If Morgoth were wearing white instead of black he could make a convincing Pope...well he did say that he was the first and mightiest of all the bishops, who was before the world, and made it...
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.
(from the poem Mythopoeia by J.R.R Tolkien).
I think a lot of the evil forces and characters in Tolkien are just good "white" characters coloured in black, and vice versa. The first Black Rider was originally going to be Gandalf, but Tolkien crossed out 'black horse' and wrote 'white horse', and kept going. On the other hand, both Farmer Maggot and Treebeard were originally baddies. The same, I think, goes for all sorts of elements in Tolkien's mythology. What is the Eye of Sauron, after all, other than an evil monstrance, set up not to be seen but to see out and to spy across the world?
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