For some reason, I was really intimidated by Melkor during the Dagor Bragollach, I don't know why. 😕 Before that happened, I thought Melkor was kinda stupid and not powerful or intimidating enough, but after I've read that part, with all the Dragons scrolling in and all the Elves and Men burning, I kinda felt, "Wow...Morgoth is cooool!!!!"..😎 😛
i always thought wow melkor is cool
because he wasnt exactly the most evil guy was he, but he was very cocky
he went into valinor and destroyed the trees lol
man were the valar pissed
he took the silmarils
he does smaller things like that, but it affects the inhabitants of arda more than learning 'oh melkor has just killed blah blah blah'
i think destroying the trees and silmarils were melkors top two make people go 'shit' moments
the third of course being the fall of gondolin
About Melkor, as an essential character of the Silmarillon, it's the reincarnation of Satan in the Bible. Can we say that Valinor was in fact Eden garden and that Melkor(the snake) drove the Noldor( Adam and Eve) away from the paradisial island and to be garded forever on by magical islands(angels)? I think it is. Tolkien mastered the art of camouflaging the catholic religion into elvish stories. More prooves: the trees of life= tree of knowing with the fruits. Fruits=Sillmarillon.
I'm not saying Tolkien was copying from the Bible, discriminating his work. I love his book more knowing that, in fact, it reflected upon our reality also. He really is amazing.
Melkor was the heart of the story. An evil one, but still he was... 🙂
Originally posted by Bar-en-Danwedh
the biblical similarities are intentional...
Originally posted by Mandos
Tolkien mastered the art of camouflaging the catholic religion into elvish stories.
He also heavily criticized the obvious Christian connections or allegories his friend CS Lewis used in his books
Some quotations >>
Originally written by JRRT in the Foreword to the Second Edition of LoTR
As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical.
From Letter #131 to Milton Waldman of CollinsBooks in 1951
For one thing its [the Arthurian] 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another, and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.
[...]
In the cosmogony there is a fall: a fall of Angels we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth. These tales are ‘new’, they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall - all stories are ultimately about the fall - at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.
From Letter #165
It [LoTR] is not `about' anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political. The only criticism that annoyed me was on that it `contained no religion' (and `no Women', but that does not matter, and is not true anyway). It is a monotheistic world of `natural theology'. [...] I am in any case myself a Christian; but the `Third Age' was not a Christian world.
From Letter #181
(about the suggestion that Gandalf could represent Christ or other biblical personae)
The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write.
From Letter #142
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like `religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
Some other letters dealing with the topic:
# 5, 43, 49, 89, 96, 153, 156, 163, 183, 191, 212, 246, 250, 306 or 312