100 Greatest Fictional Villains: Lord Foul the Despiser

  Stephen Donaldson’s epic fantasy trilogy The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant bear a superficial resemblance to Lord of the Rings, with magic artifacts, world-saving questing, and blatant Sauron and Mordor analogues. This might lead to the casual assumption that Donaldson is just another one of Tolkein’s countless slavish imitators, lazily aping the basic elements of the master’s intricate, genre-defining cosmology, but this is Not The Case At All. As well as his infamously dense prose, Donaldson distinguishes himself from Tolkein with a truly colossal cynicism, paradoxically shot through with a vein of battered, desperate idealism. Donaldson also has a habit of treating his characters to his personal brand of gruelling torment, with heroes and villains alike suffering from vividly sadistic physical and mental trials. The most frequent instrument of that pervasive brutality is the Chronicle’s main antagonist, a Dark Lord archetype of transcendent malice called Lord Foul.

  Once you get past Donaldson’s habit in his early work of giving evil characters luridly cheesy names (Lord Foul is one of many, ever more unsubtle appellations, with “Satansheart Soulcrusher” being the worst), you get to one of the most compelling fiends in fantasy fiction. While Sauron’s inhumanity stemmed from his inscrutability, as a grim yet impersonal presence for which mortals seemed mere scurrying insects, Foul’s brand of inhuman evil is founded upon how gruesomely, invasively personal he is. His mocking, commanding voice violates the heads of his targets, skewering their most fundamental insecurities and belittling their efforts to defy him with crushing finality.

  Foul is the incarnation of hatred and loathing, implied to be a manifestation of series protagonist Thomas Covenant’s own primal horror towards his leprosy-tainted flesh. His back-story and motivation are suitably epic; The Creator (nameless deity of the fantasy universe that Covenant finds himself transported to) cast down his malevolent brother in some cosmic brawl, trapping Lord Foul inside the Arch of Time that contains and supports the created world. Foul’s goal is to acquire the raw power necessary to shatter the Arch, unmaking the planet as the Creator’s metaphysical laws break down, but leaving Foul free to ravage the celestial realms once more. While in theory this should make the affairs of the Earth dull and parochial to his timeless intellect, it doesn’t stop him from playing warped games with the mortals that stand in his way. The Despiser never hesitates to express a depraved satisfaction at the misery wrought by his various tools, from the demoniacal Ravers, to the monstrous hordes of the First Chronicles, to the nature-corrupting horror of the Sunbane in the Second Chronicles.

  Relentless, blasphemous, psychopathic and legitimately Satanic in the scope of his machinations, the Despiser is a case study in how to make your fantasy overlord more than a generic Shadow.