![]() Taken up a bow to repel the Orc assault on Bar-En-Danwedh ². If he does, he shall die by if, that curse I lay on him” ¹.Īndróg would later die at the peak of Amon Rûdh, having But this I will add: he that looses the shaft shall break his arrowsĪnd lay them at my son’s feet and he shall never take an arrow nor hear a bowĪgain. “My own ransom I will pay, therefore you may dwell here, if Húrin”, Mîm the Petty Dwarf lays a geas on Andróg as vengeance for his son’s Mirror what happens between Frodo and Gollum in the last stages of Mordor. In the Silmarillion, there is a story of a character layingĪnd executing a geas, explicitly invoking the word. Not have felt the need to spell out what he was doing for his audience,Ĭonfident that they would recognize the same tropes and legends that he was Tolkien expected that he would be writing for an audienceĬomposed mostly of fellow scholars, and other readers with a classical Which involved geases (the legend of Cuchlainn being the most prominent, butįar from the only one) Tolkien would be intimately familiar with them as a As a scholar of old English and Norse mythologies, many of ![]() (Correction to the original post: at the Council of Elrond it is Bilbo, not Boromir, who challenges the Council to break out their fancy magic powers to oppose Sauron.) This landmark at some point, so here we go. I’m not much on Tumblr any more, but I noticed it reached Notes, I would do a reprise compiling all of the arguments and evidence that I always promised myself that if this post made it to 10,000 And that’s exactly what happens.įrodo’s geas takes effect and Gollum eats lava. Take the Ring again, you’ll be cast into the Fire.įive pages later, Gollum tries to take the Ring again. Frodo put a curse on Gollum: if you try to He’s holding the One Ring in his hands as he says it Įven Sam, with no magic powers of his own, can sense that some powerful He is literally, magically laying a curse. Instead, he says:įrodo: Go! And if you ever lay hands on me again, you yourself shall be cast into the Fire!įrodo’s not just talking shit here. Has the chance to kill him, but he doesn’t. When Gollum attacks Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo So anyway, words and will and magic rings. Their response, in a nutshell, is “Have you been paying attention? We have been using our magic to fight him, it’s just so vast and invisible you don’t see it.” They even say as much at the Council of Elrond when Boromir challenges the wizards and elf-lords to use their magic rings to help fight the war against the Dark Lord. And for the most part, it’s vast and invisible. Words and will and magically-imbued items. Magic in Lord of the Rings is words, like when Gandalf speaks special magic words to light fires or open doors. We’re used to thinking of magic as being class-restricted, even race-restricted, dependent on magical gas tanks and fancy components.īut magic in the Lord of the Rings is, with a few exceptions, not like that. Visibly, flashy effects, rather than more subtle and invisible forces It, because we’re so desensitized by D&D-style magic with immediate, This was so obvious when I realized it, but I think most people miss
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