The curse of Morgoth in CoH.

[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by skip spence

You didn't really expect us to go along with that, did you?

And if I ignored you, it was because I didn't really understand this Shippey fella's ideas and what significance they have to our debate. And I'm afraid I don't now either. Perhaps I'm not clever enough.

Did Tolkien ever use these terms?

No doubt he was familiar with them, whether he made reference to them himself. The names for the two points of view aren't important. The content is. Simply put: View # 1 is a creator originated all good things, and that being good, cannot have created evil; yet evil exists. The answer to how it can exist, is that evil is the negative of good. View #2 is that good and evil are equal and in an eternal struggle for dominance. Shippey is saying that Tolkien held these two views in tension, in balance, in his descriptions of evil in LotR (and probably elsewhere). The Ringwraiths, for example, are described as actual beings with real (though unseen) flesh, but they exist on a negative, "wraithed" plane, as it were. So both views #1 & #2 are implicit. Hope that helps.