Gandalf goes to Dol Guldur

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Juicy-Sweet

Another interesting question is: Why didnt they guess right off the bat it was Sauron.

What we have here is basically a very powerful guy, powerful enough to amass an evil army the Elves need to stay clear off, turn almost all of Mirkwood into a dark and evil place as well as perform feats of magic.

Now whoooooo could that be?

In all of Silmarollon and LoTR there are only two characters that could do that: The Witch King and Sauron.

I guess by Gandalf having to spy and all to find out which one of the two it was, Tolkien is hinting at there having been lots more evil overlords, that just doesnt happened to be mentioned anywhere but who had been running evil kingdoms at one time or another. Probably both Morgoth and Sauron's defeats released a bunch of evil overlords from duties, freeing them to set up shop on their own. Or maybe it happened now and then that an Elf Lord went evil.

Well, that is one thing, Middle-Earth is after all pretty vast and nobody knows what might have come, say, from the East, one can pretty much imagine some evil that had survived Morgoth's fall suddenly emerging after long inactivity. Think of the Balrog of Moria, for example. Or Shelob.

However, one thing that is made clear in LotR is that for a long time, the Wise had been thinking that it might be one of the Nazgul. It would make sense - they used to be "great sorcerers" and all that.

For that matter, I believe it was said that during the Watchful Peace, there had been one Nazgul (namely, the second, Khamul), with "his fellow from Dol Guldur" sort of left to guard Dol Guldur. Then Sauron returned, of course, when the vigilance sort of lessened.