Sauron in “The Rings of Power”: the manipulator who comes bearing gifts

At the gates of Eregion, the city of the Elven-smiths, Halbrand turns up with a mouth full of promises. Celebrimbor, the greatest craftsman of the Second Age, had promised Galadriel he would never speak to him again and leaves him at the door, but in the end he listens. Halbrand claims the Valar have sent him to help and changes his face: now he is Annatar, the Lord of Gifts. That is how, in the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video, 2024), the Dark Lord's most patient operation begins: he does not storm the city, he helps it. By the time the Elf understands what he has forged, the nine rings for Men already carry Sauron's blood inside them.

The third season, which Prime Video premieres on November 11, 2026, jumps several years ahead and is set, according to the official announcement, at the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as he seeks to forge the One Ring. But before the Eye, which in Tolkien is mostly an emblem and a vision (in Galadriel's Mirror, Frodo sees it rimmed with fire) and in Peter Jackson's films becomes a literal eye of flame atop the tower, there was a fair face and a gift. And criminology knows a good deal about predators who arrive offering things.

// The theoryReciprocity and its parasite

Sauron's case file reads him through the evolutionary criminology of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (Homicide, 1988): dominance pushed to infinity. But evolutionary thinking also studies how we cooperate. In 1971, the biologist Robert Trivers used reciprocal altruism to explain why helping a stranger can pay off: I give to you today, you pay me back tomorrow. To sustain that exchange, natural selection shaped a whole mental machinery: gratitude, trust, the sense of debt that tightens after a favor. And, on the other side, cheater detection, which Leda Cosmides and John Tooby studied in 1992.

Every machinery of cooperation leaves a gap for whoever exploits it. In 1995, the psychologist Linda Mealey proposed in Behavioral and Brain Sciences that a minority of individuals follow a cheater strategy: they mimic the signals of cooperation, charm, generosity, the well-timed emotion, to collect other people's trust without ever repaying it. It only works while it stays rare, and while the cheater can move to a new group once his reputation catches up with him. The hypothesis is contested, and Mealey was talking about people, not fallen spirits, but it describes Annatar well: he changes face and name every time he is recognized. The full framework is in our file on evolutionary criminology.

Read Sauron’s full case file · Evolutionary criminology →

// The caseAnnatar, the benefactor of Eregion

Research on grooming, which grew out of the study of child sexual abuse (Craven, Brown and Gilchrist reviewed it in 2006), describes a sequence that reappears in cults and scams: pick someone with a need, win their trust by giving, cut them off from whoever might warn them, make them complicit and, in the end, control them. The series walks through it almost step by step. Celebrimbor's need is an artist's: to leave a work worthy of his lineage and to save the Elves from their decline. Annatar offers it to him. He gets the mithril from the Dwarves, pushes the forging of the Seven and then the Nine, and gradually takes over the running of the city while the smith shuts himself away in his workshop.

The decisive step is complicity. When the Dwarves start to grow suspicious, Annatar throws it in Celebrimbor's face that he has lied to Gil-galad about the new rings, and offers him a way out: make amends by forging the rings for Men. Shared guilt binds tighter than a chain, because the deceived can no longer ask for help without confessing. In the end the trick turns literal: Celebrimbor forges inside an illusion, the metal he took for mithril was Sauron's blood, and the gift carried the giver inside it. The season ends with the smith dead at Sauron's hands. In Tolkien everything moves more slowly: according to Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, Sauron tries to seduce the Elves around the year 1200 of the Second Age, forges the One around 1600, and Celebrimbor dies in 1697, when Eregion is laid waste. Cheater detection did work elsewhere: Gil-galad refused to deal with him. The smiths, who wanted what he was offering, did not.

// The same scriptThe wise fall too

Sauron repeats the move with anyone who lets him. Saruman, the wisest of the wizards, falls not by force but by study: he analyzes the rings to fight the enemy, looks into the palantír, and ends up proposing to Gandalf the alliance he would once have condemned. The Mouth of Sauron shows the end of the road: a man who served the Dark Lord so long that he forgot his own name. In all three cases Sauron's power comes in through the same door, the victim's desire. Our guide to the villains of The Lord of the Rings traces that slope character by character.