Posted: May 09, 2000 at 21:08:46: by Michael Martinez
: There is a question below about Dwarven magic, but mine is
: about magic practised by Men. Do Men, especially the
: Numenoreans have magic? I remember theres something in the LOTR
: that the exiles fom Numenor cast a spell to make the Pillar of
: Orthanc of unbreakable stone, or that they have a spell for the
: stone to bind, something to that effect. The thing is, if they
: could do this to stone, they could(might) be ble to do the same
: for wood, thus making stronger and lighter ships,thus more
: xiles from drowned Numenor. Because then the number of
: passengers would ot be limited to what we now know of wooden
: ships capacity.Hope someone get my idea..:)Magic ships could
: hold more passengers.Well, you've gotten the short answer from Gandalf. Men did use magic in Middle-earth. There is debate over this issue because Tolkien actually started to write a lengthy addendum in a letter to a fan where he refuted the idea. But after providing a carefully constructed argument he remembered that the Numenoreans did use spells on their swords, which he indicated by making a note in the margin. He never mailed that addendum, since it clearly contradicted what had already appeared in print. You may be thinking of the description of Orthanc Pippin gave to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli while telling them of the Ents' attack on Isengard:
'That sent them mad. I thought that they had been really
roused before; but I was wrong. I saw what it was like at
last. It was staggering. They roared and boomed and trumpeted,
until stone began to crack and fall at the mere noise of them.
Merry and I lay on the ground and stuffed our cloaks into our
ears. Round and round the rock of Orthanc the Ents went
striding and storming like a howling gale, breaking pillars,
hurling avalanches of boulders down the shafts, tossing up huge
slabs of stoneinto the air like leaves. The tower was in the
middle of a spinning whirlwind. I saw iron posts and blocks
of masonry go rocketing up hundreds of feet, and smash against
the windows ofof Orthanc. But Treebeard kept his head. He had
not had any burns, luckily. He did not want his folk to hurt
themselves in their fury, and he did not want Saruman to
escape out of some hole in the confusion. Many of the Ents
were hurling themselves against the Orthanc-rock; but that
defeated them. It is very smooth and hard. Some wizardry is
in it, perhaps, older and stronger than Saruman's. Anyway they
could not get a grip on it, or make a crack in it; and they
were bruising and wounding themselves against it.'
From "Flotsam and Jetsom" in THE TWO TOWERS
The passage doesn't really say whether there was wizardry in the stone. Pippin merely suggests it may be there, but he is hardly a clear indicator of magic. Of course, he is also the one who asks if the Elven cloaks are magical. To him, just about anything might seem to be magical.
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