[SixOfSpades]

Originally posted by White Lancer: Shelob is pretty thick, she damn near commited suicide by impaling herself on Sting.....Shelob is greater than any single man or orc, but she (he?) is only one, the race of men is legion.

Actually, I don't fault her actions at all. How the hell was SHE to know just how tough Hobbits are, especially when armed with an artifact-level Phial of Galadriel and two highly enchanted shortswords? (Sting's gotta be at least +3, whereas it must have been an Age since Shelob even saw anything higher than a +1.)

And yes, that is precisely what I meant by "greatest single evil."

Originally posted by Devv: As for the evil left in the world, it wouldn't be the orcs. Of course when Sauron died they lost all sense of purpose and didn't have any will to continue. They were fuelled at first by the will of Morgoth, then by the will of Sauron. Without either present, the orcs were lost.

Not quite. The Orc race was not created by Morgoth, it was only twisted from its Elven beginnings. Orcs quite clearly have minds of their own and are perfectly capable of rational throught without divine empowerment. In the final battle before the Black Gate, you'll see that only those creatures (or parts thereof) that were absolutely created by Sauron (such as the intelligence of the Olog-Hai, or the foundations of Barad-dur) or extended beyond their natural span by Sauron's will to such an extent that they actually depended on his continued existence (the Nazgul) were actually destroyed with Sauron's downfall. The Orcs, however, were simply crazed with fear.

Originally posted by Tancred: As for Glorfindel, I am reasonably sure. It's a debated subject. I sit on the 'yes' side of the fence. There's little evidence either way...

Well, the fact that Tolkien describes Glorfindel pitching down a mountain chasm, still locked in battle with a Balrog, is rather indicative that the Glorfindel in Rivendell is not the same one present at the siege of Gondolin. But the passage that Devv quoted, the one that describes Glorfindel as being an "Eldar from beyond the furthest seas" and having "dwelt in the Blessed Realm," seems to imply that it is the same one. Perhaps there were two high-ranking Glorfindels among the Flight of the Noldor, but I doubt it, and the genealogies back me up. Maybe, just maybe, a second Glorfindel came to Middle-Earth in the Assault of the Valar at the end of the First Age, and remained. An "Elf-lord of a house of princes" need not appear in the House of Finwe if the Elf-lord in question was one of the Vanyar.

Originally posted by Tancred: The tragedy, from the Elven point of view, is that they love Middle-Earth, and they love it absolutely and completely. ... And at the end, after countless hundreds, thousands of years, to know that their valiance and the sacrifice of the lives of countless Elves who were not made to die has still resulted in the death of so much that they loved, and to have to confront the harsh, bitter truth that they've come to the end and now they have to take what they can salvage and leave *even if somehow they win* - that's where the tragedy lies.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

The trees DO bloom again, in a fashion - Aragorn finds a tiny sprout of the sapling of the White Tree of Gondor, which is itself grown from a fruit of the Tree of Valinor upon Numenor. The end of Lord of the Rings is not, I believe, another step in a great decline, but the handing-over from one era to the next. And that era will grow great again, no doubt, and create great works of its' own...

The end of LotR is not an end to the decay, it is merely a temporary restoration that brings back only a portion of the former glory. Gondor now has a King again, true, who has carried on the family tradition of marrying the highest-ranking eligible Elven female, and he has restored Minas Tirith--but what of Osgiliath? What of Arnor? Aragorn has found a scion of the White Tree, yes, but what of Nimloth? What of Telperion? This theme of great good and great evil destroying each other's greatness to produce the mundane is hammered on again and again in Tolkien's works. From the Valar vs. Melkor, we have the Noldor vs. Morgoth, then the Eldar & Numenoreans vs. Sauron, Gandalf vs. the Balrog, etc., until finally we're left with Frodo vs. Sharkey, leading us to assume that the rest of Middle-Earth is very shortly to be all about Barliman Butterbur vs. Bill Ferny.
I do not see any greatness forthcoming in the Fourth Age. I see complacence and uniformity.