Monday 27 March 2023

Morgoth's War

The following, I have edited (and slightly adapted, to make explicit and clearer the meanings) from notes by JRR Tolkien written c1958 and published in 1993 as Morgoth's Ring - which was volume ten of The History of Middle Earth edited by Christopher Tolkien. 

Assembling these extracts was prompted by my reflecting on the true (Sorathic) motivations behind The West's large-scale and calculated deployment of land-mine contamination, and the plans for massive deployment of "mucky missiles", in the current Fire Nation war.  

In other words: for the demonic beings who dominate the puppet-leadership of Western Powers; this war is not about winning, so much as staining, destroying, reducing Middle Earth to formless chaos. 

This is increasingly a Morgoth war of destruction, less and less a Sauron war of conquest.  

**

To gain domination over Middle Earth, Morgoth had let most of his being pass into the physical constituents of Middle Earth – hence all things that were born on Middle Earth and live on and by it, beasts or plants or incarnate spirits, were liable to be ‘stained’ .


When Morgoth was confronted by the existence of other inhabitants of Arda, with other wills and intelligences, he was enraged by the mere fact of their existence, and his only notion of dealing with them was by physical force, or the fear of it. 

His sole ultimate object was their destruction

Men, Morgoth despised because of their ‘weakness’: that is their lack of physical force, or power over ‘matter’; but he was also afraid of them. 


Morgoth became so far advanced in Lying that he lied even to himself, and pretended that he could destroy Men and rid Middle Earth of them altogether. Hence his endeavor was always to break wills and subordinate Men to, or absorb them into, his own will and being - before destroying their bodies

This was sheer nihilism, and negation its one ultimate object. 

Morgoth would no doubt, if he had been victorious, have ultimately destroyed even his own ‘creatures’, such as the Orcs, when they had served his sole purpose in using them for the destruction of Elves and Men. 


Left alone, Morgoth could only have gone raging on till all was leveled again into a formless chaos

And yet even so Morgoth would have been defeated, because God's creation would still have ‘existed’, independent of his own mind, and a world in potential. 

Morgoth could not, of course, ‘annihilate’ anything of matter, he could only ruin or destroy or corrupt the forms given to matter by other minds in their subcreative activities. 


Thus Morgoth had no ‘plan’ for his war: unless destruction and reduction to nil of a world in which he had only a share can be called a ‘plan’. 

Morgoth's vast power was therefore disseminated into staining, destroying, reducing Middle Earth to formless chaos. 

The whole of Middle Earth was Morgoth's Ring of Power.


2 comments:

Epimetheus said...

Perhaps it won't matter. The rumors coming out of those professionally acquainted with the Pentagram are conveying non-Fire Nation casualty numbers somewhere around 3-5 times those suffered by the New World in all its time at war in Vietnam. And this after only 1 year. Those in the Pentagram who have access to real-time orbital cameras and witness the combat power of the Fire Nation are, quite obviously, not at all eager to get directly involved. Hopefully, these more realistic persons prevail.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Epi - I agree that there seem to be some sensible people holding back escalation - yet the intent of the losers permanently to poison and contaminate the very earth of the breadbasket nation (like Saruman attempted in the Shire, like Morgoth succeeded in doing to Middle Earth) seems evident to me.

Why else try (for so long, and repeatedly) to explode a massive gamma-ray power station, last year?

To me; the wartime pattern of activities from The West is clear evidence of Sorathic/ Morgothian hatred of divine creation, the gratuitous desire for destruction of people, plants and animals, the land itself - which motivation was already evident from many other activities too.