elennalore

Hello! I haven't posted here much lately, but I decided to take part in a Silmarillion Writers' Guild challenge 30-Day Character Study and this blog is useful for posting some of the entries. Possible ficlets I manage to write will be posted on SWG, but I'll still post the links here.

My character for the 30-day character study will be Mairon, pictured above as Aulë's Maia in his hopeful youth (art by me). Also known as Sauron, Annatar, Gorthaur, Tar-Mairon and Zigûr, this little Maia seems to more names and more history than is possible to fit in a 30-day character study, especially as I try to keep this challenge low-effort and fun. I might not post every day, for the challenge runs until February 15 as a part of SWG 2025 Jubilee. So I might have time to finish all the prompts. And a lesser goal could hardly be enough for studying a character who loves organization and perfection, right?

I will tag all the posts "30-day challenge" so that they can be found easily.

After this little introduction, let's proceed to

Day 1

The prompt for the first day was a reading prompt: Drop Everything and Read, Part One. Take at least a half-hour to read what the texts say about your chosen character.

What can I say? I completed this. I read over half an hour snippets from the Silmarillion, the Lord of the Rings and Morgoth's Ring. I had just previously read Valaquenta in the Silmarillion, and I now I proceeded to read Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age. Then I took LotR and read the part where Gandalf and Frodo discuss the Ring in the Shadow of the Past, and how Gandalf reads the Ring-poem in the Black Speech in the Council of Elrond. The problem is that Mairon (of course he is always called Sauron in these sources, but you know whom I mean) is such an elusive character. He's everywhere, and nowhere. He does not appear in person in the book named by him (The Lord of the Rings).

My best source, almost surprisingly, was Myths Transformed in Morgoth's Ring where there was a lot about him in Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion. And JRRT writes about Sauron there in a more sympathetic light than one would think. What makes Mairon so interesting is that he's such a multi-dimensional character, not just black-and-white evil.

But perhaps the most intriguing detail about Sauron is what JRRT wrote about his original name, published in Parma Eldalamberon 17: [quote]Sauron's original name was Mairon, but this was altered after he was suborned by Melkor. But he continued to call himself Mairon the Admirable, or Tar-mairon 'King Excellent' until after the downfall of Númenor [end of quote].

This short quote really feeds my imagination, and it tells so much about Mairon - but I'll return to this later during this challenge.

Many thanks for the SWG for organizing the Monthly Challenges!