When Thangorodrim was broken and Morgoth overthrown, Sauron put on his fair hue again and did obeisance to Eönwë, the herald of Manwë, and abjured all his evil deeds. And some hold that this was not at first falsely done, but that Sauron in truth repented, if only out of fear, being dismayed by the fall of Morgoth and the great wrath of the Lords of the West. (The Silmarillion 273)
Near the beginning of the second season of The Rings of Power, a character named Diarmid meets Halbrand (a newly reincarnated Sauron) on the road to the Southlands and invites him to turn away from sin and death and choose a new life. Imagine if a combination of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis momentarily descended from their heavenly pub to chat about free will and virtue, and you have the general idea: “Find forgiveness. You are alive because you have chosen good,” Diarmid tells Sauron after they have boarded a ship, setting sail for a fresh start. “You have to choose it again, and the next day, and the next, until it becomes a part of your nature.” A few seconds later, as the ship is attacked by a leviathan, Sauron wholly disregards this advice, steals the royal crest rather than help the dying man, and thereby sets himself on the path to deceiving Galadriel. As he meets her for the first time swimming towards his raft, he gives her a knowing, sinister glare that does not appear in the first season, and the audience is meant to understand that his intentions were always nefarious.
This is unfortunate because the first season drew much of its power from the ambiguity surrounding Sauron’s potential for redemption. Was he genuinely repentant or just a seductive psychopath? Charlie Vickers, the brilliant actor playing the role, said he deliberately foregrounded this ambiguity so that it could be interpreted either way, even though he maintained certain core beliefs that informed his choices — and which he is not revealing to us. The writers and showrunners also noted that they were influenced by John Milton’s portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost, where readers are meant to feel an initial sympathy for the adversary before acknowledging the immensity of his evil and deceit. By the end of season two, (spoilers follow) the audience fully witnesses this depravity when Sauron casually murders Mirdania, tortures and kills Celebrimbor, and tells the orcs to “leave no elf alive.” (Every time Sauron says he wants to “heal” Middle-earth, replace it with the word with “cleanse,” which delivers a more accurate and ominous picture.)
Yet season one is far more nuanced in its complexity, leaving open a window of opportunity for a redemptive arc. I confess that I adore such plotlines, as exemplified in Adar’s healing reconciliation with Galadriel or as depicted in Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction, which shockingly remind us that the gospel of God’s grace and forgiveness is available to all, descending even to the most villainous among us. Seeking to discern how I too was deceived and missed the clues regarding Sauron’s identity, I rewatched all the scenes in the first season with Galadriel and Sauron, discovering that these penitential questions primarily hinge upon a single scene in the Númenorean forge in episode five, which throws all of these issues into relief and is arguably one of the best scenes in the entire series so far. (At this point in the first season, Galadriel has no idea of Halbrand’s true identity, which is not revealed until the final episode, but for consistency’s sake, I’m choosing to call him Sauron throughout this essay.)
As the firelight flickers across their faces, casting contrasts of light and shadow to emphasize the symbolic interplay, Galadriel and Sauron enter a new phase of emotional vulnerability with each other. Gazing into the flames of the forge, Sauron vaguely confesses to his past iniquities: “You don’t know what I did before I ended up on that raft. You don’t know how I survived, how we all survived. And when these people discover it, they will cast me out. And so will you.” (The burning coals, the confession — how did I miss these obvious clues to his character upon a first viewing?) To which Galadriel replies, echoing the advice of her brother, “Sometimes to find the light, we must first touch the darkness.” Turning sharply and advancing on her, he asks, “What do you know of darkness?” and then uses her name in a direct address for the very first time to ask about the loss of her brother (for which he is responsible) and to press her to reveal why she keeps fighting. “Because I cannot stop,” she shakily confesses, with unmasked emotion. “The company I led mutinied against me. My closest friend conspired with the king to exile me. And each of them acted as they did because I believe they could no longer distinguish me from the evil I was fighting.” Fighting back tears of apparent sympathy and sorrow — while possibly rejoicing that she may be his equal, that she may understand him — Sauron responds, “I’m sorry. For your brother, for all of it. I’m sorry.”
Is this truly repentance on his part, or just another manipulation? It’s a terribly ambiguous moment that could be interpreted either way, though we do witness his expression change in an unnerving fashion at the end of the scene. When we next see him, he is sitting alone, with no one to manipulate or deceive, weighing the pivotal choice of whether to join the expedition as the ostensible king of the Southlands or to remain in Númenor as a blacksmith. On the one hand, remaining in Númenor represents a perfect opportunity to start over with a fresh slate, but this is complicated by the fact that Númenor is also on his menu of consumption, and he is an opportunist, willing to play the long game, despite his claims to be “searching for peace” and unwilling to “leap back into the furnace” — the volcano of his own making, in other words.[1] Even villains need a vacation to recuperate on the shores of Atlantis, after all.
Further undermining the potential for redemption, the scene with Galadriel in the forge follows closely upon the heels of a scene where they have both been thrown in jail, during which he encourages her to discover the greatest fear of her opponent, Queen Miriel: “Give them a means of mastering [that fear], so that you can master them.” Later at the forge, Sauron then presses Galadriel to reveal her deepest fear — about herself, her darkness, her inability to stop fighting — so that he can gain mastery over her. He is likely surprised to discover that he alone is not her greatest concern or recipient of vengeance; rather, she is afraid of herself, of being alone with her limitless ambition, and of being an outcast because of this. And so Sauron fights beside her to lead her to victory, in an attempt to help her regain the trust of the elves, thereby gaining her trust of him — and opening the entrance to Celebrimbror’s workshop as well. In episode eight, her greatest fear becomes his final threat as he seeks to keep her silent about his identity, reminding her that the elves have cast her out before.
Witnessing these lonely, beautiful, powerful outcasts operating as light/dark foils, it’s entirely understandable why a Haladriel/Saurondriel shipping movement is currently underway, even though this Gothic dark romance is accruing too many derivative dyadic tropes from Star Wars and Shadow and Bone, and will be replete with telepathy or dream sequences between the two characters in season three, mark my words. (Should Galadriel’s long-lost husband return or appear in a dream, let us hope she makes sure it’s not Sauron in disguise!) In the third film of The Hobbit series, Sauron also taunts Galadriel for being alone (“Even now you fade, one light alone in the darkness”) before Elrond and Saruman arrive to fight beside her, before she rescues Gandalf, and before she stands up to Sauron — transfigured from damsel in distress to menacing Dark Queen — and sends him packing. I always thought this sinister scene had a weirdly intimate overlay, perhaps because Galadriel often appears to be wearing what looks like a nightgown, but Rings of Power is giving us the backstory for their twisted relationship, filling in the gaps of Tolkien’s sketchy outline of the Second Age with imaginative details that may not appeal to all fans, but are nonetheless adeptly drawing a new generation into an appreciation of Tolkien’s massive, mythopoetic universe.[2]
In the opening episode of season one, Elrond says to Galadriel, “You refused to heed any limits placed upon you,” a statement that encapsulates the dangerous trajectory of Galadriel’s unbounded aspirations over the course of the first season, which culminates in a final temptation, to which she at last places a limit, when Sauron invites her to reign at his side as his queen. She literally touches the darkness, surprisingly cloaked in its fair form, and finally turns back. Tolkien underscores her longstanding ambitions in The Silmarillion, as she “yearned to see the wide unguarded lands [of Middle-earth] and to rule there a realm at her own will” (74), and in The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, he depicts her as the “greatest of the Noldor,” “strong and self-willed,” a “match for the lore-masters and athletes,” and a warrior against the arrogant and chaotic Feanor (249-250).[3] (Chaotic is an apt word to describe the elves of the First Age, who engage in kin slaying and other wild antics, as parodied in the comic below.)[4]
At the end of the first season, when Sauron invites her to be his queen, “fair as the sea and the sun, stronger than the foundations of the earth,” a warning bell tolls as we recall Gandalf’s words to Saruman, spoken from the top of Orthanc, that “there is only one lord of the rings, and he does not share power” (Jackson’s Fellowship). This plotline is derived from Galadriel’s mirror scene, and the writers are extrapolating from this to explain the relationship between Galadriel and Sauron, as well as the temptation to reign that will haunt her until she finally rejects the offer of the One Ring, revealing the glorious terror that she would have become: “And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” (Fellowship 381). As for the groping telepathy on the way in season three: “I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!” (380). I predict that Gandalf will help her learn to operate this telepathy in a one-way direction, though this is derivative of Harry Potter, and I also suspect that he may need to rescue Celebrimbror from the shadow realm, due to Sauron’s blood on the spear that ended Celebrimbror’s life.
At the end of season two, Galadriel tells Sauron that the “door is shut” before she gives him a savage roundhouse kick to the face, meaning that the opportunity no longer exists for her to reign at his side. On the other hand, after he stabs her around the heart with the prongs of Morgoth’s crown, the door for telepathy has opened, and they are now bound together, united as the only two beings who have been pierced by its powerful dark essence. “I would have placed a crown upon your head. I would never have rested until all Middle-earth had been brought to its knees, to worship the light of its queen,” he says, instead piercing the circlet of darkness around her heart and looking diabolically gleeful as he senses their union, likely attempting to turn her into a Ringwraith.[5] His plan backfires, and the two of them are now fully equal in supernatural strength. Immediately afterwards, Sauron speaks directly into Galadriel’s mind as he attempts to gain her ring, but with the new power possibly gained from the crown, she is able to deceive him and figuratively flip him the bird as she falls off the cliff, protected by the restorative power of her ring. (“You want to heal Middle-earth? Heal yourself!”)
The first season toyed with the idea of their union in an ongoing motif, and the writers have excelled at employing this technique, using Finrod’s dagger, Morgoth’s crown, stone vs. boat imagery, a revised “legend of lovers’ leap” as bookends, and the extreme overuse of the word “bind,” with its echoes from the One Ring poem: “One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” On the raft as the storm swells around them, Galadriel yells at Sauron, “Take my hand. Bind yourself to me!” before she sinks like a stone into the darkness, ironically rescued by the stony Sauron. Their scenes on the raft are a balancing act of pulling each other aboard and saving each other from drowning, a motif of handholds that continues throughout the season, as they are matched continually point for point — landing in jail together, fighting off whole groups of people, and pulling each other back from killing Adar. After their military victory in episode six of season one, Galadriel encourages Sauron to release himself from vengeance and to be free of his past sins, to which Sauron responds, “I never believed I could be, until today. Fighting at your side, I felt … If I could just keep that feeling with me always … bind it to my very being, then I …” This sounds terribly romantic and redemptive until one realizes that he is obscuring the personhood of Galadriel in favor of being bound to a feeling that increases his freedom and strength. Sauron is only interested in amplifying his power by allying/alloying with Galadriel, which the final episode of season one symbolically elucidates, as he joins their hands around the gold and silver alloy of the dagger: “You bind me to the light, and I bind you to power. Together, we can save this Middle-earth.” His tearful, persuasive speech again highlights the ambiguity surrounding his potential for redemption, as he lays on the charm as thickly as he can: “After Morgoth’s defeat, it was as if a great clenched fist had released its grasp from my neck, and in the stillness of that first sunrise, at last, I felt the light of the One again. And I knew, if ever I was to be forgiven, then I had to heal everything that I had helped ruin.” Thank goodness Galadriel knows him better than the audience, as she recognizes that his desire to “save and heal” is better translated as “rule and cleanse,” enslaving and removing free will from all the peoples of Middle-earth in his desire for perfect order.
Interestingly, for their epic reunion and showdown at the end of season two, the setting appears to be an ancient, elven Stonehenge, likely designed for solstice rituals, so when Sauron pierces her with the crown, she is standing in a protective circle designed to welcome the light of the sun. This protection for Galadriel may help counterbalance being bound to his power and blood through the conduit of Morgoth’s crown, but it’s also intriguing to entertain the possibility that he unwittingly bound himself to the light, which would complicate matters immensely, but is also highly unlikely. “Surely you of all elves must understand that to find the light, we must first touch the darkness,” Sauron reminds her as they link swords at the top of the sun portal and then tumble through the semicircle. There is a hint of St. John of the Cross’ theology here, where the individual journeying into the divine light must first traverse the Dark Night of the Soul, underscored by the exorcism she endures and the concluding hope she proclaims, that “the sun yet shines.” And in one of the best speeches yet, which is truly faithful to the heart of Tolkien’s work, Celebrimbror reminds Galadriel that “it is not strength that overcomes darkness, but light. Armies may rise, hearts may fail, but still light endures, and in its presence, all darkness must flee.” Swords may clash, and sparks may fly, but the interplay of light and dark in the dyad of Galadriel and Sauron throughout the next three seasons of The Rings of Power will be worth watching, even though we already know how this story will end.
Kathryn Stelmach Artuso (Ph.D. English, UCLA) is a freelance journalist and the author of an eclectic assortment of academic articles and books, including Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South.
[1] “Menu of consumption” refers to the Gothic low-fantasy element of Sauron as a spaghetti swamp monster, consuming everything in his path, which gave me a schlocky B-movie horror vibe at the beginning of the second season. Sauron does have associations with vampires and werewolves, so the low-fantasy elements are legitimate, even though this massive blob of tendrils was bizarre and wholly unexpected. This season got off to a rough start, with Jack Lowden’s uneasy, middle management portrayal of a younger Sauron.
[2] Interestingly, for that scene in The Hobbit, Peter Jackson is likely drawing upon appendix B at the end of The Return of the King, where Galadriel “threw down the walls” of Dol Goldur and “laid bare its pits” (375).
[3] An Amazon on Amazon, in other words! For purists pounding the table for a prooftext, Tolkien indeed described Galadriel as having an “Amazon disposition and bound up her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats” (letter 348, to Catharine Findlay). I agree with James Cameron that Morfydd Clark’s portrayal of Galadriel is mesmerizing, and I especially enjoy hearing her breathy Welsh Ls on occasion: “Even then, there was llight!” she says in the prologue.
[4] The eclectic syncretism of Tolkien’s pantheon of gods and demigods in The Silmarillion is more indebted to Norse mythology or even to a Gnostic vision of syzygies and demiurges than to Christian angelology, even though scholars often awkwardly superimpose Tolkien’s Catholicism upon his mythopoetic universe. This is certainly not Narnia, and Tolkien’s antipathy toward allegory is often undermined by scholars determined to read Christian allegory where none exists. (How about that “gift of death” for mortals? Where do they go? Who knows? In Christianity, death is an enemy, not a gift.)
[5] Of course, this influence from Morgoth’s crown also reveals the origin of her Dark Queen persona in Peter Jackson’s films. Readers can determine for themselves just how explicitly to interpret this scene. Some fans have theorized that Sauron will use the crown to forge the Nazgûl blades, but I suspect he may instead use one of the prongs that united him to Galadriel in order to forge the One Ring.
Works Cited:
The Fellowship of the Ring. Directed by Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema, 2002.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Directed by Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema, 2014.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, seasons 1 and 2. Directed by Charlotte Brändström,
et al., Amazon, 2022, 2024.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “Appendix B.” The Return of the King. Torrington, CT: Easton, 1984.
— The Fellowship of the Ring. Torrington, CT: Easton, 1984.
— The Silmarillion. New York: Harper Collins, 2022.
— The Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.
