‘Fiery the Angels rose’: The Romantic Prometheanism of Tolkien’s Diabolical Characters

Milton’s Satan in the seventeenth century was hardly viewed as heroic, yet in his resistance to supreme authority and bold transvaluation of values (“Evil, be thou my Good”) he emerges as a sort of tragic hero for many Romantics such as William Blake or later Herman Melville. Like Prometheus, the subject of Percy Bysshe Shelley great poetic drama, Satan is a figure of noble rebellion against omnipotent force. Tolkien’s more ‘satanic” characters, such as Melkor, Sauron, and perhaps even Saruman, do not often strike readers as heroes, yet there is a sort of Prometheanism in each of them. Viewed from this more Romantic perspective, by reading them against the grain of the texts, Robert T. Tally Jr. locates the tragic heroism of these figures, especially Sauron, in their efforts to reshape and to heal the world for “well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth.” This is not to suggest that they become “good,” but rather, like the reevaluation of Milton’s Satan, they become more complex figures whose eventual “fall” can be seen as tragic, thus in turn adding literary and moral complexity to our understanding of Middle-earth and of Tolkien’s legendarium more broadly.