A Face-palm for Sauron

[Mithadan]

Excellent thread Inziladun! This is a question that has nagged at me a bit, particularly where I am of the school that seeks to reconcile the internal consistency of the mythos when something that seems not to fit is found, rather than chalking it up to an error by the author.

Boromir88 refers to a statement which he could not locate that Sauron is considerably weaker in the Third Age. I have found the reference and will start there. Letter 183, in the note at the bottom of the page, states that Sauron "By the end of the Third Age (though actually much weaker than before) he claimed to be Morgoth returned." It may be that due to this loss of his native power and strength, Sauron assumed the Ring had been destroyed. It was not until the Ring later surfaced (literally, not just from the River Anduin, but also from the caverns under the Misty Mountains where Gollum had taken it) that the Ring "called" to its master, making him aware that it had not been destroyed. Alternatively, a simpler explanation may be that he learned of the Ring when Gollum attempted to find Bilbo and made his way to Mordor and was caught. In either event, Sauron knows the Ring still exists by the time of LoTR.

The interesting related question is why was Sauron's strength reduced at all. The Silmarillion states that the people of the Valar could "clothe" themselves in the form of the Children of Iluvatar or go unclothed " and then even the Eldar cannot clearly perceive them". Their forms could be assumed and disgarded at will. Why then does the destruction of Sauron's form at the end of the Second Age so weaken him if it is a mere form?

Letter 156 states that the Istari, as a condition to their returning to Middle Earth, were required to not merely clothe themselves, but incarnate; to house their spirits in a physical body "capable of pain, and weariness... and of being 'killed'". But Sauron, at least in the Second Age, was not so incarnated. He could shift from form to form still. He takes up a "fair" form to deceive the Elves of Hollin and again to deceive and corrupt the Numenoreans. The Akallabeth relates that "Sauron was not of mortal flesh, and though he was robbed now of the shape in which he had wrought so great an evil, so that he could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men, yet his spirit arose out of the deep... until he wrought himself a new guise, an image of malice and hatred made visible..." It did not take long for him to create this new "guise". Yet when he is "slain" at the end of the seige of Mordor, it takes him a thousand years to take up a new form.

It is likely this weakness and loss of power that led Sauron to conclude that the Ring, which contained much of his strength, had been destroyed and, of course, this is what should have happened and if roles were reversed, Sauron would have destroyed the Ring. This interpretation makes "sense" and would be logical to Sauron's mind (and Gandalf comments that Sauron was analytical and logical at least to his own mind; "wise fool"). But Sauron was deceived. The "slaying" of a form of the people of the Valar almost never happened. So Sauron may not have realized the extent of the effect of the loss of a form (or body, by the end of the Second Age, he may have been incarnated).

Going to Letter 200, Tolkien relates that Sauron was always "de-bodied" when he was vanquished. Sauron's 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." Tolkien explains that it took longer for Sauron to rebuild his body/form after the battle with Gil-Galad and Elendil "because each building-up used some of the inherent energy of the spirit..."

It appears that the drastic difference between the loss of his native power after the Fall of Numenor and after his defeat at the hands of the Last Alliance may have been what tricked Sauron into believing that the Ring had been destroyed. A discussion for another day, and it may be question that cannot be answered, is whether there is a difference between the destruction the "form" in which a Vala/Maia is "clothed", and the destruction of a "body" in which a Vala/Maia is incarnated, and if there is a difference then why was Sauron incarnated?