The Portrait of Evil in The Lord of the Rings: Reflections Personal, Literary, and Theological

THE LORD OF THE RINGS has been a favorite book of mine for forty years. My father first read it to my sister and me when I was, I think, at the perfect age to hear it: about twelve, if memory serves. Since then, I have read it through on various occasions, the last being to my own daughter, when she was twelve.

If I ask myself why this book is so good—certainly as a "child's" book, but even for adults as well—my answer lies in its compelling portrait of evil. The book is rightly named. From the moment the Black Rider appears, in the quiet lanes of Hobbiton, we are caught by the threatening omnipresence of evil. We, like the Fellowship, are inextricably drawn toward Mordor, where the shadows lie. We are drawn toward the dark Lord on his dark throne.

Indeed, the greatness of the book (and I would unhesitatingly describe it as a great book, despite the inevitable limits placed on such a tale) lies in its portrait of evil. In my own reading of contemporary literature, I know only one other account of evil that is truer and more chilling: the hypnotic despair described by Georges Bernanos in Under The Sun of Satan.

What makes this portrait of evil so great and so compelling, and what arguments can be offered to demonstrate that a reading emphasizing the significance of evil in this book is true and faithful to the text?

My effort in this essay cannot be called "scholarly." This is a "layman's" reading of a book he loves. Although I have read its appendices more than once, I pretend to no complete knowledge. And it is only the Trilogy with which I will be concerned. For this reading, we can regard The Hobbit and The Silmarillion as helpful but nonessential background and foreground respectively; further Tales are of no concern.

When we speak of evil in The Lord of The Rings, we speak first of Sauron. True, there is a sense of an evil even more primordial lurking on the edges of the story. We know Sauron did not fashion Shelob, and we sense the same regarding the Watcher at Moria's West Gate, and the Balrog in its depths . . . a sense the Silmarillion confirms. Yet Sauron is to The Ring what Morgoth is to Tolkien's fuller vision: the heart and the center of evil, its true threat and presence personified. In this work, Sauron functions as Satan.

My first thesis has already been stated: Tolkien's portrait of evil in The Ring, and perforce of Sauron, is most compelling. I'd like to begin by reflecting on why this is so.

The fundamental reason, I believe, is that Tolkien chooses, brilliantly, to let Sauron remain hidden. We hear his voice only once: "Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul: One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them, one Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them." And yet, ironically, it is not he who voices these words, but his appointed challenger, Gandalf. And he says them not in some dark and fearsome dungeon, but in the place in all of Middle Earth most hidden from Sauron, in Imladris, in "the last Homely House east of the Sea," in a warm, firelit room, among friends.

Again, we glimpse him hardly at all, and then only fleetingly: as a burning fire in the Palantir, as the ever watchful Eye turning in wrathful terror toward Mt. Doom, as a vast, soaring darkness, lightning crowned, impenetrable, yet finally impotent. The fact is we never really see Sauron, just as we never really hear him.

And yet we feel him. His presence is...