#eruhini

@aspecardaweek day six | found family | aro ulmo + the eruhíni

          Ulmo is the Lord of Waters. He is alone. He dwells nowhere long, but moves as he will in all the deep waters about the Earth or under the Earth...           ...Nonetheless Ulmo loves both Elves and Men, and never abandoned them, not even when they lay under the wrath of the Valar. At times he will come unseen to the shores of Middle-earth, or pass far inland up firths of the sea, and there make music upon his great horns, the Ulumúri, that are wrought of white shell; and those to whom that music comes hear it ever after in their hearts, and longing for the sea never leaves them again. But mostly Ulmo speaks to those who dwell in Middle-earth with voices that are heard only as the music of water. For all seas, lakes, rivers, fountains and springs are in his government; so that the Elves say that the spirit of Ulmo runs in all the veins of the world.

—The Silmarillion, “Valaquenta”

The probable reason is that the term serves to distinguish between things belonging to the domains of the Ainur and beings they did not have a hand in making. The funnier answer is that as a certified Significantly Older Sibling™ I can vouch that the family very quickly puts up a distinction between you and "the children".

The reason Morgoth always, always loses no matter what isn’t that Eru made the world too resilient for him to damage and break - every single particle of matter in the setting has some of Melkor’s Will behind and inside it - the reason is that Morgoth’s evil DECAYS AT A FASTER RATE THAN THE REST OF THE WORLD. The world never heals from the evils he and his agents introduce, they just crumble faster than the norm is in Arda Marred. People killed are replaced by others and in time their descendants forget them. Ruined lands are abandoned for new ones until they recover or are removed entirely. Orcs are a regional threat when they have a powerful will driving them; otherwise they (a ruined and stumped form of life) seem mostly capable of being raiders, which, fair enough, it isn’t exactly a picnic to be attacked by a warband in the middle of the night, but it isn’t exactly a unified army intent on conquest either. Humans are corruptible, but also tend to corrupt things on their own - how long does it take after Sauron’s fall for the various evil cults he inspired to turn on eachother? Numenor lasted for millennia, but the more they turned to evil the quicker the rot started setting in (I don’t think Eru destroyed them because they set foot on Aman, but rather because the Valar weren’t doing their jobs as rulers of the World). Saruman likewise spirals out of control and ends up murdered by his own henchman, with Isengard, Rohan, Dunland and the Shire all recovering in a generation or two.

Basically, this is what I think it means that Morgoth and Evil are self-defeating in the Tolkien-verse.

EDIT this is basically Eru and Morgoth’s interactions