[Legate of Amon Lanc]

(This is scary. I just started replying to this post, then left for a few minutes [to get a candle on which I could "bake" some marshmallows], and when I came back, my reply was gone and there was just the quoted post... and not even trying to hit "back" in the editor window helped... so I had to write it all anew. Fortunately it wasn't too long, I just wonder what happened.)

Originally Posted by Thinlómien

Yes, now this is actually quite interesting. Sauron seems to be rather scary every time we are given a glimpse of how he is, or when we can see him acting and talking. But when he is just the Dark Lord and we are told of his evil plans and thoughts, or his armies, or how he would torture his prisoners in Barad-dûr, it's really not very scary. I think it must be the distance... or either, the scary thing is maybe Sauron's personality, not his powers? I don't know... I just started thinking about this.

Yes, well... I think actually, while usually it's like that the "faceless evil" is scary, in Sauron's case this is not so. It's when we SEE him, or know what he's like, that he has the most impact on us, it seems. I think that's when we realise how evil, malicious, sly, whatever else he is. Today, I just read a bit from the Lay of Leithian in HoME, just the one when Felagund, Beren & co. are captured by the Necromancer, the early draft of Sauron at Tol-in-Gaurhoth. I think this is exactly the Sauron I know - just evil, and in a way, he is even fascinating to me, in the similar way that for example Saruman is. Although, it's a little different, Saruman is not evil the way Sauron is - if I were to describe that in one word, then Saruman is treacherous, while Sauron is evil.

And now that I started thinking along these lines, I realised it's very easy to start exaggerating when you start making lists like these. Most of the things I listed don't really scare me. Maybe they are kind of scary, but they don't creep me out or anything. I think that Tolkien's books mostly aren't scary. It's more like some weird sort of fascination...

That's what I had in mind when I was writing the first post of mine here, that after the "Nameless things", the rest actually aren't the way that they would scare me (and that episode with Baldor). But when there was this question "which are the scariest", and one was supposed to make a list, then yes, it would be the one I made. And still there applies what I said earlier - that these are "scary", while for example the Balrog is not. Also, the list I composed is (partially) based on what I "remember" as scary, i.e. what I considered scary when I read the books for the first time (and was about eight or so).