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This is fundamentally wrong. The whole point of the LoTR world is that things keep getting worse and, although you may win the day, in the long run everything is cooked, as it were. Evil keeps coming back, it gets defeated every time one way or another, but things are worse off than they used to be despite the ""victory"". Restoration is impossible. We can never make things as good as our fathers had it. The elves wither and go to the uttermost West. The race of hobbits fails. The dwarves die in their mines. The ents disappear. Lorien dies.
Hard disagree. Evil keeps coming back because the Elves give up on Middle Earth. But even as evil comes back it is less potent: Morgoth was the true baddy, Sauron is but a servant. Saruman becomes a lesser version of his former greatness when he turns to evil, and even his voice fails him. He becomes a mean beggar by the end.
Nonsense. The elves had already fought several wars against evil by the time LotR happens.
The elves give up on middle earth because the cost of defeating sauron was the destruction of the rings, which destroyed the elvish realms and power. The choice of the elves was to leave middle earth or fade into wraiths. None of this is a matter of opinion, it's literally what Tolkein wrote.
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I think the vanishing of the elves and all of that was more to express the author's nostalgia for a preindustrialized past or some such. It's not so much that the world becomes darker over time, but more that the magic goes away. This could also be seen as reflective of childhood nostalgia, perhaps, a theme that was popular in Victorian fiction and which Tolkien was probably influenced by. Of course, these ideas interact with the themes about good vs. evil in certain ways, but I would say that the overall idea presented is more nuanced and indefinite than 'the world becomes increasingly evil'. One of the story points is that while good becomes increasingly degraded, evil does as well, with Sauron being much weaker than Morgoth and so forth. It's an arc from fantasy to mundanity, until evil is represented by your bland cubicle boss.
This is probably more true for the fate of the hobbits than that of the elves.
Of course, Arda has literally gotten darker since the days of the two lamps.
It's not just the magic going away - the dwarves and the hobbits are also gone. Numenor is under the seas and middle Earth kind of sucks compared to numenor.
It doesn't become increasingly evil. Nevertheless, it becomes ineffably worse.
The Elves in LOTR are just a standard tale of hubris. It is their desire to recreate Valinor in Middle-Earth without being forced to subject themselves to the authority of the Valar that caused the entire mess with the Rings. Celebrimbor's pride is what led to him helping Sauron, despite Galadriel and the other Wise being suspicious.
They were supposed to either stay and fade or leave, passing the world to Men. It was pride and a desire to stop the inevitable that made them make the rings.
Passivity isn't the problem. It's rejecting hope in God's plan. The world is degenerating and becoming disenchanted, but Eru is still at work (Numenor's destruction is actually hopeful in one way because it's clear evidence that Sauron is wrong: Eru has not abandoned the world and isn't some inert deist god) and is supposed to make it right at some point. Evil will not triumph in the end but you have to trust (and fight). It doesn't matter if you're worse off than before you fought, not fighting would be even worse.
Most everyone who becomes corrupted or grievously fails in some way rejects hope in that plan and creates problems. Celebrimbor decides he knows better, Saruman decides to bandwagon because he sees no rational path to victory, Denethor won't join Sauron but simply gives up out of despair and tries to kill himself like a "heathen king", the Valar themselves arguably fail by refusing to confront Morgoth early enough to stop him corrupting everything (which is why the Elves fade so fast in Middle Earth) for fear of destroying Arda despite knowing that Eru proclaimed Morgoth could never triumph...
Because people have free will, they fuck things up. But it's not over until it's over.
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I'd say the earlier era seem to have had greater contrasts, so that while Numenor and such have died off, so to have all the evil dragons and whatever that demon in Moria was. Good and evil were more distinct and individually potent, embodied by externalized creatures, whereas, as Middle Earth evolves towards the recognizable world, they collapse more towards a unitary point embodied by individual men (e.g. Boromir and Denethor). That is the main thrust of the matter I perceive, as far as its tendency towards one state or the other.
And if Middle Earth is literally darker, it is because it represents the world as an adult perceives it and not a little boy.
Which makes sense because eyesight literally becomes much weaker with age. Far fewer photons reach the retina. When a middle aged or older person feels the world is getting darker and darker, there's structural basis for that.
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