By the way, have any of you read
Kassandra by Christa Wolf (in case it's been translated into your respective languages)? She paints the Greeks as the bad guys in darkest colours - for example, she invariably refers to Achilles as 'Achilles the Beast'; one-sided, of course, but an interesting attempt to re-tell history/mythology from the perspective of the losers.
But all this is taking us miles away from Tolkien. Interestingly, the conflict between good and evil, which is so prominent in Tolkien's Legendarium, seems to be conspicuously absent in classical mythology - as it is in most of the mythological or heroic literature which inspired or may have inspired our Professor (Kalevala, Nibelungenlied/ Volsunga Saga, Icelandic Sagas in general, Mabinogion, Tain Bo Cuailnge, Fenian cycle, you name it). The only possible exceptions that come to my mind at the moment are Beowulf (which is the work of a Christian author) and the conflict between the Gods and Giants in the Norse Edda (which I tend to see as authentically pagan with a thin Christian veneer). But there's no figure of archetypal evil like Morgoth or Sauron anywhere in the old myths - except for ancient Jewish mythology (otherwise known as the Bible
).
Possible conclusions from this observation:
1. The conflict between good and evil is a specifically Christian (or Judeo-Christian-Islamic) theme, which Homer and most of the other pagan authors didn't find interesting (though they cared about such issues as chaos and order - as in e.g. Zeus vs the Titans, but with no moral values attached);
2. The conflict between good and evil as the crucial point of the story may also be viewed as a specifically
modern element which Tolkien introduced into mythological literature inspired by his experience of 20th century history.
Truth, as I see it, is a mixture of both.