Sauron Greater than Morgoth...

[Vultur]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

I suppose it is a way of describing the waning of grandeur and wonder the further man uses science to reduce magic to an algorithm, or perhaps, like the Gaels, it is a way of explaining the coming Christian predominance and the slow death of the old gods.

That's an interesting take on it; I never thought of that. I had always seen it as drawing on the concept of a lost Golden Age or Eden. In Greek and Roman myth there are four or five, depending on the author, 'ages of man' each diminished from the one before. Even in the Bible, this concept comes through: after the fall of Eden there is a 'middle period' where lives are far longer than those of modern man, and then 'wane' to our own time. (Even Abraham, who's entering the 'historical' time frame, lived 175 years.)