Morgoth's Ring

And for Saruman, it's pretty similar, where he briefly takes over the Shire at the end of The Return of the King, and he seems less concerned about eradication and more about controlling and harassing.

And Tolkien actually writes about this connection between their motivations in an essay in Volume 10 of The History of Middle-Earth, Morgoth's Ring, in the section Myths Transformed, where he wrote, Sauron had never reached Morgoth's stage of nihilistic madness.

He did not object to the existence of the world so long as he could do what he liked with it.

He still had the relics of positive purposes that descended from the good of the nature in which he began.

... that does really make you think twice.

And, and certainly the later elements, and interesting that both of those things that we talked about are in Morgoth's Ring, which is, I think, the second to last of the volumes of History of Middle-earth.

It's number 10.

It's number 10? Okay, so it's, yeah-

Now, I'm hoping some of you already are at least aware of the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth.

Um, it comes from Morgoth's Ring, and it is this amazing discussion between Finrod, an elf, and a mortal woman, Andreth, about the metaphysical differences between elves and men.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

They went somewhere.

Spirits that linger in some way after the bodies have died are known as unbodied, and this is one of the things that Tolkien had to say about them in Morgoth's Ring.

It is therefore a foolish and perilous thing, besides being a wrong deed forbidden justly by the appointed rulers of Arda, if the living seek to commune with the unbodied, though the houseless may desire it, especially the most unworthy among them.

For the unbodied wandering in the world are those who at the least have refused the door of life and remain in regret and self-pity.

Well,

and it's also, there's this quote in Morgoth's Ring where it's like, it was held that the refusal to return to life after repose in Mandos was a fault, showing a weakness or lack of courage in the Fea.

So if you refuse to be re-bodied, that is not cool.

It's a skill issue.

So I like how it actually does touch upon that.

Like the very beginning, it was... fair but he just tipples and tipples down and I think also in relation to Sauron is and there are snippets of it in the show which we'll probably go into but there's a lot of parallels as well and passages which you can pull from Morgoth's ring and I think we're going to see a lot more of that in season three but there's a quote where he says that he did not object to the existence of the world so long as he could do what he liked with it so...

Order, order, order.

It's

got to be better than Morgoth, right? You just want to destroy it.

Like you said, I guess like another place where the show references it in probably his peak gaslighting of Celebrimbor when he's like, do you know what it is to be tortured by a god? And then talks about how he had always had this vision that he wished to perfect, whereas Morgoth sought to destroy Morgoth.

And yeah, I think that encapsulates that quote that you've just mentioned from Morgoth's Ring.

That's really them bringing that into the show.