Morgoth's Ring (72 page)

Melkor is taken back to Valinor going last (save for Tulkas +

who follows bearing Angainor and clinking it to remind Melkor).

But at the council Melkor is not given immediate freedom.

The Valar in assembly will not tolerate this. Melkor is remitted to Mandos (to stay there in 'reclusion' and meditate, and complete his repentance - and also his plans for redress).(4) Then he begins to doubt the wisdom of his own policy, and would have rejected it all and burst out into flaming rebellion -

but he is now absolutely isolated from his agents and in enemy territory. He cannot. Therefore he swallows the bitter pill (but it greatly increases his hate, and he ever afterward accused Manwe of being faithless).

The rest of the story, with Melkor's release, and permission to attend the Council sitting at the feet of Manwe (after the pattern of evil counsellors in later tales, which it could be said derive from this primeval model?), can then proceed more or less as already told.

In this short essay it is seen that in his reflections on the nature of Melkor, the vastness of his primeval power and its 'dispersion', my (* [footnote to the text] Every finite creature must have some weakness: that is some inadequacy to deal with some situations. It is not sinful when not willed, and when the creature does his best (even if it is not what should be done) as he sees it - with the conscious intent of serving Eru.)

(+ [footnote to the text] Tulkas represents the good side of 'violence'

in the war against evil. This is an absence of all compromise which will even face apparent evils (such as war) rather than parley; and does not (in any kind of pride) think that any one less than Eru can redress this, or rewrite the tale of Arda.)

father had been led to propose certain important alterations in the narrative of the legends as told in the Quenta Silmarillion (pp. 161, 186) and in the Annals of Aman (pp. 75, 80, 93). In the narrative as it stood, and as it remained,(5) there was no suggestion that Melkor feigned repentance when (no longer able to 'daunt him with his gaze') he faced Manwe in Utumno - already harbouring 'the idea of penetrating the vaunted fastness of Valinor, and ruining it'. On the contrary, 'Tulkas stood forth as the champion of the Valar and wrestled with him and cast him upon his face, and bound him with the chain Angainor'(6) (an ancient element, going back to the richly pictorial and 'primitive' account in the story of 'The Chaining of Melko' in The Book of Lost Tales, 1.100 - 4). Moreover, in the present text it was now, defeated at Utumno, that Melkor offered to become

'the least of the Valar', and to aid them in the redress of all the evils that he had brought to pass, whereas in the narratives he did this when he came before the Valar after he had endured the ages of his incarcera-tion in Mandos and sued for pardon. Of Manwe it was said, when Melkor was allowed to go freely about Valinor, that he believed that his evil was cured: 'for he himself was free from the evil and could not comprehend it'. No such flaw or 'inherent fault' in Manwe as is described in this essay was suggested;(7) although it was told that Ulmo, and Tulkas, doubted the wisdom of such clemency (and this too is an element that goes back to The Book of Lost Tales: 'Such was the doom of Manwe... albeit Tulkas and Palurien thought it merciful to peril' (I.105)).

NOTES.

1. Cf. Finrod's words in the Athrabeth (p. 322): 'there is no power conceivable greater than Melkor save Eru only'.

2. The earliest reference to the idea of the 'dispersion' of Melkor's original power is found in the Annals of Aman $179 (p. 133): For as he grew in malice, and sent forth from himself the evil that he conceived in lies and creatures of wickedness, his power passed into them and was dispersed, and he himself became ever more earth-bound, unwilling to issue from his dark strongholds.

Cf. also Annals $128 (p. 110). - The expression 'the Morgoth' is used several times by Finrod in the Athrabeth.

3. The square brackets were put in after the writing of the passage.

4. 'his plans for redress': i.e. redress of the evils he has brought about.

5. The second passage in QS, in which the pardon of Melkor is recounted (p. 186, $48), was changed in the final rewriting of Chapter 6: see p. 273, $48. But though the changed text introduced the ideas that any complete reversal of the evils brought about by Melkor was impossible, and that he was 'in his beginning the greatest of the Powers', the narrative was not altered in respect of changes envisaged in this essay (see note 7).

6. Alteration to the old story of the encounter at Utumno might have entered if QS Chapter 3 (in which this is recounted) had formed a part of the late rewriting that transformed the old Chapter 6; but see note 7.

7. In the final rewriting of QS Chapter 6 (p. 273, $48) this remained the case (note 5); and the original story was also retained that it was in Valinor after his imprisonment, not at Utumno, that Melkor made his promises of service and reparation. This might suggest that the present essay was written after the new work on QS (almost certainly dating from the end of the 1950s, p. 300), supporting the idea that the date of the documents on which the essay was written (1955) is misleading (see p. 385).

VII.

This essay is found in two forms. The earlier ('A') is a fairly brief text of four pages in manuscript, titled 'Some notes on the "philosophy" of the Silmarillion'; it is rapidly expressed and does not have a clear ending. The second ('B') is a greatly expanded version of twelve pages, also in manuscript, of far more careful expression and beginning in fine script, but breaking off unfinished, indeed in the middle of a sentence. This is titled 'Notes on motives in the Silmarillion'.

The relation between the two forms is such that for most of its length there is no need to give any of the text of A, for all of its content is found embedded in B. From the point (p. 401) where the Valar are condemned for the raising of the Pelori, however, the texts diverge. In B my father introduced a long palliation of the conduct of the Valar, and the essay breaks off before the matter of the concluding section of A was reached (see note 6); this is therefore given at the end of B.

The text of B was subsequently divided and lettered as three distinct sections, here numbered (i), (ii), and (iii).

Notes on motives in the Silmarillion.

(i)

Sauron was 'greater', effectively, in the Second Age than Morgoth at the end of the First. Why? Because, though he was far smaller by natural stature, he had not yet fallen so low.

Eventually he also squandered his power (of being) in the endeavour to gain control of others. But he was not obliged to expend so much of himself. To gain domination over Arda, Morgoth had let most of his being pass into the physical constituents of the Earth - hence all things that were born on Earth and lived on and by it, beasts or plants or incarnate spirits, were liable to be 'stained'. Morgoth at the time of the War of the Jewels had become permanently 'incarnate': for this reason he was afraid, and waged the war almost entirely by means of devices, or of subordinates and dominated creatures.

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. In this way Sauron was also wiser than Melkor-Morgoth. Sauron was not a beginner of discord; and he probably knew more of the 'Music' than did Melkor, whose mind had always been filled with his own plans and devices, and gave little attention to other things. The time of Melkor's greatest power, therefore, was in the physical beginnings of the World; a vast demiurgic lust for power and the achievement of his own will and designs, on a great scale. And later after things had become more stable, Melkor was more interested in and capable of dealing with a volcanic eruption, for example, than with (say) a tree. It is indeed probable that he was simply unaware of the minor or more delicate productions of Yavanna: such as small flowers.*

Thus, as 'Morgoth', when Melkor was confronted by the existence of other inhabitants of Arda, with other wills and intelligences, he was enraged by the mere fact of their existence, and his only notion of dealing with them was by physical force, or the fear of it. His sole ultimate object was their destruction.

Elves, and still more Men, he despised because of their 'weakness': that is their lack of physical force, or power over 'matter'; but he was also afraid of them. He was aware, at any rate originally when still capable of rational thought, that he could not 'annihilate'** them: that is, destroy their being; but their physical 'life', and incarnate form became increasingly to his mind the only thing that was worth considering.+ Or he (* [footnote to the text] If such things were forced upon his attention, he was angry and hated them, as coming from other minds than his own.)

(**[bracketed note inserted into the text] Melkor could not, of course, 'annihilate' anything of matter, he could only ruin or destroy or corrupt the forms given to matter by other minds in their subcreative activities.)

(+ [footnote without indication of reference in the text] For this) became so far advanced in Lying that he lied even to himself, and pretended that he could destroy them and rid Arda of them altogether. Hence his endeavour always to break wills and subordinate them to or absorb them into his own will and being, before destroying their bodies. This was sheer nihilism, and negation its one ultimate object: Morgoth would no doubt, if he had been victorious, have ultimately destroyed even his own 'creatures', such as the Orcs, when they had served his sole purpose in using them: the destruction of Elves and Men.

Melkor's final impotence and despair lay in this: that whereas the Valar (and in their degree Elves and Men) could still love

'Arda Marred', that is Arda with a Melkor-ingredient, and could still heal this or that hurt, or produce from its very marring, from its state as it was, things beautiful and lovely, Melkor could do nothing with Arda, which was not from his own mind and was interwoven with the work and thoughts of others: even left alone he could only have gone raging on till all was levelled again into a formless chaos. And yet even so he would have been defeated, because it would still have 'existed', independent of his own mind, and a world in potential.

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 co-ordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction. (It was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him.) Sauron had, in fact, been very like Saruman, and so still understood him quickly and could guess what he would be likely to think and do, even without the aid of palantiri or of spies; whereas Gandalf eluded and puzzled him. 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 ( reason he himself came to fear 'death' - the destruction of his assumed bodily form - above everything, and sought to avoid any kind of injury to his own form.)

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.*

Morgoth had no 'plan': unless destruction and reduction to nil of a world in which he had only a share can be called a

'plan'. But this is, of course, a simplification of the situation.

Sauron had not served Morgoth, even in his last stages, without becoming infected by his lust for destruction, and his hatred of God (which must end in nihilism). Sauron could not, of course, be a 'sincere' atheist. Though one of the minor spirits created before the world, he knew Eru, according to his measure. He probably deluded himself with the notion that the Valar (including Melkor) having failed, Eru had simply abandoned Ea, or at any rate Arda, and would not concern himself with it any more. It would appear that he interpreted the 'change of the world' at the Downfall of Numenor, when Aman was removed from the physical world, in this sense: Valar (and Elves) were removed from effective control, and Men under God's curse and wrath. If he thought about the Istari, especially Saruman and Gandalf, he imagined them as emissaries from the Valar, seeking to establish their lost power again and 'colonize'