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Moving Sale: Magic Rings and Other Trinkets Half Off - Page 8

© Michael Martinez

How, indeed, did a Noldo mine or quarry? Did they use tools at all, or did they simply sing the Earth into a restive state and then extract what they required? What we call magic was second-nature to them, or at least an ability which they could develop and focus with long years of study and practice. Each Elven worker may have reached a stage in his skill where he put down his tools for the last time and sang his thought into being, shaping whatever materials he had chosen to use. Perhaps only a master craftsman, a master among masters, could achieve so much. Perhaps groups of Elves would work together to enlarge their achievements, but alone they would still need to prepare their forges and looms, and wield hammer and tongs, needle and knife. Luthien wove a cloak of darkness from her hair, Finrod wove illusions about himself, Beren, and their companions, and Arwen sang the White Tree into health and maturity. When Galadriel came to bid farewell to the Fellowship she sang for them: "I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew; Of wind I sang, a wind there came and in the branches blew." Is she singing of the first Mallorn? Did Galadriel create the mallorns which were carried first to Numenor and then to Lindon, and from there to Lothlorien? Elven magic must have pervaded every aspect of their realms. Even in Lorien and Rivendell at the end of the Third Age the Hobbits and others noticed things which made those lands feel separate from the lands of mortals. An Elven house might stand long after a mortal house had fallen. The grass and garden around the house would be imbued with the thoughts of the occupants, encouraged to grow long and healthy. Leaving their homes must have been very hard on the Elves, not just because they wouldn't be able to carry everything with them, but because they would have to leave behind labors of love. In Valinor the Elves must have sung many beautiful trees and flowers into existence, caused springs to well up and flow through gardens, dressed stones and shaped their visions in masonry and metal. They would have given their hearts to the land they left. Would it be any less so in Middle-earth, where the Elves lived for centuries in Hithlum, Gondolin, and Nargothrond? Not all artifacts were transportable, and the most precious may indeed have been -- for many Elves -- the very lands they worked and lived upon, year after year, century after century. Elvish country would feel Elvish because the power of the Elves ran through it. When Sauron swept through Eregion and Eriador, laying waste to all the lands, was he perhaps wounding the Elves who had tended the valleys and groves, the quarries and springs, in ways no mortal spirit could perceive? Why did Haldir, the march-warden of Lorien, curse the feet of the Orcs who walked across the Nimrodel river, sullying its waters? Was their presence more than just a military threat?

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