The Lord of the Rings J.R.R Tolkien

Eye of Sauron

Throughout The Lord of the Rings, "the Eye" (the Red Eye, the Evil Eye, the Lidless Eye) is the image most often associated with Sauron. Sauron's Orcs bore the symbol of the Eye on their helmets and shields, and referred to him as the "Eye" because he did not allow his name to be written or spoken, according to Aragorn (a notable exception to this rule was his emissary, the Mouth of Sauron). Also, the Lord of the Nazgûl threatened Éowyn with torture before the "Lidless Eye" at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

In the Mirror of Galadriel, Frodo had an actual vision of this Eye:

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.

Later, Tolkien writes as if Frodo and Sam really glimpse the Eye directly, not in any kind of vision. The mists surrounding Barad-dûr are briefly withdrawn, and:

one moment only it stared out...as from some great window immeasurably high there stabbed northward a flame of red, the flicker of a piercing Eye... The Eye was not turned on them, it was gazing north...but Frodo at that dreadful glimpse fell as one stricken mortally.

Gollum (who was tortured by Sauron in person) tells Frodo that Sauron has, at least, a "Black Hand" with four fingers. The missing finger was cut off when Isildur took the Ring, and the finger was still missing when Sauron reappeared centuries later. (Similarly, the injury to Sauron's throat in the much earlier battle with Lúthien and Huan is maintained even after his transformation.)

In the third volume, The Return of the King, the heralds of the Army of the West call Sauron out before the Battle of the Morannon, telling him to "come forth", which would seem pointless if he did not have a body.

In one of his letters Tolkien does state that Sauron had a physical form in the Third Age:

...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. ... Sauron should be thought of as very terrible. The form that he took was that of a man of more than human stature, but not gigantic.

Tolkien writes in The Silmarillion that "the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure" even before his body was lost in the War of the Last Alliance.

J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator includes Tolkien's own drawing of Sauron, showing him as a humanoid with literally black skin.

In the draft text of the climatic moments of The Lord of the Rings, "the Eye" stands for Sauron's very person, with emotions and thoughts:

The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him [Frodo], the Eye piercing all shadows... Its wrath blazed like a sudden flame and its fear was like a great black smoke, for it knew its deadly peril, the thread upon which hung its doom... [I]ts thought was now bent with all its overwhelming force upon the Mountain...

Christopher Tolkien comments: "The passage is notable in showing the degree to which my father had come to identify the Eye of Barad-dûr with the mind and will of Sauron, so that he could speak of 'its wrath, its fear, its thought'. In the second text...he shifted from 'its' to 'his' as he wrote out the passage anew."

Most adaptations of the story to visual media depict the Eye as visibly present; for obviously the Eye of Fire is visually effective, whereas references to Sauron's never-seen body are so few that even readers of the novel often overlook them.

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