Sandheaver – A family of Little Folk (Hobbits) of Bree.
Sandyman – A family of Shire-hobbits, who owned and operated the Mill of Hobbiton. Neither the elder Sandyman nor his shiftless son Ted were much liked in the locality, and Ted eventually proved something of a bad lot: he threw in with the rogues of Saruman’s employ during the War of the Ring and allowed them to ‘remodel’ his mill. The machinery ceased to grind corn and instead churned out a stream of filth into The Water. These matters were all attended to by the returning members of the Fellowship of the Ring.
Sangahyando ‘Throng-cleaver’ (Q.) – See ANGAMAITË AND SANGAHYANDO.
Saradoc ‘Scattergold’ Brandybuck – The Master of Buckland from 1408–32 Shire Reckoning, and the father of Meriadoc ‘the Magnificent’.
Sarn Athrad – See FORD OF STONES.
Sarn Ford – The last ford across the river Baranduin before it reached the Sea south of Harlindon. Sarn Ford was the southernmost boundary of the Shire and the road which ran from Michel Delving to join the Greenway south of the river crossed the Baranduin at this point.
Sarn Gebir ‘Stone-spikes’ (Sind.) – Fierce, dangerous shoals on the Anduin shortly before the Great River ran through the gorge of the Argonath. These rapids were impassable to all river traffic, and travellers were obliged to take to the land if they wished further to descend the Anduin; for this purpose a portage-way was constructed early in the Third Age by Men of Gondor.
Saruman the White – Also known as Curunír, the ‘Man-of-Skill’; Chief of the Order of Istari (Wizards), leader of those five MAIAR sent to Middle-earth early in the Third Age (c. 1000) in order ‘to contest the power of Sauron, and to unite all those who had the will to resist him’.3 Saruman’s knowledge was ‘deep’, and his hands were ‘marvellously skilled’, and he became Head of the White Council which alone moved against Sauron during the middle years of the Age. But his pride grew with his power, and little by little his true wisdom decreased as his fabled skills multiplied – and in the end he fell, bloodlessly, under Sauron’s control, a victim of his own slow corruption. He died at the end of the War of the Ring, a shamed traitor, stripped of all power and lordship, and came no more to Valinor.
The manner of Saruman’s passing is recounted by Frodo in some detail in his narrative; less well-documented is the story of the Wizard’s arising. For many years he wandered in the East of Middle-earth, acquiring arcane knowledge and learning many new skills. He then began to strengthen his will and so trained himself for eventual dominance, thus forgetting one of the chief injunctions of his Order. Yet many years of the Third Age were to pass before other members of the White Council detected his slow deviation from their common goal, and in due course Saruman succeeded in having himself declared Head of that same Council (the Istari and the Chief Eldar), in the service of which he bent all his newly acquired powers of mind and hand.
It was afterwards seen that Saruman had long desired to become a Power in himself, and that it was this weakness which was the beginning of his slow downfall. (For the other members of the Council, and of his Order, remained true to their original task, and did not seek to impose their will on others where it was resisted.) At all events, Saruman made his first deliberate move in this direction in the year 2759 Third Age, when he appeared at the Coronation of King Fréaláf of Rohan, successor of the mighty Helm Hammerhand. The Wizard brought with him rich presents, and declared himself the friend of Rohan and Gondor, and a little later was able to persuade Steward Beren of Gondor to grant him the Keys of Orthanc, the mighty Tower which, together with its fortress of ISENGARD, commanded the strategic Gap of Rohan. All thought this a welcome move. For although Saruman’s policies were already distorted and his aims self-serving, he long concealed his true mind.
For many years he dwelt in peace with his neighbours; but all the time the Wizard was secretly searching the Tower of Orthanc for a long-lost treasure of the Dúnedain, the possession of which would immeasurably strengthen the power he craved. This was the Palantír of Orthanc, one of the fabled Seeing-stones of Gondor, and in the end he found it – and kept it – in some secret place high in the lonely Tower. Nonetheless, his fascination with devices and objects of craft led the Wizard (like others before him) up dangerous paths. Long obsessed with the fate of the Ruling Ring of Sauron, and with the lost secrets of the Elven-smiths of Eregion, he suspected before anyone else that the Ring was indeed awake and seeking its Master (who was then dwelling in Dol Guldur). And when, in 2851 Third Age, the White Council met to consider ways of bringing about Sauron’s downfall before he should again grow too powerful, Saruman, hoping that the Ring would expose its location if Sauron were left unharassed, deliberately overruled a strong recommendation (from Gandalf the Grey, second of the Order) that Dol Guldur be attacked and its occupant destroyed or driven out. Saruman himself then secretly began to explore the shallows of the Gladden; for in his long search for information he had learned from the libraries of Gondor somewhat of Isildur’s death. And when the Wizard discovered that Sauron was also seeking the Ring in that same area, he became greatly alarmed – but still he withheld his vital insights from his fellow members. Fourteen years later the White Council met for the last time under Saruman’s leadership. Still he dissembled concerning the Great Ring, for by then he had begun to suspect that Gandalf the Grey was closer to its whereabouts than he. For this reason he began to spy on Gandalf, and he withdrew from the Council, and took Isengard and Orthanc for his own, rebuilding the fortress and gathering to him many Orcs and Wild Men. His mask of friendship towards the Rohirrim stiffened, and he began to meddle in their affairs, and to subvert their rule; for by this time Saruman was planning the destruction of Rohan as the first stroke of the war which he plainly foresaw.
Fifty years later (c. 3000 Third Age) he dared for the first time to use the Palantír of Orthanc.
‘Further and further abroad he gazed, until he cast his gaze upon Barad-dûr. Then he was caught!’4
For Sauron possessed the Stone of Minas Ithil, which his servants had captured nearly a thousand years earlier; and his will was greater than that of Saruman. Still the Master of Isengard believed that he would prevail – even in combat with the Lord of the Rings – if only the Ruling Ring were his. But his efforts to secure it during the War of the Ring went badly wrong. Foiled in this, he attacked Rohan – but his great army never came back from Helm’s Deep (see BATTLE OF THE HORNBURG), and in the end Saruman was himself assailed in Isengard and forced to seek refuge in the impregnable Tower of Orthanc. He was afterwards confronted by those he had made his enemies; and he was cast from the Order of Istari and from the Council of the Wise. Bereft of all true power, he was afterwards released to go where he might. Yet Saruman had still some power left – the charm of his voice – and his malice was unabated. Northwards he journeyed, to the Shire (where his agents had long been at work) and from motives of pure malevolence he there awaited the return of the four Hobbits whose deeds (as he saw it) had robbed him of his own and brought him to a sorry pass. For the Shire had been ravaged by his orders, and Saruman wished to observe the Hobbits’ grief and dismay.
It is recounted in the Red Book that Saruman was murdered by his own slave at the very doors of Bag End in the Shire; and so it came to pass that he who had once been a messenger of the Valar, who had come to Middle-earth in hope and desire to aid lesser creatures afflicted by Sauron, who had in his day possessed more knowledge than any other loremaster, whose voice was subtle and whose skills of hand were a byword, died in the dust like a vagabond, his throat cut by a poor mad wretch whom he had himself destroyed. It was not the least of the tragedies of the War of the Ring, and it did not go unmourned.
Sauron the Great – The self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth and declared Enemy of the Free Peoples; servant of Morgoth in the Elder Days and supreme force for Evil throughout two subsequent Ages: Black Master of the land of Mordor, Eye of the Dark Tower, Seducer, Betrayer and Shadow of Despair; the Lord of the Rings o
f Power.
A discussion of Sauron’s true nature would necessitate an enquiry into the intrinsic nature of Evil itself, since he later became – though he had not always been – the focus for all the greed, lust and terrible energy which was to be found in Middle-earth during the two Ages of his supremacy. All Evil gravitated to him, just as he himself became its ultimate source; and though he was, in the end, like Morgoth before him, cast into the void for ever, the mischief he had committed during the long years of his ascendancy could never be wholly unmade. And he has had many successors.
‘Yet nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.’5 In his origins, he was one of the divine Ainur, of the race called Maiar; and he served the Vala Aulë, and learned great craft from him. (Sauron is a later name given to him by the High-elves in their own language, and means ‘the Abhorred’, while the Grey-elves knew him as Gorthaur ‘the Cruel’.) But in earliest times he relinquished his labours with Aulë the Smith, and transferred his allegiance to Melkor; and when Melkor first began to devise evil in Arda, long before the Elves awoke in Cuiviénen, Sauron was already his most accomplished, powerful and valuable servant. Great service he rendered to Melkor – and continued to render while Melkor ruled Middle-earth, acting as cruelly towards Elves and Men as his Master had ever done, though at first with less power to command.
His name first appears in records at the time of the Dagor Bragollach, when his armies of orcs and werewolves captured the tower of Minas Tirith on Tol Sirion that Finrod had built; and here for a while he dwelled, in Tol-in-Gaurhoth (as the island was renamed by the Eldar; it means ‘Isle of Werewolves’), the Lieutenant of Morgoth (as Melkor was now known). Yet long before this he had been the first Captain of Angband. At the time of its building, this underworld realm was but a western bastion of Utumno, and Sauron was its castellain. But then the Valar came to Middle-earth and fought the Battle of the Powers against Morgoth, and took him prisoner back to Valinor; but Sauron was overlooked, and escaped the doom of imprisonment. And by the time of the Bragollach he was become an evil lord of great power, second in the world only to Morgoth himself. Sauron it was who devised the ending of the outlaws of Dorthonion (see GORLIM THE UNHAPPY); and he is remembered by the Elves as the slayer of Finrod Felagund.
At all events, the Servant survived where the Master did not, and with the coming of the Host of the Valar the cause of Evil in the First Age was ended. So great was the destruction wrought among Morgoth’s many servants that for a while the Eldar believed that Evil had been ended for ever. Morgoth himself was cast for ever into outer Darkness. But Sauron somehow survived the Breaking of Thangorodrim; and when he was summoned, by Eonwë captain of the Host of Valinor, to return to the Blessed Realm and there accept judgement on his crimes – likely as he well knew to involve imprisonment for many Ages in the Halls of Mandos – he refused.
Remaining therefore in Middle-earth – where the cause of Evil was now laid low indeed – Sauron after a time became aware of the growing power of Númenor across the Seas, and of the hosts of his former enemies who still dwelt in the westlands of Middle-earth, a bar between him and his domination over mortal lands.
Alarmed by the strength of both the Elves and the Númenoreans, Sauron then began to seek for a land which he could fortify after the manner of Angband of old, where he could build a new Thangorodrim as a fortress of his might. Such a land lay empty, away to the south and east, behind impassable mountain-walls, and in its centre stood a mighty volcano, whose age-old fires had covered the plain round about with layer upon layer of dark ash. This forsaken land Sauron took for his own, and it was named Mordor, the ‘Black-land’. There he built his Dark Tower, the Barad-dûr, and there he dwelt throughout the Second Age.
Although in later years Sauron’s appearance grew hateful – so that his power then lay in terror alone – at this time he was still able to appear fair of aspect and form. Accordingly, he determined upon treachery and deceit as his chief weapons, offering knowledge, wearing a fair form and bearing fair names, many of them signifying reverence for Aulë. Gil-galad, Elven-king of Lindon, whom Sauron first approached, nonetheless refused all dealings with him. Not so with other Elves: Celebrimbor of Eregion, greatest of surviving craftsmen, was less wise in these matters than Gil-galad and made a covenant with Sauron, whereby each provided the other with knowledge. Together they began to forge the Rings of Power.
It was by this means that Sauron of Mordor made himself supreme in Middle-earth for the remainder of the Second Age. He aided the Elven-smiths in their great task, and secretly wrought the One Ring to rule all the other rings which then passed under his control – so long as their owners wore them. This brought at last the revelation of his true nature, and the Elves made war upon him. Too late: his strength was already greater than theirs, and Eregion was overrun, and Celebrimbor slain. Only Gil-galad held out – and even he would have been defeated had not aid arrived from Númenor in the nick of time. In this way the Edain of Númenor renewed their ancestral alliance with the Elves – and so gained for themselves the chief hatred of the Lord of the Rings. Sauron was forced to withdraw from Eriador and turn his interests eastward, for strong though he was, his power did not compare with that of Númenor, and he could wait. Nonetheless, his writ ran throughout most of Middle-earth for the remainder of the Second Age, and many peoples endured the full weight of his tyranny.
Yet all the time the island-realm of Númenor continued to grow in strength over the horizon, and the day of their second clash drew nearer. In 3261 the long-expected fleets appeared off Umbar, but so great was the power of the host led by Ar-Pharazôn the Golden that Sauron’s own armies melted away and he was left defenceless.
Yet not all his skills deserted him. Perceiving that the King of Númenor was a vain man, Sauron humbled himself and appealed to the mercy (and the pride) of Pharazôn, who did not make an end of him but carried him back, a prisoner, to Númenor. There Sauron’s old gifts for dominance and betrayal quickly reasserted themselves; he made himself Pharazôn’s chief counsellor and began to complete the process of corruption that the Númenoreans of the Kings’ Party had already long developed. He introduced a cult of the Dark and the name of Morgoth was spoken with awe in the high places of Númenor – while evil sacrifices were made, burnt offerings to Sauron’s former Master. In every sense, Númenor edged closer to the abyss under Sauron’s wicked tutelage.
He had been captive less than fifty years when, at his instigation, an ageing Ar-Pharazôn gave orders for the assembly of the Great Armament. In 3319 this host put to sea and sailed into the West, to give battle for the Undying Lands.
In the ensuing downfall of Númenor, Sauron’s mortal body was destroyed, but his spirit survived and fled back to Middle-earth, shapeless and vengeful. He was never again able to appear in a pleasing form, but instead became the Dark Lord, terrible of aspect, black and burning hot, with a single lidless Eye ‘rimmed with fire … glazed, yellow as a cat’s … and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing’.6 Hiding in Mordor for a while, he learned that a remnant of the Númenoreans had escaped him and were even then building mighty realms-in-exile upon his borders. Mustering his dispersed armies with furious speed, Sauron struck, purposing to sweep the newcomers into the Sea; in 3429 Second Age he came across the Pass of Cirith Ungol, capturing Minas Ithil and driving the Dúnedain back across the Anduin. But once more he had underestimated his foes: they made alliance against him and broke his armies, and laid siege to the Dark Tower itself; and in final combat with Gil-galad and Elendil, Sauron was cast down and his Ring was taken from him.
For the first thousand years of the Third Age Sauron slept and the westlands had peace from him. But slowly he began to take shape once more, though at this time he was too weak to recapture Mordor, which was essential to his greater purposes but which was closely guarded by the Dúnedain of Gondor. Instead he raised the smaller fortress of Dol Guldur on a hill in the southern reaches of Greenwood the Great.
There he began to hatch his plots once more. Evil stirred in the Forest; Orcs and Trolls reappeared in great numbers, and wolves howled on its borders. Greenwood was renamed Mirkwood and the power of ‘the Necromancer’ of Dol Guldur was spoken of with dread. In the meantime, desiring to strike at his enemies but seeing no hope at that time in an assault upon Gondor (then at the summit of its power), Sauron sent his chief servant, the Lord of the Ringwraiths, northwards into Eriador with the purpose of destroying the North-kingdom of the Dúnedain. How this task was faithfully carried through to a fearful conclusion is told elsewhere (see ANGMAR). Indeed, for most of the Third Age this most terrible servant worked assiduously on his Master’s behalf. The eventual destruction of the North-kingdom freed Sauron and his servants to work for the downfall of Gondor, and the weakening of the South-kingdom allowed Mordor to be reopened and occupied by the Nazgûl.
Yet throughout much of the Third Age Sauron continued to engage in policies of secrecy and concealment. He lay hidden in Dol Guldur, creating the grand designs while his servants harried his foes, growing ever more powerful even while the Wise debated whether or not he had awakened at all. Above everything else he desired to recover the Ruling Ring, for by the fact of his own existence Sauron knew it had not been destroyed; and to this end he bent all his guile during the remaining years of the Age. In the end he was driven from Dol Guldur before his spies could discover the Ring’s whereabouts, and soon afterwards he came openly to Mordor once more and proclaimed himself. However, being cautious, and wishing this time to be certain of victory before striking, the Dark Lord forbore to attack his foes until the Ring should come within his grasp. But his enemies (who indeed, as he feared, possessed his Ring), made their own moves even while he hesitated: and in the final campaign that was made against him Sauron’s armies were defeated in the hour of victory, his plans were brought to nothing, his servants were destroyed, the Dark Tower was cast down – and the Ruling Ring itself, the fount of all his hopes, was melted in the Fires of Mount Doom. So ended the Third Age, and so passed the power of Sauron the Great. He was cast into the void for ever and the fear of his dominion was lifted from the World.
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