Here is a excerpt from an interview given by Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun with Peter Jackson (printed in a syndicated newspaper on December 19, 2001) just before the premiere of The Fellowship of the Ring: No - that's Peter Jackson's imagination at work a little bit too much, giving an overly simplistic and overly literal interpretation of things (although - perhaps understandably - it works well enough in the cinematic medium). In the film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the pupil of the great eye is shown to be the fiery silhouette of Sauron. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.ĭespite the description, the Eye was only perceived by very few people in Middle-earth, and did not have a physical worldly form, unlike Sauron. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze.

In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror. The depiction of the Eye of Sauron shown in the cinematic releases of LotR is not wholly absent in the books Tolkien gives a description of it in The Fellowship of the Ring when Frodo spots it from the Mirror of Galadriel:īut suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. The form that he took was that of a man of more than human stature, but not gigantic.

Sauron should be thought of as very terrible.

in a tale which allows the incarnation of great spirits in a physical and destructible form their power must be far greater when actually physically present. According to Tolkien himself, Sauron had a physical form in the third age:

Lord of rings eye