Without villains, there can be no heroes. The narrative drive of any heroic tale is dependent on the formidable challenge posed by its darkest forces. Consequently, we often discover that the reader’s fascination with any story is related less to the virtues of the hero and rather more to the machinations of the villain and his or her evil alliance with dark powers.
“The Devil has all the best tunes” is an old adage in music that applies equally to literature, and there are few authors who can rival J. R. R. Tolkien in his creation of archetypal villains, races of evil beings, supernatural entities and terrifying monsters. Indeed, his inventive creations in Middle-earth include all manner of things: evil and good, high and low, remarkable and ordinary. As Tolkien once explained: “Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.”
It was William Blake who infamously argued that Milton’s portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost was so magnificent that, like any true poet, he was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. One might perhaps say something similar about Tolkien’s creation of two truly satanic villains: Melkor, the “Beginner of Evil”, and his disciple Sauron, the “Lord of the Rings”.
In The Dark Powers of Tolkien, we examine both these mighty antagonistic forces at work in Tolkien’s writing and the very nature of evil itself. As a Christian medieval scholar, Tolkien’s profound moral and philosophical convictions deeply inform the narrative that plays out in his imaginary pre- or extra-Christian world.
The most common fatal flaw of his antagonists is consistent with the biblical proverb “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). Aristotle defined this kind of pride as hubris, the tragic flaw of noble characters whose downfall is the result of arrogance or overconfidence. Indeed, throughout Tolkien’s writing, there is an element of pride and the desire for power, wealth or fame that often overcomes the most worthy and the most unworthy alike.
In Tolkien’s own view, within the world of Elves and Men, “evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others”. This may result in the pursuit of power and the imposition of one will over the many, which inevitably end in tyranny, or, in Tolkien’s own words, “in sheer Domination”. There are other motives, of course: the pursuit of knowledge at the cost of wisdom, as seen in such vivid examples as Sauron and Saruman; and the very human desire to escape death and seek immortality, as evidenced by Tolkien’s Atlantis-like tale of Akallabêth, telling the story of the downfall of Númenor.
In The Heroes of Tolkien, I argued that the bloodlines of heroes were of immense importance in Tolkien, and showed how they could be traced back over thousands of years to their semi-divine origins. I also pointed out that the often immense backstories of Tolkien’s heroes and heroines are deeply intertwined with those of their ancestors and ultimately linked to the fates of dynasties and nations.
The same is certainly true of Tolkien’s villains and dark forces. To entirely understand ancient feuds and hatreds between nations, races and empires in The Lord of the Rings, one must explore thousands of years of Middle-earth history back to the days before the lands of Beleriand and the kingdom of Númenor sank beneath the seas. And to fully understand the source of evil directing events in the War of the Ring we must look back into the forces that brought about the creation of Arda (the earth) itself – and even a time before the World and Time itself came into existence.
The Dark Powers of Tolkien is organized in such a manner as to place the emergence and evolution of those powers in their appropriate historical context and chronological order. This has been done to provide readers – particularly those of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – with insights into the deeper (and often hidden) motives for the actions of many of Tolkien’s villains and their allies.
The books in this series collectively make up a reference library on the creative works of J. R. R. Tolkien and his world of Middle-earth and the Undying Lands. They are assembled with a view towards the author’s ambition to create a mythology for England. With this in mind, these books consistently examine Tolkien’s writing in the context of the myths and literature of other nations of the world. This was a perspective that was immensely important to Tolkien. Consequently, the series often attempts to trace the mythological, historical and philological sources of Tolkien’s inspiration. At other times, the commentaries examine other mythologies, historical documents and literatures that have themes, characters and events in common with Tolkien’s original tales.
As with all the books in this series, The Dark Powers of Tolkien is written and illustrated in a way that is both informative and accessible to the general reader. All the illustrations, charts and commentaries in The Dark Powers of Tolkien are meant as guides and aids to the reading and comprehension of Tolkien’s works. These are handbooks that attempt to give new and entertaining perspectives on Tolkien’s world, but are no substitute for the reading of the works themselves.
