MELKOR – “HE WHO ARISES IN MIGHT”

In Ainulindalë – Tolkien’s creation story – Melkor, “He Who Arises in Might”, is portrayed as the most powerful, inventive and magnificent of the angelic powers known as the Ainur, “Holy Ones”. These are the angelic beings who, at the command of Eru, the One (God), take part in the “Great Music” of Creation, as a kind of heavenly choir.

In Tolkien’s pre- or extra-Christian world, Melkor most resembles the Old Testament rebel archangel Lucifer, who provoked a war in heaven. John Milton’s magnificently rebellious Lucifer–Satan in Paradise Lost, too, has much in common with Melkor–Morgoth in his many wars with the Valar, the Angelic Powers of Arda.

Just as Lucifer questioned the ways of God, so Melkor asks why the Ainur cannot be allowed to compose their own music and bring forth life and worlds of their own. This is the nub of Melkor’s complaint: he wants to have freedom from tyranny over his spirit and freedom to have mastery over his own creations, just as Lucifer proclaimed his own desire to create things of his own in a manner equal to God.

Melkor the Vala descends on to Arda

Dungeons of Utumno

Both Tolkien’s Melkor and Milton’s Lucifer are legitimately heroic in their steadfast “courage never to submit or yield”; however, in truth, both rebel angels are primarily motivated by overweening pride and envy. It is worth noting how, in Paradise Lost, Satan’s minions relate to him: “Towards him they bend / With awful reverence prone; and as a God / Extol him equal to the highest in Heaven.” It is a description that is comparable to Melkor enthroned in his subterranean halls, and reveals the true motive of both antagonists: to become God the Creator themselves.

Tolkien informs us that Melkor “had been given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge”, and how, when he first entered Arda, “he descended in power and majesty greater than any other of the Valar”. However, once within the world, Melkor became akin to a black cloud and a nightmare loosed upon the waking world. In the Iron Mountains in the northern wastes of Middle-earth, Melkor built his fortress of Utumno and dug the foundations of his armoury and dungeon of Angband. Thereafter, Melkor waged five great wars against the Valar. These wars, before the rising of the first moon and sun and the arrival of Men within the spheres of the world are comparable to the cosmological myths of the ancient Greeks, in which the unruly giant Titans of the earth rose up to fight the Gods, causing mountain ranges to rise and seas to fall. Ultimately, the titanic forces of the earth were conquered and forced underground, just as Melkor’s forces are defeated in those primeval wars with the Valar.

For, as Tolkien explains, Melkor’s fall is also a moral one: “From splendour he fell through arrogance to contempt for all things … He began with the desire for Light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he descended through fire and wrath into a great burning, down into Darkness.” And so, Melkor – like Lucifer – brings corruption into the World. All evil that is, was or will be in Tolkien’s world has its beginning in Melkor, but in his beginnings Melkor, again like Lucifer, was not evil.

Just as Melkor was Morgoth’s name before his flight from Valinor and return to Middle-earth, Lucifer was Satan’s name before his fall in a war of angels in heaven. It was an event recorded in the Gospel of Luke: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven.”

Certainly, by the time of Dante and Milton, Lucifer (meaning “light-bringer”) and Satan (meaning “accuser” or “slanderer”) had become interchangeable as the name for the Devil. Furthermore, Lucifer, with his biblical epithet “Lucifer son of Morning”, was universally recognized as the name for the Morning Star, the brightest “star” in heaven, the planet Venus.

It is of course ironic that Lucifer the bringer of light becomes Satan the bringer of darkness. It is doubly ironic in Tolkien’s world, where the Morning Star is the Silmaril carried into the heavens by Eärendil the Mariner, who in the final Great Battle leads the Host of Valar in a war of annihilation against the Dark Enemy and all his allies. And Morgoth, like Satan, is hurled out into the Abyss for ever.

Satan