Tolkien's Middle Earth and C. S. Lewis's Merlin Magic`

So, sometimes while I am being lazy and not getting on with the next set while doing weights at the Y (when your job is sitting on your ass at a computer, it's good to schedule in exercise), things pop into my head. This will be just the brief outline of details to have it down, not really much cataloging of text instances, page numbers, verbatim quotes etc.

The structure that came into my head is that the relation between the silmarils and the ring in Tolkien is analogous to the relationship between magic in  Merlin's day and magic in Ransom's day in Lewis's That Hideous Strength. When Ransom is shutting the druid down from using his old methods, Ransom says that the things are not licit now and, even in Merlin's day, while allowed, they were sill kind of shady. And then you have Mr Dimble talking to Mother Dimble about things coming to a finer and finer point all the time, such that things that weren't exactly what we call "good" or "evil" yet from our perspective, just neutral or other, are now decidedly on one side of that line or the other, are now either "good" or "evil" even from our perspective.

I think the silmarils are like that older form, and I think the thing that is shifting from not bad but still maybe unwise in the silmarils to definitively evil in the ring is incarnation or embodiment outside of that specifically set done by Iluvatar (which is possibly fitting with Tolkien's comments that if there is a "time" of our world that befits his Middle Earth, it is before the Incarnation), in a vein similar to Aule's creation of the dwarf bodies in his impatience for the children to appear. The silmarils trapped the light of the two trees in a world in which the trees no longer existed, it kept them embodied. It's done with the approval of the Valar, but as time goes on, it becomes more and more obvious, with the lust of Melkor and Beren's lost hand and Maedhros throwing himself and his silmaril into a fiery chasm, that it's not healthy, In descriptions of the ring, we have Gandalf or others saying that Sauron poured much of his own power into the ring, which I think can be interpreted as Sauron, in a sense, "incarnating" in a way that is out of bounds. Gandalf takes on physical form ... in which form he divests himself of much of his power as a maia, taking the role of counselor. Sauron, on the contrary, poured his maia power into the power of the ring ... he sort of incarnated it.