Why the villains of The Lord of the Rings are the way they are
From Sauron to Shelob: which criminological theory explains each of the 10 villains of The Lord of the Rings, and what the One Ring reveals about how power corrupts.
Contains spoilers for all three of Tolkien’s novels and all three of Peter Jackson’s films, endings included.
The thesis
Few works have thought as hard about where evil comes from as J. R. R. Tolkien’s, and none has packed the question so neatly into a single object. The One Ring does not tempt with money or pleasure: it offers power, and with it the chance to use that power without answering to anyone. Plato set a similar test in Book II of the Republic with the Ring of Gyges, which made its wearer invisible: would anyone stay just if they could never be seen or punished? Tolkien answers with an entire gallery of cases. Almost no one who comes near the Ring walks away unharmed, and what interests a criminologist is how each of them falls.
The ten villains analyzed in this guide share five theories, and the way they are divided is already a thesis. Half of them, Saruman, Gríma, Gollum, Denethor and Boromir, are read through the same one: Terence Thornberry’s interactional theory (1987), which treats deviant behavior and social bonds as mutual causes that feed each other over time. None of the five wakes up one day and decides to be evil. Each concession weakens a bond, the weakened bond makes the next concession easier, and the fall turns into a spiral. For Tolkien, corruption is not a switch but a slope; for developmental criminology, too.
The other five mark the two ends of that slope. Sauron and Shelob, read through Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s criminological evolutionism, are drive with nothing on top of it: absolute domination and pure hunger. The Witch-king of Angmar and the Mouth of Sauron are what is left of a man at the end of the road. One traded his self for power, in the terms of Yochelson and Samenow’s criminal personality; the other forgot his own name one excuse at a time, in the terms of Sykes and Matza’s techniques of neutralization. And Lurtz, the Uruk-hai of the films, is the manufactured soldier that Bandura and Akers’s social learning theory explains. Between the creature that only hungers and the captain who repents lies almost the whole of criminology.
The prime suspect is power itself. In Middle-earth evil is not born of poverty or a bad neighborhood but of the opportunity to dominate: the Ring, the palantír, a king’s ear, an army fresh out of the mud. That is why the ones who hold out are not the strongest but the ones who keep their bonds: Faramir in the face of the same hopelessness that sinks his father, Gandalf when Frodo offers him the Ring, Sam when he carries it for a while and hands it back to his master. None of this excuses those who fall. The Ring did not kill Déagol: Sméagol did. That is the rule of this archive: to explain is not to excuse.
Gollum Sméagol
Gollum is the fullest portrait of corruption as a process. He was Sméagol, a river hobbit, until the day his friend Déagol found the Ring at the bottom of the water: Sméagol strangled him to keep it. His family disowned him, his grandmother cast him out, and he ended up hidden under the Misty Mountains for centuries, alone with his “precious.” When Bilbo takes the Ring, Gollum spends the rest of his life chasing it, and in the end he is the one who tears the Ring, finger and all, from Frodo’s hand on Mount Doom and falls with it into the fire.
His case file reads him through Thornberry’s interactional theory, of which he is the purest case. The murder brutally weakens his bonds; isolation leaves the Ring as his only tie; the more he clings to it, the more he is rejected by anyone who crosses his path, and the more he is rejected, the deeper he sinks into the mountain and into the Ring. There is no second great crime that explains what he became: there are centuries of small turns, each a little lower than the last. At the end of the spiral his identity splits into two voices, Sméagol and Gollum, and the case file insists that the split is not something he was born with but the accumulated product of the process.
What confirms the theory is that the spiral very nearly reversed. On the stairs of Cirith Ungol, as the book tells it, Frodo’s affection and trust rebuild the lost bond for an instant, and Sméagol surfaces; Sam’s distrust, understandable but fatal, breaks that new tie, and Gollum relapses for good. His case forces us to hold two truths at once: the Ring did not kill Déagol, Sméagol did; and even so, his fall was reversible almost to the very end.
Read the case file: Gollum →Saruman Saruman the White
Saruman the White was the head of the wizards, the wisest of them all, the one chosen to lead the resistance against Sauron. His fall goes the furthest because it starts the highest. He studies the enemy in order to fight him, looks into the palantír of Orthanc, analyzes the rings of power, and study turns into admiration, admiration into imitation and imitation into betrayal. When Gandalf comes to Isengard, Saruman no longer proposes to resist but to side with the enemy. In Jackson’s film he says it plainly: “Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf.”
His case file explains him through Terence Thornberry’s interactional theory: deviant behavior and the bonds to conventional good wear each other down over time. What makes Saruman so instructive is that he never crosses a single visible line. Studying the enemy is not betrayal; admiring his efficiency is not betrayal; wanting a little of that power is not betrayal; accepting a “temporary” alliance is not betrayal. Until, added together, all those steps are the betrayal. Corruption rarely asks for one big yes. It asks for a long string of tiny yeses, each of which weakens the ability to refuse the next.
His pride is the accelerant. He believes himself too clever to be corrupted, and that illusion of control keeps him from recognizing each turn for what it is; his intelligence, meanwhile, supplies ever more sophisticated justifications. Gandalf, who does not seek power, stands firm. The limit the case file draws is that the spiral describes how he fell; it does not absolve him of falling. He chose to look into the stone, and he chose every pact. In the end he is killed by his own servant, Gríma: in the Shire in the book, atop Orthanc in the extended edition of the film.
Read the case file: Saruman →Denethor
Denethor, Steward of Gondor and father of Boromir and Faramir, falls not through a thirst for power like Saruman or through obsession like Gollum, but through hopelessness. He uses the palantír of Minas Tirith to watch Sauron and anticipate his moves, an act of responsibility; but the stone shows him only the enemy’s overwhelming strength. As Mordor besieges the city, Denethor abandons its defense and has a pyre built so that he can burn alongside Faramir, who lies wounded and unconscious. In Jackson’s film he believes his son is dead; in the book he knows Faramir is breathing but gives him up for lost. Gandalf and Pippin save the son; the father burns.
His case file explains him through Thornberry’s interactional theory with a twist: the bond that erodes is not with a community but with hope and with judgment. Every session before the stone drives him to despair; despair clouds his judgment; clouded judgment makes the situation look even darker, and sends him back to the stone in search of confirmation. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a man convinced that all is lost stops resisting, and by ceasing to resist he brings about the ruin he feared. Along the way the spiral drags down his other bonds, his duty to Gondor and his love for his sons, until he can no longer tell love from destruction.
His contribution to the theory is uncomfortable: corruption is not always born of a desire for evil; sometimes it is born of fear. The limit the case file points out is that the stone did not decide for him. Faramir looks into the same abyss and does not fall, because he keeps his affection, his duty and his humility; Denethor chose, again and again, to look once more and to believe only the worst.
Read the case file: Denethor →Boromir
Boromir, Captain of Gondor and Denethor’s elder son, is the villain who stops being one. The Ring tempts him with the noblest thing he has, the wish to save his people, and at Amon Hen he tries to take it from Frodo by force. Frodo flees, and the Fellowship breaks. But Boromir is horrified by what he has done and, soon after, dies defending Merry and Pippin from the orcs. In the film he takes his leave of Aragorn with a line that sums up his turn: “I would have followed you, my brother. My captain. My king.”
His case file reads him through Thornberry’s interactional theory in the direction people tend to forget. The model works both ways: weak bonds and deviance feed each other downward, but strong bonds and conventional behavior also feed each other upward. Boromir’s horror reactivates his loyalty; regained loyalty defeats the temptation; the defeated temptation launches him into sacrifice. In a matter of minutes he travels an upward spiral. It is what life-course criminology calls a turning point, and the decisive thing is that Boromir does not merely repent: he acts on that moment and repairs the bond he had damaged.
The difference between him and Gollum is not the temptation, which both suffer, but the repair of the bond. The limit in the case file cuts both ways: redemption does not erase the fall. Boromir chose to lunge at Frodo, and that put the mission at risk; his turn carries weight precisely because there was something real to redeem. He is proof that no one can be reduced to their worst moment, because the worst moment may not be the last.
Read the case file: Boromir →Gríma Wormtongue
Gríma, known as Wormtongue, is the counselor of King Théoden of Rohan and, in secret, Saruman’s agent. He commands no armies and wields no sword: he whispers. Little by little he poisons the king’s judgment, isolates him from his allies and keeps him docile while Isengard arms itself. When Gandalf gives Théoden back to himself, Gríma flees Edoras for the only place left to him: his master’s tower.
His case file reads him through Thornberry’s interactional theory in its cruelest variant, the spiral of dependence. Every betrayal of the king destroys a legitimate bond, to Rohan, to his people, to any honorable future, and strengthens the only one he has left, the one that ties him to Saruman. The more he betrays, the less he can turn back; the less he can turn back, the more he submits; the more he submits, the worse the betrayals demanded of him. The first whisper may have been an almost free choice, but each one after it is made from a more trapped position. This is the counterintuitive side of corruption: the one who corrupts others also chains himself.
The film grants him a flicker of humanity: when Saruman humiliates him after years of service, Gríma weeps. It is a turning point that never takes hold, because he has no bridges left, and his final rebellion against his master is a desperate outburst, not a redemptive turn; it costs him his life in both versions. The limit the case file insists on is sharp: dependence is not innocence. Every whisper was his, and he was the one who started the spiral he later could not stop.
Read the case file: Gríma Wormtongue →Sauron
Sauron is the Dark Lord who secretly forged the One Ring to dominate the bearers of the other Rings of Power and, through them, every will in Middle-earth. The Ring’s inscription sums it up: “One Ring to rule them all.” He wants neither wealth, nor revenge, nor pleasure: he wants to subdue, and he wants it without limit. Tolkien strips him of almost all psychology, with no face, no biography and no vulnerability, and Peter Jackson’s films push that idea to the extreme by showing him as a flaming eye atop the tower of Barad-dûr.
His case file reads him through the criminological evolutionism of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who showed in Homicide (1988) that much seemingly chaotic violence follows predictable logics: competition for status, reputation, the defense of territory. Dominance hierarchies are a deep trait of social species, and Sauron is their summit stretched to infinity: he does not compete for a place in the pyramid, he wants to be the whole pyramid. The Ring is the perfect metaphor, an instrument for collapsing every hierarchy into one. What makes him monstrous is what he lacks: the counterweights that evolution itself selected, such as empathy, attachment and the need for reciprocity.
The limit lies in the theory itself, and the case file stresses it. Explaining where a drive comes from does not legitimize it: leaping from “evolution produced dominance” to “dominance is natural and therefore good” is the naturalistic fallacy, which social Darwinism turned into a doctrine and into the pseudoscientific cover for some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. In the real world there are no beings reduced to pure drive. People who dominate and oppress keep the capacity to choose, which is why they answer for what they do.
Read the case file: Sauron →The Witch-king of Angmar
The Witch-king of Angmar is the leader of the Nazgûl, the nine Ringwraiths. He was a king of Men who accepted one of the Rings of Power from Sauron and, in exchange for a power that promised never to die, lost everything else: his name, his face, his fear, his guilt. On Weathertop he wounds Frodo with a Morgul-blade, and on the Pelennor Fields he faces Éowyn, certain of his invulnerability: “No living man may hinder me.” She is not a man, and with Merry’s help she kills him.
His case file explains him through the criminal-personality theory of Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow (The Criminal Personality, 1976), which should not be confused with Hans Eysenck’s trait model, filed under a similar label. After years of interviewing offenders, Yochelson and Samenow concluded that crime springs neither from illness nor from environment, but from a pattern of thinking that a person builds through small choices. Three of their “thinking errors” read the Witch-king almost line by line: the power thrust, a hunger for control that is never satisfied; the cutoff, the switch that silences fear and guilt the moment they get in the way; and the zero state, the terror of being nobody.
He was a king who already had a realm, and it was not enough. The wraith is the cutoff made permanent: there is nothing left to switch off, because the self that once felt has been consumed. Tolkien’s irony is cruel. The man who chased power so as not to be a nobody ended up being, exactly, no one.
The limit is that the wraith is a myth, and the myth hides a trap. In the real world no master erases anyone’s will, and Yochelson and Samenow built their entire framework against the alibi that something, whether power, trauma or a leader, “erased” the offender’s will. Precisely because criminal thinking is built, it can be rebuilt; and the person who built it is accountable for it.
Read the case file: The Witch-king of Angmar →Shelob
Shelob is the giant spider who lurks in the tunnels of Cirith Ungol, at the gates of Mordor. She is the last child of Ungoliant and was already living in those mountains before Sauron laid the first stone of Barad-dûr; she does not serve him, although it suits him to have her as a guard. Gollum leads Frodo and Sam to her, hoping to pick the Ring out of whatever she leaves behind. She stings Frodo, and Sam wounds her with Sting and the light of the Phial of Galadriel. In the book the episode closes The Two Towers; on screen, Jackson moved it to The Return of the King.
Her case file uses her to show Daly and Wilson’s criminological evolutionism in its barest form. Many harmful behaviors, such as predation, the defense of territory and survival, have roots that natural selection shaped before moral categories existed: the spider that hunts is not wicked, and the wolf that kills the deer commits no crime. Tolkien describes her as a creature that “served none but herself.” She has no ideology, no plan and no hatred; she has only hunger, and her whole existence is organized around it.
That is why she is the most useful villain for drawing a line. We do not put Shelob on trial, just as we do not put a spider on trial: morality does not apply to her. In a human being, by contrast, culture, learning, empathy and decision always stand between the impulse and the act, which is why “it is my nature” is never an alibi. Set against Gollum, torn apart by the conflict between his desire and what remains of Sméagol, Shelob has no conflict, because she has nothing else.
Read the case file: Shelob →The Mouth of Sauron
The Mouth of Sauron is the lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dûr who rides out to parley before the Black Gate, and he has served the Dark Lord so long that, as Tolkien tells it, he has forgotten his own name. He is neither a warrior nor a sorcerer: he is a diplomat, the herald who lends a human voice to the will of Mordor. He arrives with terms, displays Frodo’s mithril shirt as proof that the hobbit has been taken, and speaks of surrender in the calm cadence of an ambassador closing a deal. His fate depends on the version. In the book, when Gandalf seizes the tokens and rejects the terms, he wheels his horse and rides back to Mordor. On screen he appears only in the extended edition of The Return of the King (2003), where Aragorn beheads him.
His case file reads him through the techniques of neutralization of Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957): the five excuses with which someone who knows the rule switches it off just long enough to break it. The Mouth runs through them almost in order. He denies responsibility, because he is only the messenger; he denies injury, because what he brings are “terms,” an “offer”; he denies the victim, because those who resist have brought it on themselves; he condemns the condemners, refusing Aragorn and Gandalf any authority to judge Mordor; and he appeals to a higher loyalty, his service to Sauron. He is the bureaucrat of evil that Hannah Arendt called banal, in legendary form: he does not forge horror, he administers it.
In the film a single line is enough for him to do harm: “Who would’ve thought one so small could endure so much pain? And he did, Gandalf, he did.” It is a lie told with a diplomat’s manners. The lesson of the case file is that neutralization switches off the feeling of guilt, not the fact of it: anyone who needs five excuses to serve horror knows perfectly well that it is horror. That is why he is more disturbing than any orc. The orc is brute force; the Mouth is articulate consent.
Read the case file: The Mouth of Sauron →Lurtz
Lurtz does not exist in the books: he is an invention of Peter Jackson’s films, the first Uruk-hai we see being born in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). He tears himself out of a membrane of mud in the pits of Isengard, fully grown and without a past, and the first thing he meets is Saruman telling him what he exists for. He hunts the Fellowship to Amon Hen, puts three arrows into Boromir and dies at Aragorn’s hands. In the novel, the Uruk-hai war band that captures Merry and Pippin is led by Uglúk, and Boromir falls pierced by many arrows, with no named archer.
His case file explains him through the social learning theory of Albert Bandura and Ronald Akers. In 1961, with the Bobo doll, Bandura showed that children imitate the aggression they see in an adult; Akers turned the idea into a general theory of crime with four mechanisms: whom you spend time with, which definitions of behavior you are taught, whom you imitate and what gets reinforced. Lurtz is what happens when a single hand controls all four. Saruman is the only model, obedience and killing are the only things rewarded, and the only definition available is that he was made for war. Isengard is not a place where someone happens to grow up violent: it is a machine built so that the loop cannot produce anything but soldiers.
He does not hate Boromir and wants nothing from him: he kills because killing is the behavior his whole brief existence has reinforced. That is why his case file uses him as a mirror of child soldiers and indoctrination, and why it draws a line. Lurtz is written to have no alternative; real human beings, even the most brutally trained, keep the capacity to hesitate, disobey or desert. Looking at the machine helps us dismantle it and hold the Sarumans to account, not hand the person who pulls the bowstring a clean conscience.
Read the case file: Lurtz →The map of theories
Which theory explains whom, and which family of criminology it belongs to.
| Theory | Approach | Villains |
|---|---|---|
| Interactional theory (Thornberry) | Integrative and life-course | Gollum, Saruman, Denethor, Boromir, Gríma Wormtongue |
| Evolutionary criminology | Biological and anthropological | Sauron, Shelob |
| Social learning | Psychological and psychiatric | Lurtz |
| Neutralization | Sociological: processes and control | The Mouth of Sauron |
| Criminal personality | Psychological and psychiatric | The Witch-king of Angmar |
What criminology does not explain
The first boundary is fantasy. Sauron is not a man but a fallen spirit who once served the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, and the evolutionism that reads him speaks of species competing for rank, not of beings older than the world. Nor is there a criminology of wraiths, of spiders descended from Ungoliant or of soldiers born from mud. In those cases the theory describes not the mechanism but the metaphor: the Witch-king speaks to how criminal thinking is built; Shelob, to everything that separates a person from a predator; Lurtz, to how violent obedience is manufactured.
The second boundary is the Ring itself. If it were a force that dominates beyond remedy, no one would be responsible for anything, and the story does not believe that: Gandalf refuses it, Faramir lets it go, Sam gives it back to Frodo and Bilbo, with great effort, gives it up. The Ring works as a standing opportunity, the one Plato imagined with Gyges, and criminology knows that opportunity tempts but does not compel. There are also two works with the same title. Tolkien’s novels and Jackson’s films do not agree on everything: Lurtz exists only on screen, the Mouth of Sauron appears only in the extended edition, and Denethor, Saruman and Gríma die differently in each. Where the difference matters, this guide says which version it means.
The third boundary is moral, and Tolkien raised it before anyone else: pity. Bilbo could have killed Gollum and did not, and Gandalf is glad of it; in the end it is Gollum, the murderer no one punished, who destroys the Ring without meaning to. No theory explains that kind of providence, and criminology should not try. What it can say is what every case file in this guide repeats: understanding how someone falls does not absolve them, and keeping the door open for those who can still turn, like Boromir, is sometimes the only thing that saves the story. To explain is not to excuse.
Where to watch
Platforms available in Spain, checked in October 2026. Catalogues change: each link opens the search on that platform.
- The Lord of the Rings HBO Max Prime Video
Frequently asked questions
Who are the villains in The Lord of the Rings?
The main villain is Sauron, the Dark Lord who forged the One Ring. In his service are the Witch-king of Angmar, leader of the nine Nazgûl, and the Mouth of Sauron, his herald; in the tunnels of Cirith Ungol lurks the spider Shelob. Saruman, the traitor wizard, has Gríma Wormtongue as his spy in Rohan and, in the films, Lurtz as the captain of his Uruk-hai. The gallery is rounded out by Gollum and two men of Gondor who fall to the Ring or to despair: Boromir and his father, Denethor.
Who is the main villain in The Lord of the Rings?
Sauron. He forged the One Ring to dominate the bearers of the other rings, and the whole story turns on destroying it before he gets it back. His case file reads him through criminological evolutionism as the will to dominate in its purest form, and warns against the mistake of treating that drive as “natural” and therefore acceptable.
Why did Saruman turn evil?
Through a spiral, not a leap. He began by studying Sauron in order to fight him, and each concession, looking into the palantír, admiring the enemy’s power, accepting an alliance “to control him,” weakened his loyalty and made the next one easier. Thornberry’s interactional theory describes that mechanism, and his pride sped it up: he thought he was too wise to be corrupted.
Is Gollum good or evil?
He is a murderer from day one: he killed his friend Déagol to keep the Ring. But he is not a monster from birth; he is the result of centuries of isolation and dependence, and Sméagol is still inside him, almost resurfacing at Cirith Ungol. He is fully responsible for what he does and, at the same time, the clearest example that corruption is a process that could have been stopped.
Why did Boromir try to take the Ring from Frodo?
Because the Ring tempted him with what he wanted most: the power to save Gondor. His intention was noble, which is exactly why the temptation worked. What sets him apart from the others is that he was horrified by what he had done and died defending Merry and Pippin: in the terms of interactional theory, the spiral can also turn upward.
Who killed the Witch-king of Angmar?
Éowyn, King Théoden’s niece, at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, with crucial help from the hobbit Merry. The Witch-king believed himself invulnerable, and it was not a man who brought him down. His case file reads him as the criminal personality raised to myth: the man who traded his self for power and ended up being no one.
Is Lurtz in the Lord of the Rings books?
No. Lurtz is a creation of Peter Jackson’s films: the first Uruk-hai born in Isengard, the one who kills Boromir and is killed by Aragorn in The Fellowship of the Ring. In the novel, the Uruk-hai who capture Merry and Pippin are led by Uglúk. His case file uses him to explain social learning: a soldier with no childhood whose only model is Saruman.
Why does the One Ring corrupt everyone?
Because it offers power and the chance to use it without answering to anyone, and every concession prepares the next. But it does not corrupt everyone: Gandalf refuses it, Faramir lets it go and Sam gives it back to Frodo. Interactional theory explains the difference through bonds: those who lose them fall, and those who keep them hold out.