsified. Ultimately indomitable he was, except by death, as Sauron did not fully comprehend, being himself consumed by lust for the ring. … [noparse][[/noparse]Gollum[noparse]][/noparse] dared to pretend that he believed that the land the Halflings was near to the .places where he had once dwelt beside the banks of the Gladden.


It was an easy mistake: Sauron supposed that Gollum was hiding the location of “Shire”, and so he intended to follow him home.

And he’d have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for that meddling Ranger.


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## camlost (Jan 7, 2011)

Alcuin, you say


> Sauron’s spies could probably learn in Laketown that Baggins, in the company of Gandalf and Beorn, had returned [to the Shire] when they came through Mirkwood,


but you go on to say


> Sauron now had to act quickly, before Gandalf found “Shire” and Baggins.


Which seems to be a contradiction. I think that Sauron is unsure of Gandalf having the knowledge that the ring is the one ring. He probably assumes that Gandalf will come upon this fact soon enough so he gambles by releasing Gollum believing that he will lead him to the Shire while possibly revealing the identity of the ring.


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## baragund (Jan 7, 2011)

But Sauron really did not need Gollum to lead him to the Ring. When one considers how sparsely middle-Earth was populated, it would not be all _that difficult to locate "shire" by process of elimination. Sauron could have dispatched a regiment of spies to every town, hamlet, or village from the Sea of Rhun to the Gray Havens, and from the Iron Hills to Far Harad and they would eventually come across the area where the little-folk live. Once there, it would have been easy to make discreet inquiries as to the wereabouts of "Baggins". Then, it would have been a simple matter of dispatching the Nine on their winged steeds to Hobbiton. Sauron would have regained his Ring and nobody on the White Council whould have had a clue of what was going on.

Parsifal is right. Given the above, it was a big mistake for Sauron to release Gollum. Once the interrogations reached a point where it was clear there was no more information to be had, Gollum should have been killed._


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## Alcuin (Jan 7, 2011)

I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve contradicted myself, *camlost*. In the first place, Sauron had no idea where Baggins went except that he’d left with Beorn and Gandalf. Since Beorn’s home was near the upper Anduin, Baggins was headed there, too. As for whether Gandalf knew Baggins had Sauron’s Ring, well, that might be something the wizard discovered only later: he might have been suspicious – as indeed he was! – but only later learned from his conversations with Gollum its true nature – as indeed he did! Whether Gandalf wanted the Ring for himself (Sauron’s most probable conclusion) or merely to thwart Sauron made no difference in Sauron’s reaction: either way, he had to get to Baggins before Gandalf did. He had Saruman act as his “jailor”, as was revealed in the confrontation between Saruman and Gandalf after the ruin of Isengard. I think that’s pretty much in accord with the text, and I don’t see it as a contradiction; but maybe it is. 

-

As for finding “Shire” by spies and process of elimination, “The Hunt for the Ring” gives us information on that. Saruman was misdirecting and even waylaying Sauron’s spies: he and Sauron were in a race for the Ring. Had Saruman known what Sauron had gleaned from Gollum, he’d have gotten the Ring: he already had agents in the Shire – some of Frodo’s own family, no less! 

His usual spies couldn’t sniff out the Ring, and Sauron could not trust them in any case. So he didn’t tell them exactly what he was looking for; besides, if he had, and Saruman questioned one closely – remember, he was misleading and waylaying Sauron’s servants – they would give Saruman an invaluable piece of information. So Sauron resorted to using the Nazgûl. 

In the end, *baragund*, he did exactly what you suggest: he used the Nazgûl to hunt out “Shire” by process of elimination. But there was no Internet, no long-distance telephone, no radio, no motorized vehicles, an enormous amount of territory to check, and the Nazgûl initially went in the wrong direction. They spent two months hunting up and down the Anduin – it was a reasonable place to start! halflings did live in that region for many, many centuries, and Gollum’s community had only died out in the past 500 years – and then they turned westward and visited Saruman, from whom Gandalf had just escaped. (Did Sauron know Saruman had Gandalf?) After that, they made a beeline toward Frodo.

-

There was no sense in killing Gollum. For one thing, Sauron would surely have preferred to torture him! But Gollum was valuable: Sauron believed Gollum knew where Shire was, and that Gollum would lead him to Baggins. He had a palantír, he had Orcs nearby, he had Nazgûl in Mordor and Dol Guldur, and Saruman didn’t know about it: looked like a reasonable risk with a very high payoff. 

Aragorn was the fly in that ointment: Sauron didn’t suspect anyone else was looking for Gollum, because he probably figured Baggins wasn’t looking for him and wouldn’t tell anyone about him. The Ring induced Bilbo to lie about how he got it from the very beginning, remember?

-

If you want to track down what went wrong for Sauron, I have another suggestion: it was Bilbo. He didn’t kill Gollum, which was probably what the Ring “wanted” him to do. Then he told Gandalf the truth – which was definitely not what the Ring “wanted” him to do. Finally, with Gandalf’s help, he gave it up – something Sauron never envisaged. 

That people would reject the Ring and seek to destroy it put Sauron out of reckoning. To his way of thinking, his only real risk in letting Gollum go was that Saruman would get him before he led Sauron to Shire. If Saruman could waylay Sauron’s servants, Sauron could certainly waylay Saruman’s! From his perspective, it was rational decision.


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## baragund (Jan 10, 2011)

Alcuin, you're probably right that it was not necessary or even desirable to kill Gollum. Sauron could just as easily have left him to rot in a dungeon for the rest of his days, and if he let slip some bit of information during that time, so much the better... 

But it was Gollum's release, and his subsequent capture by Aragorn, that tipped Sauron's hand to the White Council. If Sauron kept Gollum in prison or executed him, he could have conducted his search for Shire at his leisure.

And it would not be necessary to send out the Nine (and get everybody's attention in the process) until the Ring's location has been verified. Simply send out a large group of relatively presentable-looking individuals to make covert inquiries. Given the timelines involved in the hunt for the Ring, a year or a decade in that effort would have been no big deal.


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## Alcuin (Jan 10, 2011)

Ok, I see your point. 

Let me just continue on for a bit, though. (You know, when in a hole…) 

We don’t know how long Sauron had Gollum. Appendix B has in part for the entry for III 3009 in the “Tale of Years”,


> At some time during these years [noparse][[/noparse]3009–3017[noparse]][/noparse] Gollum … ventured into Mordor, and was captured by Sauron.


 That’s not much information, but I have the (possibly mistaken) impression that Sauron had him for quite a while – maybe a year, perhaps longer. He questioned him thoroughly: Gandalf was certain Gollum had been tortured. 

What “Hunt for the Ring” tells us about Gollum’s sojourn there is that Sauron couldn’t get anything more out of him: Gollum would die before telling him all he knew. It adds that for some reasonably long time – and this is why I think Gollum may have been in Sauron’s captivity for several years – when Sauron sent spies, Saruman waylaid them. Saruman knew where the Shire was and about its history during Arnor and that it had been settled by Hobbits: his primary interest in the place was his jealousy of Gandalf. 

Sauron knew that Saruman was also hunting for the Ring. When the White Council drove Sauron out of Dol Guldur in III 2941, the year Bilbo found the Ring, they used Saruman’s devices to accomplish this. Saruman had only consented to act because he learned that Sauron’s servants were searching the Gladden Fields and surrounding region. These two Maiar were both originally from the following of Aulë, they had known one another for literal ages, they were both in the race to get the magic dingus, and each knew it and distrusted the other.

So Sauron doesn’t _have_ a lot of time to leisurely go and hunt for “Shire”. He’d already done that, and for a couple of years, Saruman intentionally screwed things up. Sauron couldn’t be sure Saruman wasn’t also hunting for “Shire”. (He wasn’t: he didn’t know he needed to, not even when he captured Gandalf, even when he derisively asked what brought him from his “lurking-place it the Shire”.) It’s just as well they distrusted one another, or the first one that put all the pieces together would have come upon Frodo unawares; and even as it was, Frodo barely escaped Khamûl at his own front door! 

If news reports and personal reminisces published as memoirs are to be believed, real-world law enforcement and espionage agencies sometimes release suspects or opponents (or villains) to follow them back to their hide-outs, or to discover who their associates are. This sounds like the very same thing. It didn’t work out well for Sauron, but the _alternative_ was to continue doing what wasn’t working, and run the worse risk that Saruman would get there first. 

It was a rational decision, and it isn’t a plot flaw: _Sauron weighed everything to a nicety in the balance of his malice,_ as Gandalf says. I don’t know that he had a better choice. The thing that got him was that Bilbo _had_ told Gandalf the truth about the Ring, and as a result, Aragorn, about whom Sauron knew nothing (I believe he thought the line of the Dúnedain had ended with death of Arathorn his father), _was_ looking for Gollum.


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## baragund (Jan 21, 2011)

I had forgotten that Saruman was also a Maia associated with Aule.

When presented with that additional background, Sauron's release of Gollum really _does_ sound like the smartest thing to do. Your line of reasoning sounds very much like what any executive or statesman might do when presented with a problem that has multiple possible solutions but a high level of urgency: weigh all that facts available and use your judgement to make the best decision you know how. After re-reading, my argument sounds more like Monday morning quarterbacking...

So your continued digging led to the way out! :*up


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## Thorin (Jan 21, 2011)

Another angle that Sauron really didn't need Gollum is that if he was in fact in contact with Saruman through the palantir, Saruman could easily have directed Sauron to the Shire as he was familiar with it's location (having his spies and his stash of Longbottom leaf in Orthanc).

The only conclusion one could get is that Saruman deliberately hid the location of the Shire from Sauron as he wanted the one ring for himself. But I suppose that begs the question: did Saruman really know (or when did he know) that Bilbo had the one ring? Did Gandalf reveal his suspicions to Saruman of Bilbo's ring before spies from Mordor were sent forth?

Good observations!


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## Alcuin (Jan 21, 2011)

Saruman did not know enough to locate the Ring. He knew the Nazgûl were searching for the Shire, and he was actively delaying them and Sauron’s other servants who were looking for it. That made him suspect it was in the Shire. He told Gandalf he believed Gandalf knew where it was. He didn’t know about “Baggins”, or he’d have asked his principal agent in South Farthing about it – Lotho Sackville-_Baggins_! 

Sauron and Saruman were racing to get the Ring. Keenly aware of their rivalry, but unwilling to confront one another directly, of necessity they were both taking risks. Of the two, Saruman was the weaker and taking the longer risks: first, by leaving Sauron in Dol Guldur for centuries hoping the Ring would reveal itself; then by misleading and waylaying Sauron’s servants, a thing he could not hope to hide and that would anger Sauron intensely; and finally by taking inviting Gandalf to Orthanc to try to weasel the location of the Ring from him, and then by taking him prisoner. 

Gandalf the Grey rebuked Saruman for his lust for power to his face, and in return got a sojourn on Saruman’s roof. But his first confrontation with Saruman about the One Ring took place at a meeting of the White Council in the year 2851. The details are at the end of the essay “the Hunt for the Ring” in _Unfinished Tales_. CJRT says there were a “half dozen different manuscripts” of the confrontation, in which Saruman prevented the Council from disturbing Sauron in Dol Guldur while Gandalf smoked pipeweed. When Saruman rebuked Gandalf for smoking in Council, Gandalf blew a large smoke ring followed by several smaller ones and reached out to grasp them, only to have them vanish.


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## Pink Fealinde (Mar 8, 2011)

I'd say it was his overconfidence in the Ring's ability to thoroughly corrupt... At least he could have come up with some kind of emergency backup plan _just in case_ that failed him, and anyone sought to destroy it. At least, that's what I make of it.


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## Bucky (Mar 9, 2011)

Well, the Ring wasn't made 'to corrupt' ~ it was made to dominate other Ringbearers. And in that respect, it had only partial success ~ Men. Dwarves it did not turn into wraiths as he wished, but inflamed their hearts with lust for gold, of which he saw great enough profit. The Elves, obviously The Ring worked on them, or they would not have taken them off the moment Sauron put his on, perceiving his mind & plan.

It was only chance accident that lead the Ring to leave Sauron's possession & he wasn't banking on it's ability to 'currupt' anyone to get it back. He was dead as a doornail for 1050 years & only slowly took shape again. For all he knew, his Ring should have been destroyed by his enemies. As he slowly regained power as the Necromancer & gathered news from both near & afar of the Elves & Gondor & Arnor, it must have dawned on him that their was no Dark Lord in Middle-earth who'd taken his place......

This must have come as quite a shock to Sauron & he must have set himself upon quite a riddle to unravel: What had happened to his precious Ring when his finger was lopped off by Isildur? (if he even knew that)
Why hadn't his enemies thrown it in the nearby Sammath Naur?
If not, where did the one great living Lord of The Last Alliance go who had kept the Ring? Elrond? Cirdan? Celeborn? Isildur? That white fiend Glorfindel? (If Tolkien decided to bring him back in the Second Age, we know he was there) Perhaps they decide a Queen was better & gave it to Galadriel?
Why was he still possibly around (Elrond, Cirdan, Celeborn, The Heirs of Isildur & Anarion) yet none ruling Middle-earth as a Dark Lord?

Then. s Sauron is pondering these things, in 1981, the Dwarves flee Moria from some unknow 'nasmeless thing' ~ reports must be scetchy because until Gandalf faces Durin's Bane, the Wise don't even know he's a Balrog. But, with Sauron 'peopling' Moria with his creatures in 2480, he must have found out eventually that a Balrog was in there before the Wise did. How would Sauron react to this? A creature well-nigh as powerful as his Ringless self - could he have gotten a hold of the Ring? What if he did?

Then these old men appear with amazing powers about the year T.A. 2000 and join with the Elves to form the White Council & he's got that to worry about. Rumor spreads that they've been around 'thousands of years' and now Sauron has to wonder A. Where the Istari came from and B. Could one of them have been given the Ring?

Finally, what if the enemy had simply put it away never to use it, save for a day he arose in power?

I'd say Sauron must have had a lot on his mind while stationed at Dol Guldur....


The least of which was "How should I have made the Ring better to corrupt somebody in case I lose it, which will never happen in the first place."


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## Pink Fealinde (Mar 10, 2011)

Thanks, I hadn't completely considered his point of view... I am not quite as learned on the lore, and history and whatnot, which is a pretty good reason why I'm at this forum in the first place. History lessons are well appreciated.


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