cassowarykisses:

psychopompious:

@nyarnamaitar Hey! I wanted to reply to your convo about Sauron and his opinion of Melkor’s “failure”, but I didn’t want to derail it, and this ended up getting too long for a comment or an ask, so I’ve put the whole rambly thing under a cut.

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I particularly like your idea that Sauron wanted to make the One Ring to prevent his power from being subdivided further and further. I find it likely that he perceived Melkor’s eventual loss as to be a symptom of his loss of personal control over his power (he cannot shapeshift, he cannot heal from the Silmarils/Fingolfin’s stab wound). That is, Sauron thinks he can’t achieve his goals without first making sure his power & focus are fixed points. I’ve headcanoned for awhile now that the One Ring made Sauron basically incapable of going back on his major goals & positions at the time he made it, but I hadn’t considered the way Melkor’s fall would have impacted his decision to do that. Sauron only made any sort movement toward redemption during the War of Wrath because he perceived Melkor’s methods as pointless and doomed to failure; to Sauron, the value of having control over the world ranks higher than any other moral considerations. 

With that in mind, it’s interesting to think about why Sauron would found a cult devoted to Melkor during his time in Numenor. Was it purely to see how far he could make the Numenoreans go? Some sort of tribute to Melkor and his methods, particularly if Sauron intended to utterly ruin Numenor? (Though probably not in the exact way it wound up happening.)