Sauron and his bodies
Sarumian talked earlier about Sauron being able to restore his physical presence a number of times, though with increasingly greater difficulty. Tolkien talked about this in a letter he wrote on 25th June 1957, to a Major R. Brown:
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 destructable 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. (Letters, Letter 200, p. 260.)
Tolkien then spoke of Sauron, after the War of the Last Alliance, taking longer to re-build than he had 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. (Ibid.)
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