Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader

In the making of his sub-creation and in the response it evokes, Tolkien invites us to see sub-creation in Adam’s terms, as naming, and to see the meaning of name in The Lord of the Rings as pattern in the leaf, and to see the leaf of the world’s first forest as the leaf of the world’s first book.

Evil will triumph, but it will still be evil; those killed resisting it, even those killed beyond death like Odin’s Einheriar, will still be in the right.

...Yavanna warns Manwë that trees now have protectors (the Ents): “Now let thy children beware! For there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they will arouse at their peril.” Aulë says only, “Nonetheless they will have need of wood,” and goes on with his work. The remark prefigures millennia of conflict leading all the way to Gimli and Treebeard, but no more is said. No more needs to be.