200 From a letter to Major R. Bowen 25 June 1957
I note your remarks about
Sauron. He was always de-bodied when vanquished. The theory, if one can dignify the modes of the story with such a term, is that he was a spirit, a minor one but still an 'angelic' spirit. According to the mythology of these things that means that, though of course a creature, he belonged to the
race of intelligent beings that were made before the physical world, and were permitted to assist in their measure in the making of it. Those who became most involved in this work of An, as it was in the first instance, became so engrossed with it, that when the Creator made it real (that is, gave it the secondary reality, subordinate to his own, which we call primary reality, and so in that hierarchy on the same plane with themselves) they desired to enter into it, from the beginning of its 'realization'.
They were allowed to do so, and the great among them became the equivalent of the 'gods' of traditional mythologies; but a condition was that they would remain 'in it' until the Story was finished. They were thus in the world, but not of a kind whose essential nature is to be physically incarnate. They were self-incarnated, if they wished; but their incarnate forms were more analogous to our clothes than to our bodies, except that they were more than are clothes the expression of their desires, moods, wills and functions. Knowledge of the Story as it was when composed, before realization, gave them their measure of fore-knowledge; the amount varied very much, from the fairly complete knowledge of the mind of the Creator in this matter possessed by
Manwë, the 'Elder King', to that of lesser
spirits who might have been interested only in some subsidiary matter (such as
trees or
birds). Some had attached themselves to such major
artists and knew things chiefly indirectly through their knowledge of the minds of these masters. Sauron had been attached to the greatest,
Melkor, who ultimately became the inevitable Rebel and self-worshipper of mythologies that begin with a transcendent unique Creator.
Olórin (Vol II p. 279) had been attached to Manwë.1
The Creator did not hold himself aloof. He introduced new themes into the original design, which might therefore be unforeseen by many of the spirits in realization; there were also unforeseeable
events (that is happenings which not even a complete knowledge of the past could predict).
Of the first kind and the chief was the theme of the incarnate intelligence,
Elves and
Men, which was not thought of nor treated by any of the Spirits. They were therefore called the Children of
God. Being other than the Spirits, of less 'stature', and yet of the same order, they were the object of hope and desire to the greater spirits, who knew something of their form and nature and the mode and approximate time of their appearance in the realization. But they also realized that the Children of God must not be 'dominated', though they would be specially susceptible to it.
It was because of this pre-occupation with the Children of God that the spirits so often took the form and likeness of the Children, especially after their appearance. It was thus that Sauron appeared in this shape. It is mythologically supposed that when this shape was 'real', that is a physical actuality in the physical world and not a vision transferred from mind to mind, it took some time to build up. It was then destructible like other physical organisms. But that of course did not destroy the spirit, nor dismiss it from the world to which it was bound until the end.
After the battle with Gilgalad and Elendil, Sauron took a long while to re-build, longer than he had done after the Downfall of Númenor (I suppose because each building-up used up some of the inherent energy of the spirit, which might be called the 'will' or the effective link between the indestructible mind and being and the realization of its imagination). The impossibility of re-building after the destruction of the Ring, is sufficiently clear 'mythologically' in the present book.
