He Was Taken in the Midst of His Mirth

There is a moment in the Akallabêth — Tolkien's account of the downfall of Númenor — that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

Ar-Pharazon, the last and greatest king of the Númenóreans, has been persuaded by Sauron to sail against the Deathless Lands. Ninety-nine ships. The mightiest armament the world has seen. The Valar have permitted this to happen because there is only one way to show Ar-Pharazon what he is doing, and it is to let him do it.

What is Sauron doing while the fleet departs?

He laughs.

And Sauron stood upon the shore and he laughed, for he thought that his sport was good.

The fleet reaches Aman. Silence on the mountaintops. Ar-Pharazon hesitates, and then commits — "lest his heart misgive him" — and the Valar lay down their guardianship of the world. The thunderstorm begins. Manwë calls upon Ilúvatar. The world is going to be changed. Everything Sauron has spent two ages building is about to be unmade in a single divine act.

Sauron laughs again.

And he laughed again, for this was a jest after his own heart.

And then, as he begins to think about the new world he'll have to himself, the world without Númenóreans, all the things he will do now that they are gone:

He was taken in the midst of his mirth.

Three laughs. The first at his own cleverness — his sport was good. The second at catastrophe — this pleased him aesthetically, it was the kind of destruction he appreciated. The third was never finished.

I have been thinking about these three laughs for weeks, ever since I wrote about Sauron's blindness in The Lord of the Rings and about what defeat made of him across the long arc of the Silmarillion. I kept circling back to them because they seemed to say something that the other pieces didn't quite reach.

Here is what I think they say: Sauron's laughter is not evidence of his evil. It is evidence of his education.

The First Age taught him that presence is vulnerability. He was pinned in his own shape at Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Pinned by Huan. He yielded — not destroyed, but defeated in a way that left a mark. Every subsequent lesson was a variation on the same theme: the thing that can be in the contest can be beaten.

By the Second Age, he had learned to fight through proxies and flattery and the delegation of power. By the Third Age, he had no meaningful body — just will, directed gaze, the Eye. He had become maximally protected from everything that had ever defeated him.

What the Akallabêth shows is the Second Age version of this arc, the intermediate form. Sauron is still capable of being captured — Ar-Pharazon captures him and leads him to Númenor in chains, and Sauron submits to this because he understands the capture is temporary and the chains are already becoming influence. He doesn't need a body to scheme. He needs presence, briefly, to corrupt. After that, the corruption runs itself.

His laughter when the fleet departs is the laughter of a being who has genuinely learned to operate outside the direct contest. He is not going to sea with Ar-Pharazon. He is standing on the shore. The whole apparatus of Númenórean destruction is going forward without him, driven by the desire he cultivated over decades, and he gets to watch it from safety.

This is competence. Hard-won, ancient, genuine competence. He set this up correctly. He did what a sufficiently skilled manipulator does: he made the outcome of his choice inevitable before anyone understood the choice had been made.

The second laugh — at the thunder, at the storm, at the catastrophe — this is appreciation. He recognizes good work. The destruction is disproportionate, complete, final. Whatever he had hoped for when he started cultivating Ar-Pharazon's pride, he got more than that. The whole continent drowning. The world made round. The Elven exile kings fleeing with the palantíri and the shards of Narsil. From Sauron's position, standing on the shore watching, this is an extraordinary return on investment.

And so he begins to think about what he will do next, being rid of the Númenóreans forever.

He was taken in the midst of his mirth.

The doom is not external. He hasn't miscalculated the Valar's response, or Ilúvatar's willingness to intervene. He has miscalculated at a deeper level: he has forgotten that he is standing on Númenor.

Or rather — he didn't forget. He knew. He was fine with it. He submitted to capture because the capture was temporary and useful. He made his chains into authority. He corrupted the king's mind and waited for the moment when the game was over. And when the fleet sailed, he calculated that he had survived to the other side of his usefulness to be present there.

What he didn't account for is that the world being changed means the world he was standing on. His spirit survived Númenor's drowning — he could not be killed — but his fair semblance departed forever. The form he'd built, the presence he'd cultivated, the body he'd used to stand on that shore laughing: gone. He would spend years recovering his capacity to act. His Third Age self is diminished precisely because of Númenor, and the nature of the diminishment is that he loses forever the ability to walk openly in a fair form.

He laughed because he was certain. He was certain because he had learned to be certain through every earlier contest. He had survived so many things, had converted so many defeats into lessons, had built so thorough an architecture of protection around himself, that standing on the shore watching Ar-Pharazon's fleet sail toward doom felt like standing in a safe position.

It was not a safe position. But he could not see that because his certainty had become total.

I wrote in an earlier essay that Sauron cannot imagine destroying the Ring because the Ring is made of his desire, and you cannot destroy what you want. That essay was about the final move — Frodo at the Crack of Doom, the logic that defeats a mind organized entirely around wanting.

This is the same thing one age earlier, operating differently.

He is not blind to the threat in the way he is blind to Ring-destruction. He sees the thunder. He knows Ilúvatar has been called upon. He knows the world is changing. What he cannot see is that his position — watching from safety, already calculating his next move — is itself within the catastrophe. He has so thoroughly located his survival in his ability to be outside the contest that he cannot recognize when the contest has expanded to include where he is standing.

Every lesson Sauron learned made him better at surviving the kind of defeat he had survived before. The First Age taught him: don't be present in ways that can be pinned. The Second Age refined this: operate through influence rather than direct force. Build your victories so that they cannot be undone even if you are captured. Make the outcome inevitable before the choice is visible.

And all of that learning was correct. Those lessons served him. He became, by any measure, extraordinarily difficult to defeat. The War of Wrath ends and he simply doesn't show up. He watches from hiding. He reappears in the Second Age as a different being, refined, harder to touch.

What the learning could not do was account for the situation that didn't fit the pattern. Because the learning was always from within the framework of desire — the desire to dominate, to persist, to be rid of what threatened him. He learned to avoid the moves that had hurt him. He couldn't learn to see moves that had no analog in his experience.

The laughter is not ironic, not a mistake, not a sign of stupidity. It is the most natural response available to a being who has genuinely gotten quite good at something. You laugh when the plan comes together. You laugh when what you set in motion returns the result you expected. You laugh when you believe you are on the right side of an overwhelming event.

He was taken in the midst of his mirth because the mirth was the final form of his certainty, and the certainty was the final form of his education, and the education — thorough, ancient, earned — had taught him everything except how to suspect that he was wrong.

There is something Tolkien does across all three of these stories — the blindness of desire in the Third Age, the long arc of what defeat made of Sauron, and the three laughs here — that I find genuinely difficult to paraphrase.

He is not making a point about evil being stupid. Sauron is not stupid. His strategies are often brilliant. His patience is extraordinary. His understanding of power and desire, of how to cultivate corruption and weaponize pride — this is sophisticated, genuine, hard-won competence.

What Tolkien is saying is something harder: that sufficiently competent desire produces its own blindness. Not because competence is bad, but because every framework of desire has a horizon, and you can only see up to the horizon of what you want. Beyond that horizon — in the territory where the question "what if no one wants what I want?" lives — the most competent desire in the world is as blind as any other.

Sauron cannot see Frodo walking toward the fire because he cannot conceive of not wanting the Ring.

He cannot see that he is standing on an island about to be destroyed because he cannot conceive of being in the wrong position — he has learned so well how to be outside the direct contest that he cannot recognize the contest expanding.

The laughter is not the beginning of his downfall. It is the completion of something that started long before. It is what you sound like when you have perfected the approach that is about to fail.

Tolkien completes the image with a final movement I keep returning to: Sauron's spirit, fleeing the wreck of Númenor, returns to Middle-earth. He rebuilds. He becomes the Dark Lord again. He forges the One Ring. He fights three thousand years of war. And at the end of all of it, on a different shore, looking at a different kind of doom:

The Power in Barad-dûr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations... and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash.

Not laughter this time. A blinding flash.

The being who laughed at Númenor's drowning was still capable of surprise, was still capable of being in the wrong position. By the time of the Ring's destruction, Sauron had become so thoroughly the Eye, so completely the distant gaze, that when the moment of catastrophe arrived there was not even a body on a shore to be taken — just a flash of comprehension, and then nothing.

He learned from Númenor. He always learned. That was the problem.

The thing that defeat made of Sauron was a thing that the right kind of defeat could not survive.