[erikpukinskis]

What about the idea the Noldor had, that they had seen great beauty in Valinor but they’d see even greater beauty through their suffering? They could’ve stayed and let the Ainur protect them from Melkor, but they chose to stoke a sense of honor, and fight for themselves.

I don’t think Tolkien sees this as a fundamentally deleterious development. But I haven’t seen how it ends for the Noldor so I don’t know. :)

As for Melkor, I don’t see him as fundamentally a force of decay. Destruction, yes. But Ilúvatar seems to have constructed Eä such that Melkor will always fail, that destruction will lead to differentiation and new lifeforms: not decay.

I wonder if this is an allegory for the way that life seems to defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics... not literally, the end always comes, but by creating a kind of a standing wave which seems to defy entropy, even if it is doomed to eventually decay.