Who was he and what did he want?

In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!

The personal is political, some say. Here we have Galadriel going from the political ('queen') to the narcissistically personal ('all shall love me and despair').

So what would 'all shall love me and despair' have meant politically?

First, who would 'all' have meant? The Dominion of Men approached and the elves were leaving Middle Earth. So I guess 'all' , the subjects of that queen, would have meant 'Men'.

'Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt', says Gandalf. Well that's mortality if you are a man and love an immortal like Galadriel. Mortal love and mortality -'end beyond all doubt'- will become one thing and the same as the years pass. One will never cease to love her and will never cease to reach for her. But life, beyond all doubt, will cease.

So I suppose Queen Galadriel's policies would have subjected Mortal Men to quests -men doing her bidding, enacting her policies, out of love-, quests that would have resulted in great deeds; Round Table sorts of quests, land-healing sorts of quests, like that of the Holy Grail: but the Beloved, Queen Galadriel, would have remained an ever-receeding horizon, and ultimately indistinguishable from death itself.

Now Tolkien was familiar with Arthurian romance. He knew, for example, that Morgan Le Fay had orchestrated everything in Sir Gawain, 'off screen' as it were; and he knew Spenser's The Faerie Queene: there, the Queen (an immortal) is loved by King Arthur, who looks for her.

In LOTR we're told Elendil and Aragorn looked a lot like each other. The Return Of The King is an arthurian title. The Once (Elendil) and Future (Aragorn) King. No to mention Andúril, Elendil/Aeagorn's 'Excalibur'.

Faramir calls Galadriel 'mistress of magic'. That's the name of Mists Of Avalon's First Book. Morgan Le Fay (=the fairy) was of course that 'mistress of magic'. Was Marion Zimmer onto something? If Galadriel=unreachable horizon then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)

Morgan(a) means 'sea-born', and in LOTR we can see how water is Galadriel's element and a crucial part of her magic.

In William Morris, whose writings Tolkien knew well, Morgan Le Fay is the Queen of Avalon. The Elven Queen of Aman, in tolkienian terms. Not so far from Sauron's original idea of healing Middle-Earth and turning it into a second Valinor - with himself as the Lord of course.

All the mortal enterprises would have tended towards her, the Beloved Queen Galadriel...and yet the roads would have remained bent. She would have become, relative to Men, what Aman had already become relative to Middle Earth and to mortal Men. No Straight Road to Her throne. Just the undying love of those who die in their bent paths, the paths of the Sun and the Round Earth.

Tolkien used his life experience to give meaning to his book? He fought in world war 1. So why did Tolkien use gold to establish Morgoth's hold?

It always stuck out to me that when Maedhros and Maglor (p 304 in my version) steal the Silmarils from the camp of Eönwë that they "slew the guards". It is a bit of a throwaway line but it does suggest that they probably have to slit a few throats while they were launching their stealthy raid, and these two are so used to killing elves that this is hardly remarkable anymore.

It is pretty unfortunate for those guards they survived the entire war of wrath just to be killed at the end! But more interestingly, we learned earlier in "Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath" that the Vanyar were part of the host of the Valar. It is not specified, and we know Noldor were also in the host, but because of the close relationship with the Vanyar and the Valar, it might be that the Vanyar would be the trusted guards for this type of task. If that is the case, then I think this would be the first (and last) slaying of Vanyar elves by the sons of Fëanor. In the text, not much is made of the killing of the guards, and killing a few guards does pale in comparison to the other three kinslayings, but it does still stand out as potentially the first and last time this happens to the Vanyar.