The Fall

The Second Music is the moment, at the end of the Dagor Dagorath, when the weight of Morgoth’s marring finally falls away from the world. Tolkien describes that marring as something soaked into the very matter of Arda — a heaviness every creature carries without even knowing it (Morgoth’s Ring, “Myths Transformed,” notes that Melkor “entered into the very matter of the Earth”). When Arda is remade, that weight is gone. The world becomes what it was always meant to be, and every being in it becomes more itself: freer, clearer, more whole.