[HPforGrownups] Voldemort and Sauron and Others

[Eric Oppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 191477

Quoting sigurd at eclipse.net:

> Dear List
>
> As I believe I said, I am re-reading the whole series start to   
> finish a second time and now doing critical analysis on it. I also   
> notices some interesting tropes. One of them is the nature of the   
> villain.
>
> Has anyone noticed that both Voldemort from HP and Sauron, the   
> villain in Lord of the Rings, both secrete their power into various   
> material artifacts. Sauron into the rings (and yes, most of him is   
> in the one ring, but there's a little bit of them in the other rings  
>  as well) and Voldemort into the horcruxes. Similarly in the Elric  
> of  Melnibone series the anti-hero, Elric's sword Stormbringer  
> secrets  much of Elric's personality, and even in Conan, Thulsa  
> Doom, the  arch villain feels compelled to use these physical  
> artifacts and  often animals, which do none of them any good at all.  
> In the first  two cases it is the destruction of these material  
> artifacts that  destroy them.
>
> Also interesting is the constant recurrence of the snake as the   
> symbol for evil.
>

In _Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,_ at least the early version with  
which I'm familiar (wrote articles for _Dragon_ back in the day) a  
lich, which is a very powerful undead sorcerer, keeps a "phylactery,"  
which is a sort of artifact to which his soul can retreat if his  
body's destroyed (or so I remember; it's been decades since I last  
played, and I gave away my rulebooks, but that's more-or-less how it  
works).

And they got the idea, I think, from the Russian legend of Koshchei  
the Deathless, who concealed his soul outside of his body, and thus,  
couldn't be killed.

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