Morgoth

Melkor belonged to the Ainur, the beings brought forth from the thought of Ilúvatar before the making of the World, and among them he was the greatest in power and in knowledge. The account of the Music relates that he alone had been given some portion of every gift that his fellows possessed severally, and that he was accounted a brother of Manwë in the mind of their maker, though the kinship is one of origin rather than of blood. His restlessness is traced to a single desire: he went often alone into the empty places beyond the World, seeking the Flame Imperishable, by which he hoped to give being to creatures of his own devising. He did not find it, for it lies with Ilúvatar alone, and out of that unsatisfied want grew the discord that first ran counter to the intended theme. The name Melkor is Quenya and carries the sense of one who arises in might, a title fitting to his first estate rather than to what he afterwards became.

The name by which he is chiefly remembered was not his own choosing. Fëanor gave it to him in the Sindarin tongue, Morgoth, understood as the black or dark foe of the world, and the Noldor kept it thereafter, so that the older name largely fell out of use among the Elves; in the reckoning of the Valar he was no longer numbered with them. A second Sindarin byname, Bauglir, attends it in formal styling and is glossed as the constrainer or oppressor, pointing to tyranny rather than to darkness. Later usage among Men and Elves alike tended to avoid the personal name altogether, preferring circumlocutions such as the Great Enemy, a habit of speech that itself records how the memory of him was handled.

In the works published in Tolkien's lifetime the figure appears almost wholly at second hand, named in the genealogical and historical matter appended to The Lord of the Rings as the Great Enemy whose servant Sauron had been. The pronunciation follows the general rules set out for the Elvish tongues: the g is hard in every position, and the final th is the voiceless spirant, not the voiced sound heard in English 'this'. Readers of the German editions will find the form unaltered in both the Carroux and the Krege translations.

The discord Melkor raised in the Music was answered by Ilúvatar in vision, and when the Ainur descended into the World to give it form, Melkor came with them, claiming Arda as his own realm. The labours of his fellows he undid as fast as they were made, so that the earliest shaping of lands and seas was less a work of building than a long tug of war. When the Valar raised the two great Lamps, Illuin in the north and Ormal in the south, and dwelt at Almaren in the light between them, Melkor bided in secret and then threw down the pillars that bore them; the ruin scarred the shape of the world and ended its first spring. Thereafter he built the deep fortress of Utumno in the far north, and the Valar withdrew over the western sea to Aman, where they made Valinor and set the Two Trees to give light. In the long twilight that followed, Melkor's dominion over Middle-earth was almost unchallenged, and the marring he had worked in the substance of Arda proved beyond undoing.

The waking of the Elves at Cuiviénen changed the balance. Melkor learned of them early and hunted them in the shadows, and it is held among the Wise that the Orcs were bred from Elves so taken and ruined in his pits, a mockery made in envy rather than in creation. To end this the Valar went out to war, and in the long assault upon Utumno the shape of the northern lands was broken a second time. Melkor was overthrown, bound with the chain Angainor, and brought captive to Valinor, where he was sentenced to three ages of confinement in the halls of Mandos. Released at the term, with a show of penitence that Manwë accepted and Ulmo did not trust, he was permitted to dwell in Valinor. There he did his most patient work: counsel and rumour among the Noldor, hints of Valarin jealousy and of wide lands in the East withheld from them, and the whispering that turned Fëanor and Fingolfin's houses against one another and put the first weapons into Noldorin hands.

Driven at last from Valinor, he sought out Ungoliant in the ravines of Avathar and bought her help with a promise of whatever he might take. At the festival on Taniquetil the two came upon the Trees; he struck them and she drank their light and their sap, and Valinor went dark. In the same night he went to Formenos, killed Finwë at its doors, and carried off the Silmarils with the rest of Fëanor's hoard. His refusal to yield the jewels to Ungoliant nearly cost him his life in Lammoth, where her webs held him until the Balrogs came out of Angband at his cry. Angband, the western outwork of the ruined Utumno, he rebuilt and made his seat, raising the three peaks of Thangorodrim above it, and he set the Silmarils in an iron crown that he wore thereafter, though the touch of them burned his hands and never healed.

The wars in Beleriand that followed occupied the whole of the First Age. Early sorties failed against the returned Noldor, and after the Glorious Battle his armies were shut within the north for close on four hundred years, a siege he could not break but was never brought to accept. He broke it in the year 455 with the Battle of Sudden Flame, loosing rivers of fire from Thangorodrim and the dragon Glaurung before his hosts; in its aftermath Fingolfin rode alone to his gate and challenged him, and though Morgoth killed him he took seven wounds and went lame ever after, a hurt he could not heal. Beren and Lúthien afterwards came into his own hall, where her singing overcame him and one Silmaril was cut from his crown. His answer came in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears in 472, won largely by the treachery of Easterlings he had bought; Húrin was taken alive, and when he would not disclose the hidden city he was set in a high seat on Thangorodrim under a curse laid on his kin, and released after long years to carry that ruin among the Elves himself.

In the structure of the legendarium Morgoth stands less as the chief villain among many than as the first cause from which the others descend: later evils are referred back to him, and the flaw he worked into the substance of Arda was held to be past mending, so that decay, sickness and the failure of good purposes could be spoken of as properties of a world already marred. His instruments were the extremes of the physical order, excessive heat and bitter cold, used to unmake what his fellows assembled, and the accounts allow him strength and knowledge greater than any other of the Ainur. Dominion on that scale carried a cost, however. The further he bent Arda and its living things to his will, the more he was tied to the machinery of that mastery, until he ruled through captains, armies and terror rather than through his own presence, and after the raising of Angband he came out of it in person only rarely.

The limits are set out as plainly as the powers. He could give no life of his own: what came out of his pits was bred, twisted or enslaved from creatures already made, and the judgement of the Wise is that mockery of this kind is the furthest a rebellious spirit reaches. Falsehood served him better than force, and much of his success rests on rumour, flattery and the setting of allies against one another. What was hidden by other wills he could not simply find; the hidden kingdom escaped his searching for many years and fell to betrayal from within rather than to his art. When Húrin stood before him he claimed mastery over the fates of Arda, and was answered that the claim ended at the confines of the World, beyond which those who refuse him pass out of his reach. His reckoning was likewise bounded by his own appetites, so that motives he did not share — pity, or an errand undertaken without hope of reward — lay outside what he thought to guard against.

Among the Powers he kept no equals. Manwë, set against him as the appointed head of the Valar, is presented as the one least able to read him, since malice was absent from his own nature and he judged others by himself; the pardon granted after the confinement in Mandos is the clearest fruit of that blindness. Tulkas, who came into the World late and expressly to oppose him, drove him into flight at his first arrival, and the enmity between them is described as the most personal that Melkor bore. He reached also into the households of his fellows: Ossë, of the people of Ulmo, was for a season drawn to his allegiance by the offer of the sea's dominion, and was recovered only through the entreaty of Uinen. That episode sets out his method in small — he approached subordinates with what their masters would not give them.

The latest papers move in the opposite direction and enlarge the theoretical scale. In the essays gathered under the title Myths Transformed, Tolkien worked out an account in which Melkor spent his native power by pouring it into the substance of Arda itself, so that the world became the instrument of his will while he grew steadily weaker and more closely bound to bodily form; the comparison offered there is with the Ring of his lieutenant, Arda entire standing to Morgoth as that lesser thing stood to Sauron. The same papers reopen the question of the Orcs, canvassing descent from Men, from beasts, or from lesser corrupted spirits, and leave it unsettled rather than fixed as the published compilation fixes it. To the same period belongs the debate of Finrod and Andreth, whose attached tale supplies matter the published Silmarillion lacks: Melkor's approach to the first Men in the East, the instruction he gave them and the worship he obtained, tracing their fall directly to him.