"(The Silmarillion) is a sweeping legendarium, an imagined mythology with all the familiar mythological characters, elements, and themes - creation and transgression, gods and men, love and war, heroism and doom. More than anything else, and more than most mythologies, it is a story about light. Images of light in all stages - bright, dim, whole, refracted, clear, or rainbow-hued - pervade the songs and stories of the fictive world. It is a world peopled with sub-creators whose interactions with and attitudes toward the light shape their world and their own destinies within it.

The task of the Valar is to shape and light the world, but the whole concept belongs to Eru alone. In fulfilling his purpose, the Valar are already at one remove from his wholeness, for they bring to the world not light but lights, a variety of lights of differing kinds and progressively lessening intensities. Each light that comes is dimmer than the one before it, splintered by Tolkien's sub-creators.

This extended image of light diminished from its primal brilliance, yet still and evermore faintly illuminating the world, is paralleled by Tolkien's presentation of the peoples of that world and of their language. Increasingly as the story progresses, we are shown, through character, deed, and word, that Elves and Men are in their different ways drawn to the light and yet separated from it. The whole work is permeated by an air of deepening sorrow, a sense of loss, of estrangement, and ever-widening distance from the light and all that it signifies. Tolkien has imagined a world and its peoples through which he can explore the meaning and consequences of the Fall - the long separation of humanity from the light of God"

-Verlyn Flieger