[The Silver-shod Muse]

I have a hard time believing that Eru, who is without doubt represented as a "good guy", or at least positively neutral, would sacrifice harmony because he got bored and decided to "liven things up." He did not desire discord, but a melodious, ever-changing constancy (if that makes any sense at all).

As far as negating good to achieve evil, I don't think that's the idea that Tolkien was shooting for at all. When Eru created offshoots in the form of the Ainur, he intended them to posses the ability to make decisions for themselves. The Ainur became their own at "birth".

The very worse things are those that were once good, but are now corrupted, as we see in Tolkien's idea of creating evil through corruption in the elf to orc transformations. It goes very much against the grain to say that Melkor was not given a choice, but was destined to be evil and to suffer (as I'm sure he did). Again, as at the opening of this correspondence, I used the example of Aule's dwarves to mirror the relationship between Eru and the Ainur. Melkor made a decision that he had to feel the consequences for.

I don't have the Sil nearby, but I recall that there is a passage where it's stated that in the end times, Eru will direct the Ainur to sing again, only this time there will be no flaws. Melkor marred the song as an individual, not as one of Eru's repressed personalities.

In any case, there is no such thing as pure evil, because if you take all the good out of something, there will nothing left. Intelligence, for example, is a good thing, and only when perverted is it made evil.

If any of you own C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, it has an excellent preface on what I've just written concerning the nature of evil and its source that I highly recommend for the curious. I'm sure Tolkien would've agreed with it, as the ideas illustrated there can be seen reflected in much of his work.