[Amarinth]

lord gothmog-- thanks for the comments, and i do understand what you mean, the distinction between possessing a "dark side" and being evil in the sense of truly practicing it. but what i intended to show was that melkor needed only the seeds of greatness, talent, inherently "good" or, at the least, "neutral" traits, to eventually forge evil with himself as his crucible. it's just like finding you have great power in the beginning, testing it out, then really using it to its full force until such time you end up creating god knows what with it, and by that time you've invented a completely new world-order featuring yourself as the bad, bad guy! hey, i think this actually happened already during rcent history! [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

anyway, this interpretation does not need a prerequisite darkness for melkor to have tapped into. notice in the silm that even eru was quite neutral with describing his "jazzed up" contribution to the music of the ainur, this again being interpreted in a sense (by myself [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]) as an act of innovation from such a great a talent. consciousness of his actual evil manifests only when his innovation passes into the material world, i.e., when enacted, and that is where his position as an enemy is truly established.

i totally agree with you about not knowing if god or eru is completely good though. i can only go as far as to say that "good" pertains to everything consistent with eru's world order, melkor's deeds having given rise to another thus gave the distinction to "good" because his was antithetical and given the role of "evil".

this are just some interpretations among many, naturally, and though it disagrees in part with yours it's great though to have your and everyone else's take on this, i really had a blast!