Antitheses
"No careful reader of Tolkien's fiction can fail to be aware of the polarities that give it form and fiction," writes Verlyn Flieger. Tolkien's extensive use of duality and parallelism, contrast and opposition is found throughout the novel, in hope and despair, knowledge and enlightenment, death and immortality, fate and free will. One famous example is the often criticized polarity between Evil and Good in Tolkien. Orcs, the most maligned of races, are a corruption of the mystically exalted race of the Elves. Minas Morgul, the Tower of Sorcery, home of the Lord of the Nazgûl, the most corrupted Kings of Men, directly opposes Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard and the capital of Gondor, the last visible remnant of the ancient kingdom of Men in the Third Age.
The antitheses, though pronounced and prolific, are sometimes seen to be too polarizing, but they have also been argued to be at the heart of the structure of the entire story. Tolkien's technique has been seen to "confer literality on what would in the primary world be called metaphor and then to illustrate the process by which the literal becomes metaphoric." A famous description of this device is Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light where the mythology of the Elves described in The Silmarillion is seen not only to be the story of the fall of the Elves from grace (a Fall akin to that of Satan or Adam and Eve) due to the hubris of Fëanor in his deadly oath regarding the Silmarils and all that follows as a result of it, but also a story built on a simultaneous splintering of light from the light of creation and the splintering of Elvish language from the word of creation, Ëa. Although, these arguments are more readily seen in The Silmarillion, which contains the Creation Myth of the Elves, similar observations can and have also been made regarding The Lord of the Rings.
Read more about this topic: Themes Of The Lord Of The Rings