be restored; it would continue to wane until it was like that of ordinary Men. Dagor Dagorath In a letter, Tolkien wrote that "This legendarium [The Silmarillion] ends with a vision of the end of the world [after all the ages have elapsed], its breaking and remaking, and the recovery of the Silmarilli and the 'light before the Sun' – after a final battle [Dagor Dagorath] which owes, I suppose, more to the Norse vision of than to anything else, though it is not much like it." The concept of Dagor Dagorath appears in Tolkien's manuscripts that were published by his son Christopher in The Shaping of Middle-earth but not in the published Silmarillion, where the eventual fate of Arda is left open-ended in the closing lines of the Quenta Silmarillion. Analysis Creation and sub-creation Scholars, noting that Tolkien was a devout Catholic, have stated that the Ainulindalë creation myth echoes the Christian account of creation. Brian Rosebury calls its prose "appropriately 'scriptural'". Verlyn Flieger cites Tolkien's poem Mythopoeia ("Creation of Myth"), where he speaks of "man, sub-creator, the refracted light / through whom is splintered from a single White / to many hues, and endlessly combined / in living shapes". She analyses in detail the successive splintering of the original created light, via the Two Lamps, the Two Trees, and the Silmarils, as the wills of different beings conflict. She states that for Tolkien, this creative light was equated with the Christian Logos, the Divine Word. Jane Chance remarks on the biblical theme of the conflict between the creator Eru Ilúvatar and the fallen Vala Melkor/Morgoth, mirroring that between God and Satan. Similarly, she notes, the struggles of Elves and Men corrupted by Morgoth and his spiritual descendant Sauron echo those of Adam and Eve tempted by Satan in the Garden of Eden, and the fall of man. Flieger has observed that the splintering of the created light is a process of decline and fall from a once-perfect state. She identifies a theory of decline that influenced Tolkien, namely Owen Barfield's theory of language in his 1928 book Poetic Diction. The central idea was that there was once a unified set of meanings in an ancient language, and that modern languages are derived from this by fragmentation of meaning. Tolkien took this to imply the separation of peoples, in particular the complicated and repeated sundering of the Elves. A