Sauron the Vampire
When I read Dracula in October of 2022, it struck me less as a straight horror story and more as a good-vs.-evil adventure story in the vein of The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps I just had Middle-earth on the brain because The Rings of Power had finished airing its first season earlier that month. Maybe it’s that I think Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is stylistically similar to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptations from the early 2000s (complete with Annie Lennox credits song). And Sauron does briefly take the form of a “vampire” in the tale of Beren and Lúthien, though Tolkien seems to mean the word as a description of a giant batlike creature, not a bloodsucking undead gentleman who sleeps in a coffin. Whatever the reason, something about Stoker’s novel, with its fellowship of outmatched but resourceful heroes banding together to oppose a supernatural evil, brought Tolkien to mind – and the vague association of Dracula with Lord of the Rings stuck with me, so I was more than a little intrigued when I perceived that the second season of The Rings of Power was essentially portraying Sauron as a type of vampire.
In the season’s opening scene, Sauron’s orcs turn on him, mangling and destroying his physical form. This takes place in a snowbound fortress in the northern realm of Forodwaith – a setting that, more than Sauron’s other haunts (Dol Guldur in the forest of Mirkwood or Barad-Dûr in the fiery land of Mordor), evokes Dracula’s castle in wintry Transylvania.
The manner of Sauron’s assassination (set upon and stabbed to death by several assailants) recalls Dracula’s demise in his snowy castle at the end of the novel. During this scene, Sauron is garbed in a red and gold robe, a curiously soft costume choice that sooner evokes more effete depictions of Count Dracula (see: Gary Oldman’s red and gold robe in the 1992 film) than the ironclad Dark Lord of Peter Jackson’s films. More explicitly vampiric imagery surfaces when Sauron’s façade drops in a moment of rage and his teeth become sharp and pointed.
None of this struck me as deliberate allusion to Dracula until the next sequence, which depicts Sauron slowly regaining his physical form over some hundreds or thousands of years. Like a vampire, Sauron must take life from others to stay alive, but The Rings of Power does not show him sucking anyone’s blood. Instead, we see him consume animals – first a rat and then a centipede. This seems a pointed reference to Dracula, though it is not the Count himself but his deranged, zoophagous acolyte Renfield who consumes rats and insects in imitation of his dark master. When Sauron eventually works his way up to consuming a human person, the show cuts away from the act and instead shows red wine dripping out of the hapless victim’s flask – a clever visual innuendo that draws a symbolic association between wine and blood, evoking the symbolism of vampirism as a perversion of the Eucharist (more on that later).
In Stoker’s novel, Dracula exerts control over the wolves of Transylvania, causing them to terrorize Jonathan Harker; in the first episode of The Rings of Power season 2, Sauron hypnotically takes control of a vicious, wolf-like Warg and commands it to kill Waldreg. Dracula also exercises some control over the elements (“the storm, the fog, the thunder”), and in the season’s second episode, Sauron summons a storm over the elven city of Eregion.
The drama of this second episode revolves around whether or not Celebrimbor – the great elven smith, creator of the rings of power, and lord of Eregion – will invite Sauron (disguised as the human Halbrand) into his city. This, too, is an allusion to vampire folklore, in some versions of which the undead cannot enter just any house but have to be invited inside (hence the title of the Swedish vampire story Let the Right One In).
Once Celebrimbor has let the wrong one in, Sauron takes the form of the benevolent angelic messenger Annatar and begins manipulating Celebrimbor to craft the rings of power that he needs to enslave the wills of the people of Middle-earth. This entire plot – in which Sauron poses as a cordial guest, psychologically assails Celebrimbor to make him pliant to his will, and ultimately physically imprisons him in his tower – plays out not unlike the early passages of Dracula, in which the Count, posing as a gracious host, imprisons Jonathan Harker in the tower of his castle in Transylvania and wages a campaign of psychological warfare against him. Both Harker and Celebrimbor eventually learn the true nature of their tormentors, resist, and escape, but incur great injury to themselves in the process.
A key turning point in Harker’s escape from Dracula’s thrall comes when he is shaving in the mirror and Dracula – who, as a vampire, does not cast a reflection in mirrors – startles him from behind. The Count’s true nature is also exposed by a mirror in Tod Browning’s 1931 film, when Van Helsing notices his lack of reflection. Similarly, a mirror plays a key role in Celebrimbor’s discovery of Sauron’s real identity. Sauron has imprisoned Celebrimbor in an illusion that keeps him unaware of the fact that his city is under siege and keeps him slaving away on the rings of power, but the true state of things is momentarily revealed to him when he glances in the mirror, and this crack in the illusion marks the beginning of the end of Sauron’s hold over him.
Though vampires are known for drinking others’ blood, late in Dracula, the Count turns Jonathan’s wife Mina into a vampire by forcing her to drink his blood. Sauron’s blood plays a similar role in The Rings of Power: he tricks the deluded Celebrimbor into infusing it into the nine rings of power that will be distributed to men, turning them into the Ringwraiths. Sauron’s blood, like Dracula’s, is a means of turning his victims into undead beings enslaved to his will.
Ultimately, when Celebrimbor rouses himself to heroic resistance and refuses to collaborate any further, Sauron kills him by impaling him on a spear and lifting him up into the air – directly referencing the historical Vlad the Impaler, often believed to be the inspiration for Dracula (and conflated with him in some adaptations).
At the climax of the season, Sauron attempts to coerce Galadriel to give him her elven ring of power by exerting a kind of psychic control over her. I knew Charlie Vickers’ performance as Sauron in this moment reminded me of something, but I couldn’t immediately place it; then it struck me that the scene was depicting a kind of hypnosis, similar to that described in Dracula, and that Vickers was channeling Bela Lugosi’s performance as Dracula in the 1931 film (notice the points of light reflected in their eyes):
All of these allusions linking Sauron to Dracula, and to vampires in general, strike me as indicative of The Rings of Power’s grasp on the Christian typology of Tolkien’s work, which is one of my favorite things about it. (I have many thoughts, for another time, on the show’s framing of Galadriel as a type of both Eve and Mary.) In The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings (quoted here), Catholic philosopher Peter J. Kreeft likens Sauron’s Ring to Dracula’s bite, in that both take life and are thus antitheses of Christ’s giving of His life, His blood. Sauron is like Dracula in that both are types of Antichrist.
Gwenyth Hood has written extensively about the similarities between Sauron and Dracula for the Inklings-focused journal Mythlore.