Why is the Hated Loved?

[Evisse the Blue]

Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle

So Melkor hates not the light, he loves the light, but the fact that he can't have the light for himself and the subsequent sense of loss, isolation and emptiness that he has imposed upon himself.

I was going to argue that Melkor can never own the light, even though he badly wants to, whatever the reason. The thing which proves this is the fact that as soon as he tries to touch the silmarils, his hand is burned and he suffers an agonizing pain. So even by his 'owning' the Silmarils (because technically he did own them), he did not fully make them his own: his evil deed only apparently succeded. This probably (surely!) left him even more bitter than before. Just as Gollum and Frodo can never truly get the Ring to obey them - they are merely the Ringbearers (they bear the Ring from place to place, mostly acting according to the Ring's own devices), they are not the Ringmasters.