The Lord of the Rings is not the kind of book which lends itself to a sequel. J.R.R. Tolkien realized that after making his first attempt to write The New Shadow. Today’s fantasy audience has been denied the sense of finality which one experiences upon reading the words, “Well, I’m back”. Not that this was the original ending for the story. Tolkien wanted some closure. He wanted to assure the reader that Sam would come out of his blue funk. He wanted the reader to understand that some of the High Elves had stayed behind.
But something final had been achieved in the War of the Ring the last physical incarnation of evil had been overthrown. From that point forward, evil would manifest itself in the petty ambitions of men, not in the physical shapes of Dark Lords. Anyone writing about Middle-earth today would probably have a green hand climbing out of the slime in one of the last scenes. Glowing eyes in the woods along the shore would maliciously watch the White Ship vanish into the night. Someone would fail to notice that the King of the Barrow-wights had escaped Bombadil’s careful watch.
Something would scream out, “Hey! Buy enough books, and there’ll be more where this came from!”
Tolkien gave us three fundamental evils which were all, in their own ways, defeated completely, finally, and totally defeated, without hope of eventual resurrection. First came Smaug. He was The Dragon. The ultimate monster. Smaug is not a paean to “Beowulf”, he is a statement of what most fascinates us about monsters they are big, mean, and ugly. Before the Japanese gave us Godzilla and his flying friends, Tolkien gave us Smaug cruising out of the skies, raking the pine-clad slopes of Erebor with fire, and sending masses of screaming Dwarves to their doom. Dale was trashed before Tokyo.
Smaug is evil. No one doubts that. When Bilbo creeps down the tunnel to steal his little cup, he has no real idea of what terrible power he is about to awaken. The dragon hasn’t just kept men and dwarves from flourishing in the North. He has held back the forces of evil, too. Smaug is so powerful no one dares venture near him not birds, not squirrels, not Orcs, not Wargs. Not nobody, not nohow.
But, like all good dragons, Smaug gets his comeuppance. A mere man slays the beast and saves the day. And though the Battle of Five Armies is a tense moment, the reader is permitted (with Bilbo) to sleep through the worst of it. We only learn how things fared afterward.
The second fundamental evil Tolkien gave us was Sauron. Sauron represents the diabolical side of our ambitions. He is the perverter, the twister of words and ideas. Sauron is the guy who moves into a party scene, starts telling great jokes, and gets all the women to flirt with him. Once he’s stolen the limelight from all the lackluster mortal men, he leads the party down into damnation. That’s basically what happened to the Elves of Eregion. They danced with the devil and ended up paying the ultimate price for their dalliance with power.
Saruman fell to Sauron’s wily ways, too. And so did other characters in the book. Sauron is the most realistic of Tolkien’s incarnate evils, because he is most like to one of us. He stands just a little bit above men in some respects, is just a little bit larger than life. Keeping Sauron at a distance was Tolkien’s way of preventing the reader from realizing (until the climactic ending) that Sauron was just another blowhard until.
The third fundamental evil is Morgoth. As the original evil bad guy, Morgoth gets blamed for starting all sorts of grief. But he is too far removed in memory (of the characters in The Lord of the Rings) for the reader to get a true sense of him. And when we meet him in The Silmarillion, he doesn’t quite come across like Lucifer tempting Jesus in the New Testament. Morgoth is the paramount villain before he becomes legendary. He is the essence of the corrupter in his prime. He doesn’t have to be portrayed as larger than life, because everything he does has a profound effect on multitudes.
Morgoth, unlike Sauron and Smaug, can set into motion chains of events with just a word. He thinks ahead in ways Sauron never really could. Morgoth returns to Middle-earth and takes control in the space of a few years. Sauron takes shape and then devotes 2,000 years to gathering strength and wearing down his enemies.
The War of the Jewels was not a significant event for Morgoth. It consumed much of his attention. Tolkien points out that the rebellion of the Noldor ensured that Morgoth would remain fixed in one area of Middle-earth, thus sparing most of Middle-earth a great deal of harm and suffering. But Morgoth and the Valar had been present in the Halls of Ea for so long, had built worlds and stars, and had fought many greater battles in the past, so that what transpired in Beleriand and adjoining lands really pales by comparison with the previous wars. The War of Wrath looked back to the old days of raw, unmitigated power battling power. And yet, it wasn’t the same. Morgoth was weaker. The Valar really didn’t have to rip apart whole continents. In fact, mindful of the presence of the Children of Iluvatar, the Valar took special care not to unleash their full fury.
Tolkien gave his readers a diminishing perspective of evil. It was continually receding into a more distant past with each book. Even if Tolkien had published The Silmarillion in his lifetime, Morgoth’s defeat would still expected by anyone who read the book after reading The Lord of the Rings. We would have been looking back to see just exactly how Middle-earth came to be the way it was at the end of the Third Age. The Silmarillion fills in the background more than anything else, and though there is some suspense for the reader, we already know that the Elves cannot possibly win the war. If they had, their kingdoms would have survived. The Lord of the Rings would not express regret over the loss of Beleriand.
It is precisely because of this diminishing perspective of evil, and because of the resolution of all suspense in The Lord of the Rings, that we cannot expect a sequel. People have attempted to write sequels. Word has it that all attempts have been very, very bad. Two hundred years from now, when Tolkien’s works have long been in the public domain, people will try to move the story forward, and they will fail because there is no story to move forward. The characters continue. They have new adventures and new stories to tell. But the chief story, the tale of the rise of Evil Incarnate and its defeat, is brought to as much of a conclusion as anyone can contrive.
Within the scope of Tolkien’s history, there are a multitude of stories which may be discovered, but these are all bound up with the greater tale. They are either footnotes or end-notes. There cannot be a new Dark Lord, because the powers which gave rise to Dark Lords have been undone. People look at the mysterious Blue Wizards, whom Tolkien suggests in at least one letter may have founded “cults of magic”, and suggest, “Well, they could become new dark lords.”
Nope. Sorry. That Balrog won’t fly. Sauron did not found “cults of magic”. He may have skulked about in the shadows, but his presence was felt throughout Middle-earth. Sauron didn’t become a major power, however, until he forged the One Ring. That is, prior to that time, Gil-galad suspected there was something going on somewhere, but he had no real idea of who was skulking about or what he was trying to achieve. When Sauron had the One Ring, however, he was able to extend his own personal power in ways which rivalled Morgoth’s manipulations. Sauron didn’t become a Dark Lord because he was the biggest, baddest guy left standing. He became a Dark Lord because he rose to the occasion.
Now, take the Blue Wizards, and what have you got? A couple of Maiar who had remained faithful to the Valar (and Iluvatar) throughout most of Time. These guys might have failed in their missions, but would they completely rebel? Even Saruman didn’t really achieve much. How long had he been sour on the cause? A few decades? A couple of centuries? Gandalf still believed Saruman could be redeemed, right down until they met for the last time in Dunland. Did Gandalf ever hold his hand out to Sauron and say, “Well, you’ve done some wrong, son, but if you work with us you could get a reprieve”? Not a chance. Sauron was too far gone for that kind of offer. He had had his chance, and he blew it.
Had Saruman not been killed in the Shire, had he not gone back there to achieve some petty, malicious revenge against the Hobbits, he could have scurried off to the shadows, retreated to distant lands, and plotted to become the next Dark Lord. It’s true that he had lost a great deal of his power (and we need not debate whether that was due to Gandalf’s work at Isengard, the destruction of the One Ring, or both). But Saruman was an immortal being who, unlike Sauron, had not fully divested himself of his strength. What’s a few thousand years of recovery to a Maia?
If Sauron could grow stronger through the ages, then so, too, could Saruman. Saruman was still “anchored”, as it were. The Blue Wizards, however, never became a threat to Middle-earth. Whether it was simply not in their nature or they lacked the power, they didn’t have to be dealt with as Saruman had been. Gandalf wasn’t sent east to find out what happened to the other Istari, or to bring them to task for wandering from the ways of Iluvatar. He was allowed to return home.
Some people point to Gandalf’s prophetic statement, “other evils there may be”, and suggest that other servants of Morgoth may still linger undiscovered. But I don’t think Gandalf was thinking strictly in terms of what the Ainur could achieve if they went rogue. Men were capable of inflicting great evil upon themselves. Even prior to World War II, we had already committed some grievous deeds against our fellow man. The Assyrians slaughtered whole tribes and left the skulls of their victims piled up alongside the roads as a display of their power. The Romans conquered an immense empire, forcing whole tribes into slavery, often wiping out entire towns and cities which proved troublesome.
Napoleon led an entire generation of Europe’s young men to their deaths on numerous battlefields.
Mankind does a good job of generating its own evil. We don’t need Dark Lords to threaten our survival. And if we don’t need Dark Lords, then we don’t need to combine the stories of our own masters of evil with the tales of the Dark Lords who preceded them. Napoleon and Hitler are but pale shadows of the Devil. They may be his servants, but they are not as powerful as he. The evil they inflicted upon the world, though not forgotten, has receded with each generation.
The Silmarillion is presented as a testimonial to an ancient conflict in which uncounted multitudes of Men, Elves, and Dwarves suffered. We have similar testimonials, such as “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and Homer’s “Iliad”. Do we believe these stories? Not really. We know there was a war fought for Troy about the time given in Homer’s poem, but the poem makes that war seem larger than life. The ancient epics, if they were ever based on history, have made the transition from history to mythology.
The Bible is a controversial testimonial to the past. Most of its stories can still be verified through other sources, and if not regarded as history by most scholars, it is still viewed as a largely contemporary record of the living memory of events. For example, there has been debate over whether David actually lived. Why? Because so far only The Bible says he lived. A tombstone in Britain, naming a centurion from a Roman Legion, is often regarded as a more accurate record of history than the Bible, a collection of books which has been carefully preserved and studied for nearly 3,000 years. Why? Because books are considered less reliable than tombstones.
We have no idea of whether the centurion named on that tombstone really lived. Someone could have just carved a name and epitaph into a slab of rock with no regard for who lay beneath it. Such a deception is at least as likely as (if not greater than) hundreds of priests and scholars conniving to deceive people for thousands of years. But we’ll put more credibility into carvings on a piece of rock than we will put into stories written down on paper, preserved and passed on, generation after generation, for thousands of years.
Maybe that’s because the tombstone carvers didn’t have time to describe the balls of fire which came flying from the grave as the centurion was laid to rest, but writers of Biblical books and other ancient documents did have time to record omens, dreams, and prophecies. Ammianus Marcelinus, one of the most respected Roman historians, is often treated with great skepticism. Why? Because he took the time to record “the facts” that is, he mentions such things like balls of fire shooting out from the foundations of the Jewish temple at the approach of workers sent by a Roman emperor to restore it.
Did things happen as Marcelinus recorded them? We seem to feel there is more reason to believe he is a liar than an honest man. But then, his nonsense is sometimes excused by the fact that he was recording things he himself had not seen. No one, by the way, who was present when President Clinton partied with certain people, has yet come forward to explain exactly what happened. But Time and Newsweek have recorded those events for posterity. CNN made sure we heard all about the stained blue dress. A thousand years from now, will anyone believe these events happened? Will they, like us, require that someone carve the facts in stone, before they can be accepted as “facts”?
Finality, like historical fact, is argued to death. No one can really lay it to rest. And, so, someone, somewhere, will try to convince us that a new Dark Lord can really rise up in Middle-earth. The new Dark Lord will be just as menacing, just as powerful, just as everything
But do we really, really need another Dark Lord?
This article was originally published on March 3, 2001.
