I was rethinking an earlier assertion made by both SRD and myself in the GI - that Sauron is evil personified. I'm second guessing myself, and thereby, also SRD - dare I?
Here's the post, to save anyone time who actually cares enough to look.
This is my second question in almost as many days, and given your time constraints and my selfish desire for you to get as much done on Fatal Revenant as possible, I feel a tad guilty.
Me! wrote:I just read your statement in the GI, “I didn't want to go the Tolkien route: pick a name like "Sauron" and *pretend* he isn't Evil Personified.”
My question should be obvious by now. Why don’t you think that Sauron was evil personified? What did he “lack"?
On a side note, I found it interesting that he put considerable effort into *not* being a Tolkien imitator, yet on the surface (surface only), there were dozens of superficial similarities. I don't have the guts to ask him if he's aware of this, though I've long wanted to.SRD wrote:I edited out most of your question because it seems to be based on a misunderstanding. I *do* think that Sauron was “evil personified.” My point, which I must have phrased rather badly, was simply that Tolkien doesn’t *announce* Sauron as “evil personified” (at least not in “The Hobbit” and LOTR, which is really all I know on the subject). To the best of my knowledge, Tolkien just told his story--and then stubbornly resisted all attempts to “interpret” it or assign meaning to it. Well, the story still is what it is; and Sauron qualifies as “evil personified”. But I got into this mess by trying to explain why I gave *my* “evil personified” a name as obvious as “Lord Foul the Despiser.” At the time that I wrote the first “Covenant” trilogy, I felt a young man’s desire to be VERY CLEAR that my story was not an imitation of Tolkien’s.