The upcoming Phase III of this project will consist of reception and fandom studies centered on Sauron and will include one or more fan surveys. If you are familiar with Tolkien’s Legendarium either through his original works or adaptations and are interested in participating in these surveys when Phase III goes live, please follow the link below to sign up for our mailing list.
Jointly authored with Nick Polk.
Recent scholarship has addressed the connected problems of Tolkien as “Author/Author(ity)” and the exclusivist readings of Tolkien’s work that follow this construction (Chunodkar, Emanuel, Reid). This “constructed Tolkien” seems to parallel common readings of his Legendarium’s own Creator God, Eru—understood as the monolithic “Author” of Ea. Yet “subcreation” within Tolkien’s narrative and extra-narrative works is routinely exhibited not as monolithic but rather as (literally and figuratively) multivocal (and hence inherently queer).
In this paper Cameron will propose that the Legendarium can be read through the lens of “con-creation” (the total choice-making activity of all rational beings) both internally (as events in the Secondary World) and externally (as both a text and a pseudohistory in the Primary World). This approach levels the playing field between all actors in—and readers of—“The Drama,” providing a queer (non-normative) approach to creativity (and interpretation of creativity) when compared to “orthodox” doctrines of creation. Nick will further argue that con-creation resonates with process theologies of creation, particularly Jacob J. Erickson’s Irreverent Theology and Catherine Keller’s creatio ex profundis. Both emphasize the participation of a multiplicity of creatures in divine creativity, shaking off a monolithic determination of creation.
Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” outlines the author’s theory of Fantasy and includes Tolkien’s thoughts on the appropriate medium for such artworks: “Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. […] Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive. It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular.” Language as medium allows the reader/hearer to participate in the act of subcreation through imaginative generation of the Secondary World—each word chosen by the author activating in the encountering mind a complex matrix of associations with both individualized and “Platonic” examples of the referent. In comparison Tolkien identifies a tendency for visual representations of Fantasy to overwhelm these faculties, in essence dominating the viewer’s encounter with the Secondary World. This poses interesting questions for the application of Tolkien’s theory to many current examples of Fantasy in primarily visual media such as films and video games.
Final Fantasy is a series of JRPGs (Japanese Role-Playing Games) consisting of 16 major titles released for various video game consoles between 1987–2023. Applying Tolkien’s theory to a formal analysis of the changing graphical qualities of this series suggests a more nuanced understanding of what mediums are capable of inviting the kind of imaginative generation Tolkien describes and what may count as “true literature.”
Building on the work of MacLeod and Smol, utilizing the concept of “Visual Indeterminacy,” and combining the tools of art theory with an understanding of early JRPG graphics as pictographic/ideographic, I will argue that while more recent Final Fantasy installments, with photorealistic graphics and voice acting, function like interactive film, early Final Fantasy games functioned like literature despite their primarily graphical nature, allowing players the opportunity for the imaginative generation that Tolkien seems to have believed was integral to successful Fantasy.
Sauron’s relationship to corporeality, impairment, and disability is in many ways unique within the Legendarium. While not an incarnate being by nature he is nevertheless incarnate in two distinct “bodies” at the same time during much of the Second and Third Ages (himself and The Ring) both of which seem to exhibit at least some amount of agency. He is dismembered in the prose of The Lord of the Rings through metonymy and metaphor, yet those under his domination extend his bodily reach. His relationship to the aesthetics of his form (and the eventual limitations thereof) plays a narrative role as does his skill as a shapeshifter, and his capabilities as a necromancer include the “unnatural” manipulation of body and spirit independent of each other. Perhaps most curiously, Sauron twice himself receives physical injuries that persist across his own bodily transformations: a wound to his throat that drips blood and the loss of a single finger. That is, unlike Morgoth, Sauron maintains the ability to “shift” or “rebuild” his shape following these injuries, but cannot (or will not) “heal” these wounds as a part of that process.
Sauron is a master of deception and illusions, muddying the waters when it comes to readings of his relationship to his bodily form, but the above characteristics offer tantalizing glimpses into how we might read Sauron through the lenses of disability, impairment, and their understanding in Medieval thought. Building on the work of Flieger, Kisor, Metzler, and Moore, and utilizing both a Medieval understanding of the post-resurrection wounds of martyrs and saints as well as Price’s modern concept of “bodymind,” I will explore possible interpretations of the persistence of Sauron’s wounds and ask what might constitute impairment and disability for an Ainu, if their bodies are in fact reflections of their spirit.
The Second Age began in crisis as the peoples of Middle-earth faced the aftermath of war—one violent enough to destroy a continent—as well as the loss of knowledge and skills as the Eldar returned to Valinor. In response to this “disorder,” indicative of “Arda Marred,” Sauron sought the “rehabilitation” and “reform” of Middle-earth “neglected by the gods.” Over the next two millennia, Sauron produced several works of craft that became building blocks to his eventual totalitarian empire: The Rings of Power, The Black Speech, and The Dark Tower. Building on the scholarship of Charles Huttar, Jerold C. Frakes, and Jonathan Himes, I will explore Sauron’s creations in light of their possible functions as tools of physical and metaphysical “reform” in Middle-earth by arguing that they may represent attempts at replacing metaphysical linchpins symbolized in Medieval thought via Boethius’s Wheel of Fortune, The Tower of Babel, and The World Tree.
While Sauron’s most famous First Age appearance in the tale of Beren and Luthien remained relatively unchanged from Sauron’s introduction in the 1920s until Tolkien’s death, his role in the Legendarium expanded significantly across Tolkien’s lifetime as Sauron became the primary antagonist of two additional Ages of Middle-earth. Utilizing the work of Christopher Tolkien, John D. Rateliff, Douglas Charles Kane, and Joe Abbott, I will examine how this growth ultimately lead to developments in Sauron’s backstory, characterization, and presentation such that we can, I believe, identify at least two major “Saurons” at work in the wider corpus of Tolkien’s Legendarium—“Saurons” who remained in some ways unsynthesized at the time of Tolkien’s death. I will also explore how competing and unsynthesized aspects of each of these “Saurons” can be identified in otherwise abandoned characters (above and beyond the well-recognized Tevildo) introduced as early as “The Book of Lost Tales.”
From the beginning of Tolkien scholarship Mordor has been analyzed in light of its Hellish iconography; from the perspective of the narrative voice, what constitutes “Hell” in Middle-earth may seem clear. But what is Hell to Mordor’s chief inhabitant? What is Hell in Sauron’s Eye?
The Rings of Power has brought Sauron into the spotlight by interpreting him not as depersonalized evil but as a character in his own right. Actor Charlie Vickers has shared how he developed this character for the screen, adapting characteristics taken directly from Tolkien’s own writings: Sauron’s love of order and his desire to “heal” Middle-earth—a goal with its implicit suggestion of utopian vision. Is such a goal even achievable within the theological and metaphysical constraints of Middle-earth?
Drawing on Tolkien’s writings about Sauron from the 1950s, the biblical scholarship of Elaine Pagels, and the work of Jonathan McIntosh (among others), I intend to argue that Sauron’s goal strikes at the nature of Arda itself; to Sauron, Hell is Arda Marred, and his struggle to order it is ultimately his own struggle with the Problem of Evil—the very force he, in a feedback loop, comes to represent.
“[N]othing is evil in the beginning, even Sauron was not so.” These words from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings express a theological axiom and hint at a character arc for its hidden and eponymous villain—an arc we are never shown, even in the wider corpus of Tolkien’s Legendarium. Unlike Morgoth (the Luciferian “beginner of discord”) who appeared within the opening chapter of The Silmarillion as the unfallen “Melkor,” the unfallen pre-Sauron remained hidden and nameless—until 2007. With the publication of the 17th volume of the Tolkien linguistic journal Parma Eldalamberon, we learned that Sauron had once been “Mairon” (The Admirable).
This name exists only in one place, a figurative and literal margin: a single footnote to a metatextual project inside a niche linguistic journal which had, until very recently, remained out of print. Yet within fandom this marginal note has generated a metaphorical “Great Wave” of transformative works and renewed interest in Sauron as a character. What gives this bit of marginalia such potency in fandom? What can be gleaned from this name amid the dozens of other names and epithets applied to Sauron both in The Lord of the Rings and across the Legendarium? How does “Mairon” compare to the names of Sauron’s maia foils Melyanna, Curumo, and Olórin? What might “Mairon” suggest about the telos of its owner? And what can we make of Tolkien’s statement that Sauron “continued to call himself “Mairon” […] until after the fall of Numenor?”
In the spirit of Croft’s and Broadwell’s work on onomastics in Tolkien as well as the Tolkien fandom history work of Dawn Walls-Thumma, I will explore these questions with regard to how they help shape a potential “capsule story” for the Lord of the Rings, himself.
Even before The Rings of Power aired questions about Sauron abounded. Would he appear this season? Would we know him when we saw him? The first episodes introduce a selection of original characters whose identities remain a mystery, and, right until the end, the season teases the possibility that a number of them might be Sauron. Many have referred to this aspect of the show’s narrative as a “mystery box” after the storytelling style popularized by the show Lost. In the context of The Rings of Power, I prefer to use the term “Schrödinger Box.”
Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” describes the concept of quantum superposition: that dynamical systems exist in several separate quantum states at the same time until observation occurs. The effect on the audience of the aforementioned dramatic structure creates a perceptual situation not unlike superposition in which, if any of these new characters could be Sauron (so long as the box remains closed), Sauron, in our minds, becomes all of them.
I will argue that through this perceptual situation The Rings of Power—the newest Tolkien adaptation and the first to “open the box” and present Sauron as an individualized character—has mirrored a reader’s experience of Sauron in the Legendarium in general and in The Lord of the Rings in particular. Building on the work of Gergely Nagy and using gestalt theory and textual analysis, I will examine “Sauron” in Tolkien’s texts as a gestalt entity which the reader creates by mentally constructing a whole (that might be said to be in superposition) from disparate and seemingly contradictory parts—a participatory action that enhances suspense, invokes terror, and synthesizes a character who appears to have remained unsynthesized across the various tales in which he appears.
In Book 5, chapter 1 of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, the antagonist, Claude Frollo, criticizes Gutenburg’s press. With one hand pointing towards a book and the other pointing at Notre Dame, he states, “this will kill that. […] the book will kill the building.”
Using the underlying principles of Frollo’s statement as a jumping off point, and touching on Tolkien’s thoughts on the “fitness” of sound form to meaning, this talk will examine the interplay of form and content in communicating (and circumscribing) the “meaning” of a text, and particularly narrative texts. I cover several examples of original and adapted narratives relating to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien as presented in different media (printed literature, video games, film, and television series), drawing attention to how the “embodiment” of the text in the various media alters how the reader / player / viewer encounters (and potentially interprets) the content.
How to Destroy Your Enemies and Influence People: Disinformation in Numenor and the Epistemological Limitations of Mortality
Sauron the Evangelist: Sauron as Subversion of John the Apostle
Rending the Web of Story: “Con-creation” in The Lord of the Rings, The Legendarium, and the Primary World
A Competition of Marys: Varda and Nienna as Marian Listeners
The Infinite Variety of God: Fanfiction as Subcreation
Tolkien’s Felix Culpa: ‘The Melkor Ingredient’ as Original Sin
Necromancy and Verisimilitude in Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War