Exploring Tolkien’s Legendarium: The Defeat of Sauron
At the start of the 2001 film, The Fellowship of the Rings, director Peter Jackson has crafted a compelling and visual stunning prologue. It distils a great deal of Tolkien’s text and conveys the essential history of the One Ring succinctly. Cinematically it works extremely well but it is sadly far from canonical due to all the practical considerations a film maker has to make when adapting a lore dense text. I have often wondered exactly how Sauron was defeated at the end of the Second Age because Tolkien is somewhat vague in The Lord of the Rings. Gil-galad, Elendil and Isildur all seem to be involved in physically fighting the Dark Lord. Gil-galad died due to being burned by Sauron’s touch. Elendil also died in combat and his sword Narsil broke beneath him. Isildur claimed to have delivered the killing blow after his father was defeated. However, no character in the story provides a definite, linear account of these event.
At the start of the 2001 film, The Fellowship of the Rings, director Peter Jackson has crafted a compelling and visual stunning prologue. It distils a great deal of Tolkien’s text and conveys the essential history of the One Ring succinctly. Cinematically it works extremely well but it is sadly far from canonical due to all the practical considerations a film maker has to make when adapting a lore dense text. I have often wondered exactly how Sauron was defeated at the end of the Second Age because Tolkien is somewhat vague in The Lord of the Rings. Gil-galad, Elendil and Isildur all seem to be involved in physically fighting the Dark Lord. Gil-galad died due to being burned by Sauron’s touch. Elendil also died in combat and his sword Narsil broke beneath him. Isildur claimed to have delivered the killing blow after his father was defeated. However, no character in the story provides a definite, linear account of these event.
Instead we have various characters making guarded statements about this battle at various points throughout the story. As ever, Tolkien is deliberately ambiguous and chooses his words very carefully. All of which builds a sense of legend around the events. However, if one draws upon Tolkien’s writing in other texts, such as his letters to his editor and readers, the comprehensive History of Middle-earth and the various appendices to The Lord of the Rings, there is enough information to reconstruct the broad sequence of events with reasonable confidence that provides a clearer picture of what happened. It should be noted that there is insufficient data to choreograph the combat blow by blow. Tolkien states who accomplished what but never described precisely how the three combatants fought or fell. That is left to the readers imagination and is perhaps all the better for it.
A deleted scene from The Fellowship of the Rings prologue depicting Elrond and Gil-galad
After reading and cross referencing the various sources I previously stated, here is my interpretation of the sequence of events that happened on the slopes of Mount Doom as Gil-galad, Elendil, Isildur and Sauron fought.
Sauron makes a sortie from Barad-dûr
After seven years of siege, Sauron personally breaks out of the Dark Tower and drives the fighting towards the slopes of Orodruin. Gil-galad and Elendil confront him there. Isildur, Elrond and Círdan are also present at the final encounter but the texts explicitly name Gil-galad and Elendil as the two who directly engage or “wrestle” with Sauron. “Wrestle” in Tolkien’s elevated, archaic language means a close and desperate physical struggle. Gil-galad presumably still had Aeglos his spear and Elendil had his sword Narsil. Both are imbued with “power”. Tolkien was intentionally vague about “magic” in his writing and it is very much a soft system with a quasi-spiritual aspect.
Gil-galad and Elendil overthrow Sauron
This is the most consistent point across various accounts. Gandalf says that Gil-galad and Elendil “overthrew Sauron”. Elrond states that Sauron was already “overthrown” before mentioning Isildur cutting off the Ring. Furthermore The Silmarillion says that after Sauron wrestled with the two kings, “Sauron also was thrown down”. Finally in Letter 131, Tolkien says that Gil-galad and Elendil perished “in the act of slaying Sauron”. The cumulative evidence therefore attributes Sauron’s actual defeat principally to Gil-galad and Elendil acting together. However, Sauron kills both kings during the same struggle. We know that Gil-galad was burnt. This probably happened during the close physical struggle, perhaps through Sauron seizing him but Tolkien never describes the exact action. Similarly, the details regarding Elendil death are absent. Nor can we determine whether Gil-galad or Elendil died first, or whether the events were effectively simultaneous. But in one respect the text is unambiguous. The outcome is mutually destructive. A pyrrhic victory.
Is Sauron physically dead at this point or just incapacitated?
This is a particularly ambiguous aspect of the tale. When Tolkien says Sauron was “thrown down” or “overthrown”, that could mean that his physical body was dead or that he was incapacitated and unable to continue fighting. However, I think it is certainly a case that the final separation of spirit from body had not yet occurred. The second possibility provides the neatest reconciliation of the accounts. Gil-galad and Elendil defeat and mortally wound Sauron, leaving him helpless or dying. They subsequently die achieving this. Isildur then performs the final physical act of “defeating Sauron” delivering the “killing blow”.
Isildur cuts off the Ring
Elrond says that Isildur alone stood beside his father during the “last mortal contest”, while Elrond and Círdan stood beside Gil-galad. That establishes Isildur’s presence at extremely close quarters. It does not, however, explicitly state that Isildur exchanged blows with Sauron before the two kings fell. Isildur takes the broken hilt-shard of Narsil and cuts the One Ring from Sauron’s hand. Only after narrating the overthrow by Gil-galad and Elendil do the principal accounts describe this action. At this point Sauron’s power wanes and his spirit flees, although precisely whether Ring-removal caused the bodily death or merely completed an already accomplished defeat is not explained. Isildur may well have delivered a “coup de grâce” to Sauron, finally killing his physical body, before cutting the One Ring from his hand. Either way, this deed makes Isildur’s action enormously important but it does not make him the warrior who single-handedly defeated Sauron. However, Isildur uses this act as justification for keeping the ring. “Was it not I that dealt the Enemy his death-blow?” This leads to the subject of Weregild, which is a complex matter in itself and best explored in a separate blog post.
A possible sequence of events
After due consideration of all the data available I interpret the most likely sequence of events regarding the defeat of Sauron to be as follows. Gil-galad and Elendil fight Sauron together at close quarters, with Isildur, Elrond and Círdan nearby but unable to intervene effectively. Both kings wound Sauron severely. Sauron seizes and burns Gil-galad, but in doing so leaves himself open to Elendil. Elendil delivers another terrible wound before Sauron strikes him down. Elendil falls upon Narsil and breaks it. Sauron, grievously injured and exhausted, falls beside them but still retains bodily life and the terrible heat of the Ring. Isildur takes up the shard and severs the Ring from his hand. Sauron’s body then finally relinquishes his spirit. That is a partly imaginative reconstruction but it accommodates virtually every significant statement Tolkien made. The order of responsibility is clearer than the exact physical events
A cutscene from the MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online depicting Gil-galad wounding Sauron
The depiction in The Lord of the Rings Online
The MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online features a cutscene version of these events and it is appreciably closer to the text than Peter Jackson’s prologue. It shows Gil-galad and Elendil both injuring Sauron, Sauron killing them through his fiery power and Sauron collapsing from the wounds and effort before Isildur cuts away the Ring. This captures Tolkien’s essential structure. The kings fight Sauron, all three are mortally overcome. Sauron falls. Isildur removes the Ring. LOTRO still invents necessary visual details. Tolkien does not say that Elendil is burned, that each king lands a particular wound, or that Sauron collapses from expending the Ring’s power. Only Gil-galad’s death by fiery heat is specifically attested to. Nevertheless, I think the LOTRO cutscene is probably the most credible dramatic visualisation of the surviving textual evidence. It understands that the victory belongs collectively to Gil-galad and Elendil, while still allowing Isildur’s severing of the Ring to function as the concluding “death-blow”.
Concluding thoughts
Upon further reflection it can be cogently argued that it is not essential to clarify this matter and many others that arise in Tolkien’s writing. As a writer whose work evolved over decades, he would often revise his writings and occasionality contradict himself. Thematically, much of The Lord of the Rings is about distant past events shaping the future. Much of this history is shared orally from characters from different races, with different perspectives. As such these dialogue exchanges can be open to interpretation and can be plausibly different. Plus Tolkien knew that it isn’t always essential or indeed desirable to clarify everything. His Legendarium drew heavily from existing European mythology which in itself is not one hundred percent coherent, linear or without contradiction. However, fans of Tolkien’s lore and of lore per se tend to like continuity. In its absence there is “headcanon” and artistic interpretation. In many respects that is what keeps Tolkien’s work evergreen.
