JRR Tolkien is all too often characterized as a writer who portrayed the world as a struggle between black and white. One has hideous goblins and orcs, along with their Dark Lord, on one side and the beautiful men and elves, led by a wise king, on the other. The difference between good and evil is vivid and clear in the aesthetics of each force’s followers. Who would actually want to follow the moral code of a people so visibly vile and corrupt? However, such an estimation of Tolkien’s depiction or evil is unfair.
One needn't peer far into Tolkien’s mythos to see that the author dealt with evil. Within The Lord of the Rings, the case of Saruman provides a counter-example to the accusation. The myth of Fëanor and his Oath to reclaim the Silmarils is another counter-example and it is perhaps the most sympathetic depiction of evil that Tolkien even created.
The great theme unifying theme of Tolkien’s depiction of evil was the pursuit of power. In a letter to Milton Waldon, Tolkien directly addressed the connotations the word had throughout his mythos: “'Power' is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods.” For Fëanor, his quest to Middle Earth to reclaim the Silmarils after Melkor stole them would lead to not only his own death, but a grand tragedy of all who followed them as their war against Melkor and his hosts turned into a generations-long quagmire. The power to return what was stolen from Fëanor and to bring Melkor to justice always eluded the elves that followed in Fëanor’s footsteps. Ultimately, all they were left with was tragedy.
In a culture in which we all too often seek our own empowerment, Tolkien's myths are a much-needed warning that power is a word to be distrusted. The desire to have power over others and to leave one’s mark upon the world, however much we may want to praise the motivations, is a temptation that often leads to one’s own misery and, in the large scope, to the perversion the greatest of humanity into their species’ own scourge. The real Dark Lords are those people who try to remake the world in their own image. They are the ones who arrogate to themselves the authority to say that their vision of the world is the one that must be, whatever the consequences.
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