O primeiro senhor do escuro: Melkor e as tradições mitológicas em O Silmarillion, de J. R. R. Tolkien

Abstract

The English author J.R.R. Tolkien became famous by publishing books that became classic examples of fantasy literature, which refers to those books whose main idea is to create an entirely new world for all the fantastic creatures which may exist in the narrative. Not only he dedicated himself to the writing of these stories, but he also devoted most of his life to imagining and writing a complete and complex mythology that would serve as a basis for the understanding of the events in the stories of his other works and the natural and mythical laws that governed the world of his creation, the Arda. His stories were compiled in the posthumous book The Silmarillion, which will be analyzed in this paper. Looking at the text, both the original and the 1999 Brazilian translation published by the Martins Fontes publishing house, we will look for the Christian elements, specifically the Catholic ones, part of the author's personal religion, which permeate the text, and especially those of mythological inspiration from the Norse texts studied by Tolkien in his academic life. Within the text, we will focus our analysis on the character Melkor, one of the great powers in the pantheon created for the mythology of Arda, whose envy, resentment and pride made him fall into disgrace and become the origin of evil in this world. In addition, we will analyze how Melkor, in his first moments, approaches to the figure of the trickster, creature present in polytheistic mythologies that acts on his own benefit and, with that, creates good and bad situations that are responsible for the progress of the legends. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.