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TurnerMohan — Thuringwethil
Published: 2014-01-08 18:40:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 13266; Favourites: 208; Downloads: 103
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A while back it was suggested to me that I try Thuringwethil, a vampire of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, Sauron's messenger and - apart from Sauron himself, when the mood takes him - the only vampire mentioned by name in Middle-Earth, though never having actually been human, the "vampires" in service to Morgoth are more like demons than traditional vampires. For that reason (in addition, of course, to the brief but distinctly not humanoid description of her offered in the Silmarillion) a more Harpy-like form seemed appropriate.In general the forces of evil in Morgoth's time seem more colorful, diverse, and more openly demonic than the rather lowly, regimented armies of orcs (and, dishearteningly, men) that Sauron employs in the later ages. Aesthetically, I'm very attracted to this idea of the evolution of Evil as a force in middle-earth; that the presence of ultimate, theological evil, mostly seen in visions and whispered in shadows by the time of LOTR, was much more open and visible in the days of Uttumno and Angband. The very first wars between good and evil, inestimable eons before elves or men came into the picture, were utterly lofty affairs, like the biblical War in Heaven between Lucifer's rebels and the good angels, or the primordial, earth-shaping wars between the gods and the titans that appear in many pagan mythologies. As time goes on in middle-earth (as in our world according to Christianity) it seems that the players on either side become more and more mundane and earthly; wars between good and evil angels, fought with nothing less than the building blocks of the Earth itself (or even with pure metaphysics, as in the Ainulindalie) turn into wars between elves and orcs, between good and evil men, and the lines become muddied; the Rohirrim for example are, as a culture, only more "good" in the absolute, cosmic, theological sense than the men of Harad or Dunland by mere degrees. by the end of the third age, only in rare moments like the battle between Gandalf and the Balrog or the contest at the gate of Minas Tirith do we get a glimpse of the conflict between Good and Evil uncloaked and re-assuming it's ancient grander and clarity, whereas in the Elder Days you can see, visible on the earthly plain, the loftier, more absolute good and evil (morgoth and his terrible servants, the valar and maiar) that are only invoked and called upon for strength in the later ages.
To that end, I tend to picture Morgoth's first servants, his rebel Maia - balrogs, sauron, ungoliante, the dragons, vampires, wargs, werewolves, boldogs, ect - as really hellish, like something out of a dark renaissance painting. They are fallen angels, assuming terrible forms on earth. Gathered in legion they would appear very much like the satanic bacchanal on Bald Mountain in "fantasia."
Part of the Weekly Tolkien Sketchblog.
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Comments: 55
Is there any description about how big Morgoth's vampires were? I'm assuming they weren't small, especially if they were fallen Maiar and the balrogs could reach pretty lofty heights.
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no specification is ever given as to the size of the vampires, but for my own purposes i would assume they'd be roughly comparable to a human or elf in size. thuringwthil here i imagine from the waist up has a torso, neck and head about the same size as luthien, with much longer "arms" and probably shorter legs, facilitating her flight.
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This is now one of my favorite Thuringwethil designs. Great concept art. I've been sketching her myself, and I agree that she, as more of a "warrior vampire" rather than a "seducing vampire" would have no troubles looking grotesque.
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That really is a brilliant design, though it makes me think more of a "gargoyle", I have read Silmarillion but it's seem I learn more from your descripitions..
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thank you. gargoyles (both of the gothic and disney varieties) were definitely on my mind while drawing this
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Well ok. This one is one of the most convincing, disturbing and terrifying concepts you did. I just love it. The anatomy, the features, the hands and nose... simply amazing Turner!
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disturbing is what I was going for so I'll take that as a compliment 
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Great picture and I like your perspective on Middle Earth history.
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You depict her really convincing! I'm appreciate your knowledg of human and animal anatomy in this work (and you create something own proper)), Impressive!
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thank you! the blurred line between human and animal anatomy is a fascinating subject to me, mainly because we and other animals are working with the same bones and muscles, just in different proportions. glad you like it!
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and I love that you depict her not like "sexy-vampire-girls", but like Tolkien bewrite her
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Tolkien didn't do "sexy-vampire-girls"
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Neither did Mr Stoker, but they keep trying to add them into adaptations of 'Dracula' anyway (despite the fact that the Brides are LITERALLY baby-eating villains).
Please don't let me go on because I have OPINIONS about adaptations of 'Dracula' that start with "They should keep the moustache" run on to "The Count's character arc is basically a rather cruel old man trying to reclaim his youth by stripping others of theirs" and just gets crazier from there ("Don't these people realise that Jonathan Harker is meant to be the romantic league, not the walking allegory for venereal disease contracted via the droit de seigneur?!?").
A-hem, I'll try to stop now.
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i cast my lot with the francis ford coppola version, one of my favorite movies ever, especially from a production design standpoint, sadly lost in the shadow of Louis' and lestat's cinematic debut, which built the mopey, eternally emo house we are all living in.
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Et tu Master Mohan?!?
Alright, I must admit that the art design was generally excellent, the score was even better (though for pity's sake don't make me try to spell the composer's name from memory!) and that Mr Gary Oldman was a very solid Dracula - complete with moustache!, but I will say here that it's not my favourite adaption of Mr Stoker's Magnum Opus (I find Sir Anthony Hopkins' Van Helsing too demented for my taste, I'd rather see Mr Keanu Reeves cast as Dracula himself than Jonathan Harker and don't get me started on the 'Mina LURVES Dracula' plot-line an idea which leaves rather a bad taste in my mouth).
I will say here that I don't despise Mr Coppola's efforts, but my favourite adaption and in my opinion the best generally is the BBCs 'Count Dracula' from 1977 (it too has it's flaws - for one M. Louis Jourdan's Count Dracula boasts no moustache!), snippets of which may be found on YouTube, should you be interested in getting a glimpse of this particular favourite of mine.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbgL3x…
Oh and I will close by saying that my personal attitude towards the Vampire fiction of Ms. Anne Rice and derivatives is that it might be more accurate to think of her work as Vampire propaganda intended to hocus audiences into forgetting the good work of Mr Stoker (which I tend to see as something of a Victorian counterpart to Mr Max Brook's 'Zombie Oubtreak Survival Guides').
I'll close here by saying that my favourite character has always been Van Helsing and not Count Dracula!
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Please accept my apologies; I meant to begin by saying that this is one of those images that first caused me to conceive an Admiration for your work Master Mohan - taking a passing mention and making a terrifying freak-monster out of her is no mean feat! (one wonders how she perished … did Beren actually manage to BEAT one of his enemies for a change or was Huan just that good?!?).
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my money's on the dog, beren just sort of "swoons" alot
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Poor old Beren, he gets starring billing and absolutely NO other credit for his Quest!
(Well, except where people have absolutely NO sense of humour about him effectively being more of a damsel in distress than Luthien Tinuviel ever was by virtue of being so far out of his depth!).
In all honesty I rather like the idea that while Beren is a fairly rugged-looking sort and quite uncomplaining (considering the long record of adventures and misadventure that he has endured), the only real 'Action Hero' moment he enjoys is when Curufin and Celegorm are arrogant enough to try abducting his other half from right under his nose - and suffer the appropriate consequences of such folly not long thereafter!
One idea that occurred to me is that, in any adaption of 'Beren and Luthien' I would show Finrod Felagund as the slayer of Thuringwethil (think about it, a vampire that perishes under the bare hands and TEETH of it's destroyer); this gives the poor fellow a right royal send-off (he actually kills a NAMED villain) and allows you to introduce Thuringwethil as a truly nasty piece of work, killing the loyal friends of King Finrod one by one and silently sowing terror in the darkness as a vampire should.
Admittedly this is partly inspired by my mental image of Sauron's Minion-Master Relations with his werewolves as being roughly as congenial and cordial as Scar's dominion over his Hyenas ...
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It's true, beren is a lot more often "in distress" than luthien, and requires saving on many occasions. It seems like the tale of beren and luthien switches main characters about half-way through (around the time huan shows up) i liken beren's role to jack from Titanic; kind of a "manic pixie dream boy" in what is ultimately more the woman's story (also the lay of lethian bears an ALARMING resmblence, aesthetically and in narrative, to the Twilight saga, what with the forbidden love between an immortal and a mortal, the big, protective 'third wheel' canine, immortal douchebags, vampires, werewolves, pine forests, effete villains, only I think tolkien actually beats out stephenie meyer in the "female empowerment" department)
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That's because Professor Tolkien was writing mythology more often than fairy tales!
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It's a very grotesque shape, and I find it very fitting! 
I do agree that in the Elder Days the powers of Good and Evil were more overt and direct in their confrontation. By the time of the Third Age things had definitely quieted down, as Middle-Earth became further removed from the Powers that had shaped it. Which was not always a bad thing.... Tolkien made it clear that in the Third Age there were still survivors of the Morgothic corruption and meddling still haunting the dark corners of Middle-Earth. Sauron could summon some of them (werewolves, the silent watchers) to his service, and presumably he could sway a dragon. (Hence the Quest of Erebor!) However, many other creatures we heard about were obviously Morgothic in origin, but did not serve Sauron, choosing to please themselves, or maybe so remote that the Dark Lord had little use for them. The Balrog of Moria, Shelob, and Scatha the cold-drake were all nasty beasts of an elder age that were up to no Good, but did not take Sauronic service. And yet, their existence still worked to his benefit, for the terror of their presence and their greedy natures kept the Free Peoples at a disadvantage.
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Luthien assumes Thuringwethil's form for the approach to Angband, and so I tend to see the two as somewhat paired opposites. Thuringwehil is, as a presentation of femininity, this horrendous antithesis of the young, beautiful, pure luthien; all hanging breasts and gristly musculature, presented naked. There is a certain sexiness to her, but, as with sauron, it is the eroticism of the perverse and ungodly, and could be said to represent a threat of what luthien could become if she were successfully seduced by Morgoth. (together with Melian the three - the only females mentioned in the Lay of Lethian - form a classic Gravesian virgin-mother-hag triangle) As with my other musings about the sexual connotations of tolkien's writing, I sort of doubt that that is where Tolkien was coming from with his work. he usually comes off as distinctly (and rather unusually amoung 19th and 20th century fairy tale enthusiasts) uninterested in sexual subtext, but I think, just insofar as his work follows the forms established by legends and fairy tales, there is an amount of that there to be mined, and nowhere more so than in "beren and luthien."
As for the remnants of morgoth's forces in the third age, I always wondered what (if anything) the balrog in moria thought of sauron, and if it was of any interest to him that Sauron was on the rise again. Balrogs in general seem to possess this old-school, silent praetorian dignity to them that is very different from sauron's realpolitik, do-anything-to-stay-afloat approach; it seems like the prescence of Gandalf, a fellow maia from the other team, rather than the ring, is what interests him about the fellowship.
I've always enjoyed the idea of the members of morgoth's inner circle somewhat despising eachother (gothmog thinks sauron is a slithering coward, sauron thinks the balrogs are dim witted muscleheads, both think ungoliant is a greedy, brainless pig) and kind of quietly enjoying eachother's failures. Shelob, if she thinks about anything other than food, seems to not especially trust or love sauron, but doesnt mind him much either, and I really liked how the Desolation of Smaug played up an idea tolkien had played around with; of sauron possibly conscripting smaug into his service. It was cool how movie-smaug comes off as rather hip to current events concerning sauron's return (dragons are kind of telepathic in middle-earth) and seems pretty down for the approaching darkness. like glaurung, he would probably have fared well under a dark lord.
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The Gravesian comparison works because so much of Middle-Earth is anchored in what really was, instead of a construct spun whollly of the imaginaiton. The symbolism works because the symbols are present, and are ones we have known all our lives. The good stories are always like that. (Which is at least one reason why I despise much contemporary literature as shallow, narcissistic trash of no lasting importance beyond the lifespan of its designated readers.) Tolkien's view of human sexuality was a great deal different than what we are accustomed to in this day and age. It certainly pre-dated the Sixties! I do believe that Tolkien's idea of a good love story was one of the tales of courtly love between knight-errant & his lady. His own romance with his future wife was similar enough, and seems to have bled over into his writing even without his source material. Of course, as a good Catholic he desired the proper result for all the pledges & sighs. All his good heroes & heroines eventually settle down to raise the next generation of potential heroes, and the right chivalric King Earnur of Gondor is censured for leaving no legitimate heir in MInas Tirith when he rode to meet his doom.
It was always implied that the Balrog of Moria and Sauron never had a formal arrangement, but each served the other's needs well enough. At least Sauron was well served by it. As the Necromancer, he was still weak and not ready for a direct challenge with the Free Peoples. However, the greed of the Dwarves was their undoing; Tolkien thought it possible that the Necromancer had stirred the Balrog to wakefulness before the Dwarves cut through the wall of its prison-refuge. Thereafter, Durin's Bane served the Dark Lord simply by holding Moria free of the Dwarves, even to the point of nullifying the final victory over Azog. (With other consequences too for Wilderland and Eregion, as nicely showcased in the recent movies.) In turn, when Balin's expedition of 200 Dwarves had carved out a place for themselves, Durin's Bane withdrew with his forces into the deeps, and Sauron sent a force of orcs to make good any losses and pin the Dwarves inside without hope.
Likewise the needs of Sauron & Shelob were well-served, although Sauron was said to speak of her as "his cat". As a daughter of Ungoliant, Shelob only cared about sating her unending hunger, but that made her a sure border guard, a redoubled defense of Cirith Ungol, where she had been a constant menace to unwary people since at least the Second Age. (I always felt that a posting at Cirith Ungol in the days of the Watch on Mordor would be sure proof of Royal displeasure to an officer, and the garrison would be a jumpy lot of discipline cases & sad sacks. Certainly the orcs had no joy of it, and they were used to fear & suffering as part of their existence.)
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Personally I always found the idea of an alliance between Sauron and Smaug one of the most disagreeable of all Tolkien's ruminations. My displeasure originated as instinct and impression but as I've found with many such instincts there is actually a solid textual reason as to why that impression was generated. For a start, The Hobbit was not written as part of the whole mythology of the elder days; and as such Smaug was not conceived originally as having been a servant of Morgoth. There are references to parts of Tolkien's wider mythology but they are more private jokes and the book as a whole was not written to be consistent with it.
Smaug is not therefore a creature of Morgoth in conception. He shares many traits with Tolkien's first age dragons, but he is as much in the tradition of Chrysophylax Dives from Farmer Giles of Ham. The qualities Smaug displays- his vanity, selfishness and ego seem to be entirely contrary to Sauron's own aims. You learn, particularly in HoME 10 'Morgoth's Ring' what drives Sauron, and that is a profound megalomania; a corruption of his original desire for order which ultimately ends in slavery. Sauron's most favoured servants; the Nazgul were veritable automata, and a strong independent personality like Smaug's would have been the ultimate offence to him. He would not have been able to accept Smaug as an ally of equals; a hireling he had to appease but would have demanded Smaug defer to him.
For Smaug's part, his colossal ego wouldn't have allowed anything of the sort. I entirely agree with your impression that Morgoth's inner circle despised each other, and of all of them Sauron was the most petty, the most weaselly. Smaug (regardless of whether he was one of the original winged dragons unleashed during the War of Wrath giving him direct allegiance to Morgoth or whether he was rather one of their descendants birthed in the Withered Heath in a later age) would have thought of Sauron as a jumped up dictator, a poxy gobshite who's ambition outsized his ability. Smaug's power was all on display- he recites through a litany of his physical attributes like a bodybuilder boasting of his physique; Sauron's physical form was butchered by an Elf and a Man and since then fear over weaker minds has been his only power. In fact of all the characters in the story, good or evil, Smaug had the least chance of making an alliance with Sauron and believe that Tolkien's ruminations on the subject were ultimately simply attempts to join the dots after the fact. Had Smaug been alive during the War of the Ring he might have taken advantage of the chaos to increase his wealth, but equally he would have taken any overtures of an alliance from Sauron or his enemies as an insult. Dain sent Sauron's emissaries away with harsh words; Smaug wouldn't have sent anything back except perhaps the unclad spirits of the Nazgul; their physical forms having been torched to a cinder.
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true Tolkien did not write the hobbit with the super-consolidated world of the lord of the rings in mind, and he usually used references to his broader mythology which became the silmarillion as basically name-drops like elrond and gondolin, but at the same time, he did have much of that mythology already written by the late thirties, and smaug - like everything else in the hobbit - while he is part of that victorian bedtime story tradition of dragons like Chrysophylax Dives or kenneth graham's Reluctant Dragon, he also has more than a foot in the archaic world of great heroes and monsters. this is another reason (apart from the ones i've already mentioned) why his deep, booming voice in the film, comparatively lacking in human inflections, didnt bother me, because it gives him a kind of ancientness, and makes his lineage to figures like the - for all intents and purposes - psychologically identical Glaurung (who talks like something straight out of the bible or, more accurately, like ancient dragons like fafnir, with his "thy's" and "thee's")
I think they borrowed alot from glaurung for the film's smaug, as a good model to flesh out the dragon's role in world affairs (which is probably exactly where Tolkien was coming from when writing "the quest for erebor") and I think it paid off in giving him more insightful and menacing things to say about thorin's impending gold greed and the coming darkness (in the book you sense that smaug figures that the king under the mountain probably has "sons' sons" who'd like to see him dead, but he doesnt know their names and doesnt really care, which gives him an unnassailable badassery that the movie had to compromise on, but i thought it was a worthwhile tradeoff) and really i think Glaurung and Smaug are basically exactly the same in terms of their personalities, it's just that one was written for a kid's story, and the other for something closer in tone to ancient epic sagas, or to the more serious LOTR for that matter, and i think you definitely loose some of that fairy tale charm when you go all epic (actually it came as a huge shock and almost a betrayal to me, the first time i read "fellowship" that the ring, bilbo's little magic pal, was this utterly evil thing, but boy does that seem a long time ago
Really tolkien is a bit schizophrenic in his treatment of sauron (or i guess it is simply the general schizophrenia between fairy tale and ancient legend, which pervades his whole corpus, and is simply most pronounced with sauron) To the players in the war of the ring (and this is played up quite a bit in the LOTR movies) he is this insurmountable, incontestible evil force, but then when you look back into history he's been beaten by men more than once, even when in possession of his ring, and even as a great sorceror under morgoth his big moment was getting his ass kicked by Huan. I suppose he benefits tremendously, in terms of his appearing powerful and formidable, from the ever diminishing nature of the world around him, and so it stands to reason that his fellow veterans from the first age like the balrog, shelob or possibly smaug might not esteem him and fear him like a god the way men in the third age do. but smaug is nothing if not a venture capitalist, so i think he'd be the most easily onboard of the three. My money'd be on the balrog as the big hold out (though I can imagine shelob being raised on stories from her mother about decietful, two-legged dark lords and their musclebound thugs, that's something you'd see in the fairytale version 
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In all fairness Sauron gets his share of greater and more wicked triumphs even before The Hound of Valinor chokes him like a prissy prince of kitty-cats; it was he who so far as we know ensured that when Morgoth returned to Middle-earth he found a hell-fortress and a mighty power awaiting him in Angbad, he who cast Finrod Felagund out of Minas Tirith (corrupting it to the service of the Dark Lord), he who penetrated the guise of the aforesaid Wise King and captured Beren (coming within an ace of cutting down the family tree that would so vex his master and his own later history before it had even had a chance to flower - the thought of Sauron in the world unopposed by the likes of Master Elrond, Elendil and Aragorn is a chilling one).
I would argue that Sauron's mixed record makes him seem MORE dangerous, not less; an undefeated Dark Lord is rare, but one that can roll with the punches and come back twice as dangerous is even more rare.
Still, it is a lot of fun to imagine Master Elrond spending a good part of the Siege of Barad-Dur baying like a Hound, thereby causing the Lidless Eye to … TWITCH … in it's socket!
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yeah well huan (who really aught to sound like rory mccann from GOT) is a real asskicker.
but you're right about sauron, and i think that the fact that he seems so insurmountable in the thrid age is given context and made more interesting by the fact that there are those in middle earth, even that late, who "have his number" so to speak (like when aragorn, recounting the story of bere and luthien remarks that at the time sauron was only a servant, or the way galadriel and elrond talk about him, like he is this infinitely older and greater thing than themselves, but at the same time they've shared middle earth with him to long to be smitten by his might the way men or hobbits can, he's almost a peer to them, in a sense)
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I agree, albeit with the reservation that The Wise think of Sauron as a peer in the same way that your average Springfield Elementary student thinks of Dolph, Jimbo and Kearney as peers ...
I particularly love your idea of having Rory McCann voice the Hound of Valinor; it's just too perfect a shout out and too appropriate a casting choice to be believed!
For the record I tend to see Huan speaking as rather less smooth a process than, say, Smaug monologuing; more like what follows when a common dog is commanded to 'Speak' with that period of working the vocal chords before the 'BARK!' comes (albeit with comprehensible sentences coming out instead of a canine shout); it helps convey that this is NOT an everyday event.
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yes that's one of my very few fan-casting crossovers between ASOIAF and middle-earth (beyond some cant-quite-place-it feeling on my part that whoever that was that played ned stark would have been great for boromir) and I discuss my thoughts on the changing roles of dogs and wolves between martin and tolkien in my other huan-related response, but Rory Mccann just sounds (particularly when tabling that overbearing scottish accent) like he was born to voice a dog. I'm often surprised, watching GOT, how much he sounds like Liam Neeson (fellow large celt and an oft suggested candidate, among certain circles, for Huan's voice) except shaggier, more kicked around and, well, more dogged. furthermore the two characters, huan and clegane, have vaguely similar trajectories, both quitting their little aristocratic douchebag masters and joining up with - and serving as a protector and sort of impromptu father figure to - one of our heroines (incedentally the hound and arya's rapport is getting more enjoyable all the time)
I really like that idea that speech is something he may have to work his way up to. having had many dogs, and known many more, it's dependably funny to watch them do that.
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I admit that while my personal experience of dogs is somewhat limited - it's not that I'm a cat person (so long as they're friendly and good-mannered I have roughly equal appreciation for cats and dogs), it's just that my family enjoy our foreign travels and are too kind-hearted to leave felix or fido in a kennel so that we can go off on holiday - but I am familiar enough with them that the mental image of Huan having to cursed-near spit out his words caught my imagination.
I must also admit that the similarity between Mr Neeson and Mr McCann's voices hadn't really registered with me (mostly because Mr Neeson has that slightly-patrician, extremely leonine look and Mr McCann has something of a Hobbit-face even if he's too tall by some four feet to be one; that one is very fair while the other is quite dark helps my eyes to fool my ears into thinking them very different), but you do make an extremely good point!
Mind you Celegorm the Fair could EAT King Joff the Jerk, especially without Huan to give him that 'You are BETTER than this boss' look!
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Well the big question is that if Smaug was so eager for plunder, so much of a free market capitalist, why was he content to sleep on the spoils of Erebor and Dale for a hundred and seventy-five years without so much as a hint of greater ambition? Smaug had gathered his hoard and he was perfectly happy to sleep on it undisturbed never showing the slightest interest in the nearby woodland realm. There is nothing Sauron could offer him really- anything Smaug wanted he could have got for himself. Why would he be willing to satisfy Sauron's petty need for mastery?
The portrayal of Sauron isn't so much schizophrenic so much as it shows a development of his methods in his rise to power. I mean I hesitate to make the Hitler comparison but Sauron did start out as the kind of poxy little corporal and evolved into this extraordinary figurehead of a vast empire. Physically he might not have been any greater but he was the one member of Morgoth’s cabal that grasped the fruits of the fruits insanity and had the ambition to pursue some 'greater aim' as it were- a world spanning regime rather than personal gratification. Tolkien makes the point of how Sauron inherited the corrupted world that Morgoth had created and at the same time inherited something of Morgoth’s omnicidal desires- that which wouldn’t bow would be crushed. It’s wrong to think of Sauron as being as pragmatic as the romans hiring barbarians as ‘contractors’, Sauron wanted slaves, not merely token vassals.
I don't mind that Smaug was more aware of wider events than in the book, perhaps being aware of a rising power in the world (anyone with any degree of potency seems to have an inbuilt ‘powerometer’), but I think it is best if he has no investment in them- as you say, that gives him an ‘unassailable badassery’. Personally I don’t see Smaug as just a ‘fairytale’ Glaurung; obviously there are similarities in their natures and Tolkien undoubtedly used the qualities he’d established with Glaurung as a template for a dragon’s attitude but I think even in an ‘epic’ retelling of The Hobbit, less needs to be changed than you might think, an opinion I hold from the perspective of someone who read the more ‘epic’ sequel first before backing on myself and reading The Hobbit. Smaug’s particular brand of sardonic playboy narcissism is most certainly a break from the lofty tone of LotR, but so is the very nature of hobbits and they were successfully transplanted with very little alteration from their invention in the eponymous book into the wider mythology via the sequel.
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Sauron's ability to manipulate others through speech and form was both his strength and his weakness. It was his undisputed strength, and the narrative of Middle-Earth listed his triumphs. The weakness was partly the old saw, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." All his suckers who survived meeting him the first time learned never to trust him in any way but to regard him as their dire enemy. And of course his powers of manipulation automatically failed against people who just refused to play along. Huan the faithful hound was one, but so were Frodo Baggins, Galadriel, and Gandalf. He could have manipulated Smaug, but that was because he and the dragon thought enough alike, and he had the golden carrot of potential additional plunder. And it's not like Smaug, descendant of Glaurung & Ancalagon, would have any innate reason not to working "with" the second Dark Lord. If Sauron had been able to regain his One RIng, and wield his full power again, the issue would not have even been in doubt! Boy the Free Peoples missed several perils with the completion of the Quest of Erebor.... There was nothing sophisticated about Shelob's non-compliance as given in her biography in TTT. She just didn't give a damn about matters greater than herself, and Sauron had nothing to gain by aggravating her. Besides, her numerous spawn were available, and more malleable to his needs.
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Truly excellent, however being the 'woman of secret shadow' I think I personally imagined her more amorphous; darkness dripping off of her rather than so clearly defining her bottom half. The word 'woman' also somehow makes me imagine she'd have some kind of spectral garment that was actually part of her body, almost like a jellyfish's skirt. I do like how feminine (and strangely beautiful) you've kept the head- kind of like Angelina Jolie with piranha dentures (... works for some...)
Once again you've managed to capture so many of my own opinions and thoughts in your 'flavour text' too; the more gothic nature of the villains of the first age is an intriguing shift of image (hell you've got Sauron- Gorthaur the Cruel setting up house on a lonely isle guarded by werewolves- he's one bone white bouffant away from saying 'Ze children of the night, vhat sveet music zey make!'), it's more ancient and archaic than uberwald victorian gothic (a fair dash of celtic mystique) but the horrors that inhabit it do have whispers of terrors you find in those stories- nightmare hounds on the moors and strange predatory women flitting through the forests.
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that always struck me as an oddly elegant name for one described as "a batlike creature clinging with creased wings"
Personally, while I can entertain the option of a more clothed, humanoid form for her given the right circumstances (it seems that Sauron and possibly several of his charges in Tol-in-Gaurhoth were able shape shifters, and it is said that Thuringwethil "was wont to fly in vampire's form to Angband" perhaps suggesting that she had a choice of form) I wanted to draw her in her most natural mode, not something alluring or relateable to the children of illuvatar but just the opposite; dangerous, beastial, and sexually horrifying, comprised of just enough of our own humanoid form and appeal to make the whole all the worse, like how the title creature in "alien" was designed as this horrid compilation of phallic and vaginal structures. Also I wanted to portray her crawling and classically naked, like something you'd see writhing in the middle of one of those beautiful but rather off putting paintings of hell.
She is, in my mind, very much like one of the brides of Dracula mentioned only briefly in the novel, and indeed Tol-in-Gaurhoth under Sauron seems very much like Dracula's abode, with Sauron himself, sorceror and shape shifter, seducer, lord of bats and wolves, sworn vassal to the devil, fulfilling the lead role almost perfectly. "Beren and Luthien," like almost all classic fairy tales centering around a princess, seems awash in buried sexual subtext. in their quest to earn and consumate their right to their pure, perfect love, they (and specifically luthien) run afoul of continual suggested sexual aggression, the sons of Feanor, Sauron, Draugluin's brood (the wolf often functioning as the aggressive, predatory male id in fairy tales) culminating in her confrontation with and attempted seduction by Morgoth, a scene I find hard not to take in very tim curry-esqu terms. I strongly doubt that much of that was tolkien's intention (as I doubt it was his intention to invest the relationships of either frodo and sam or maedhros and fingon with a sexual connotation, though both relationships, in my opinion, do lend themselves to such a reading) but perhaps it is just unavoidably built into the framework of the classic fairy-tale princess story. That was in the back of my mind when drawing this, also with my take on morgoth.
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Well I can see where ya goin' with this, but how come Sauron gets away with being Attractive before the drowning of Numenor?
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Sauron seems to be somewhat the exception that proves the rule, being the "diplomat," so to speak, of the forces of evil. And really even Sauron doesnt seem to bother with his "fair form" for most of the first age; he's pretty unabashedly evil as the lord of Tol-Sirion. I think his identity as Annatar the giver of gifts was really something he had to resort to in the aftermath of his master being defeated and kicked out into the void.
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Dunno.....Maybe the rest of the maiar that were known to take fearsome forms preferred to look nightmare inducing 24/7/365. lol
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The fearsome aspect of the fana was the exterior expression of the spirit within. There were not a lot of siren-types in the hosts of Morgoth.
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Well said, and the proof's in the pudding; sauron is pretty much the only servant of morgoth anywhere near as high up as he was (barring the balrog in moria) to have survived into the second age. There's something to be said for doing whatever you have to to survive.
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As an addendum to my longer post above, Thuringwethil might have had some shape-shifting power as well, due to some hints of her description in the tale of Beren & Luthien. But the bat-form seemed to be common enough that Luthien could adapt it as a disguise known to the servants of Angband.
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I couldn't agree more, in fact i just said as much in my response to drdeath153 above
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And so you did! 
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Hmmm....Good point. But what's "fana"?
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The fana was the physical incarnation the Valar & Maiar took when entering Middle-Earth proper. It was a self-made body, and could feel as mortal bodies could feel, yet those beings were not dependent on it. At least the good ones, anyway; Gandalf the White is simply Gandalf without his "Grey" fana, which he sacrificed in fighting the balrog. When the maiar & Valar returned to the Undying Lands, they dismissed their fana until the time they needed one again. Sauron was unusual among the corrupted Maiar in that he retained his unfixed fana, unlike the balrogs, for example, who became fixed in their ohysical form....and likewise vulnerable to its destruction. Once Sauron lost his fana in the Downfall of Numenor, his spirit could no longer become incarnate by itself, or take a pleasant form; his inner evil was forever visible to others.
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Yeah, that's strange, I've never heard of the word "fana" before......I've heard of "fëa and hröa"(soul and body), but when I looked up fana on tolkiengateway, there wasn't anything about it.......
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Tell 'em they left a word out!
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Dude, this is just awesome! This is very much how I pictured my own imagining of Turingwethil! This very much reminds me of how the harpies(those bat-like creatures shown in the 2005 version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) were done. I will admit, their appearance is far more akin to vampires than harpies, because traditionally harpies are half bird instead of bat, although in the film's video game version, they are called "werebats" instead of harpies which makes more sense to me. In this book I have called "The Crafting of Narnia" it has concept art of the harpies and it both shows and talks about how originally they were concieved as traditional and bird-like, but eventually become more bat-like.
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birdwings are a hard sell for evil creatures these days because, for one, we're so used to this established visual canon of good, angelic beings having bird wings and evil demonic creatures having webbed bat wings. also, when designing an anthropomorphic creature like a harpy, bat wings are very much like human arms and wings, only with the fingers unpleasantly stretched out and webbed, whereas bird wings (belonging to creatures evolutionarily much farther removed from us than bats) look more out of place on a humanoid torso. That said I'd love to see some more classical, feathered harpies in movies, I might even try one myself down the road, but for that "minion-of-satan" look that I was going for here (and that I suspect they were going for with the white withces forces in "CON") you cant do much better than long, clawed bat-wings.
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That's funny you mentioned bat wings being like human arms, because in the book I mentioned, it talked about how the director, Andrew Adamson, responded well to the concept art that depicted bat-like harpies with feet that functioned more like hands. Also an interesting fact is that on that very same page, there's concept art for bird-like harpies that depict them as having the heads of skinny hags and the bodies of vultures or condors from the neck down and it looked very creepy to me. It also made me think of the three breasted, very vulture-like harpy from The Last Unicorn movie made by Rankin and Bass. I definantly felt those kinds of harpies were a good way to have gone, though personally, I think they should have just 86'ed the harpy idea, since harpies were not mentioned in the book, and used incubuses/incubi instead since they could be bat-winged and be scary-looking, despite traditionally taking the form of handsome men at night. lol
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