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Old 10-09-2004, 01:00 PM   #12
davem
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: In the home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names,and impossible loyalties
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davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.davem is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
I'm not sure the 'hated' is 'loved' - I think its desired - which is pretty much the case for all of us - we dwell on what we hate, we feed our desire for it by dwelling on it. We find it as impossible to let go of our desire for what we hate as we do for what we love. As Buddha said, life is suffering - we suffer because we desire, & the way to be free of suffering is to be free of desire.

The suffering we find in Tolkien's world is instigated & prolonged because of desire - someone's desire for something, & the stronger the desire the worse the suffering.

'Love not too well the works of thy hands' as someone says to Feanor(?). Its this 'love' (strictly desire, that leads to all the falls we see throughout the Legendarium. Morgoth desires the Silmarils - but what else is he capable of? If it wasn't the Silmarils that obsessed him it would be something else. Ungoliant & Shelob desire light, to consume, transform & vomit out as 'darkness' - its opposite, its negation.

This is why, for me, we are not dealing with 'love' in these cases, because there is no wish for the things desired to survive, to be loved by others, to even continue to exist - Morgoth 'loves' nothing - his desire is to destroy all things, to reduce them to primal chaos. Why? because he didn't make them - they don't owe their existence to him. He is not God, & so he hates the things he is not God of.

Of course, he begins with the belief that to be 'God' is simply to have absolute control, but in the end he realises that rule is not the be all & end all of divinity. He has not made the things that he desires, so they can never truly be 'his', because they sprang from another mind & will. Eru will always be present in their essential nature. So it seems he decides that the only way he can be 'God' is to destroy all things which originated outside himself - yet, he himself was made by Eru, & in the end he must destroy himself also.

But he cannot destroy Eru, so he is doomed to failure in his only desire. He turns on himself as much as he turns on other thngs. He ends up hating himself & desiring himself at once - as does Ungoliant & Shelob - who ends by consuming herself, because thats the nature of desire: it consumes itself, & ends up with nothing.

(Here endeth the lesson!)
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