The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness. He lacks the One Ring.
Gandalf, Sombra do Passado
"Uma segunda escuridão" é, claro, uma descrição bastante ampla que pode ser interpretada de várias maneiras. Mais detalhes são dados no ensaio intitulado " Nota sobre motivos no Silmarillion ", publicado na History of Middle-earth 10:
Sauron, however, inherited the 'corruption' of Arda, and only spent his (much more limited) power on the Rings; for it was the creatures of earth, in their minds and wills, that he desired to dominate.
E:
O motivo final de Sauron é, portanto, a ordem e a dominação estéril; essa foi realmente a razão pela qual ele criou o Anel em primeiro lugar.Sauron had never reached this stage of nihilistic madness. He did not object to the existence of the world, so long as he could do what he liked with it. He still had the relics of positive purposes, that descended from the good of the nature in which he began: it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall, and of his relapse) that he loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.
But like all minds of this cast, Sauron's love (originally) or (later) mere understanding of other individual intelligences was correspondingly weaker; and though the only real good in, or rational motive for, all this ordering and planning and organization was the good of all inhabitants of Arda (even admitting Sauron's right to be their supreme lord), his 'plans', the idea coming from his own isolated mind, became the sole object of his will, and an end, the End, in itself.