Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2310239" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think that was his full answer though.  He also said that evil lacked the capacity of original thought, that it could only mock and twist the creations of others.  He also said that the problem with evil is that it continually turned on itself, and worked against its own purposes.   Also, he said that evil eventually caused one to forfeit thier identity and thier capacity to choose.  Notice that one of the problems evil things experience in his stories is that they are forgetting thier own name, the most explicit reference to which is when Tolkien introduces the 'Mouth of Sauron' - who is an utterly pathetic character the more you think about it.It's worth noting of course that the answers are exactly the opposite of the boasts that evil make to justify themselves.   Morgoth believes he is 'doing his own thing', but he was really doing his own thing only in the first moments of his rebellion.   Before long his rebellioned deepened to the point that he could just repeat his same themes over and over again in ever louder and shriller tones, and his original purpose (initially merely to increase the respect his audience would have for him) very quickly got lost in his attempts to justify his failures afterwards.  The later thoughts that we might speculate that he had - that Manwe and the rest didn't do the same solely because they didn't think of it first or were too cowardly to try - is probably only part of that justification, and is part of Melkor/Morgoths own maiming of his reason.   Like Gollum, even if he succeeded in his goals he would have just found 'empty darkness' where he could gnaw fruitlessly on the dreams of his old plots.  In fact, Tolkien writes that Morgoth is reduced to gnawing on himself endlessly in the void.</blockquote>

Verification