Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 2046159" data-attributes="member: 5122">But you're not reading it literally.  You're reading "hands" and "king" literally, sure.  (Perhaps too literally, but that's a different argument.)  But the single most important word in the sentence, "healer," you're reading to mean "person with a magical ability to lay on hands and cure wounds," when a literal interpretation is actually "person skilled in healing."  That includes everything from spells to herbalism.(Just as an aside, and not really meant as proof of anything, which of these two D&D characters would an NPC be more likely to call a "healer": a bard with access to cure light wounds, or an expert with a Heal skill modifier of +20?  Maybe my games are different, but no NPC in my game would call a bard a healer, whatever his spells, unless, well, that's what the bard did.)Athelas is a plant with remarkable properties.  Just smelling it made people feel better, and with proper care and cleaning of the wound, and then application of this remarkable plant by someone who knows what he's doing (including that the plant is beneficial in the first place), Frodo got (a little) better.  That's not magic, not by the text, and any read that says it is, IMO, is not only a far from literal read, it's a weak read.  It's the projection of the reader's views and desires upon the text.As for what Strider was doing when he was singing over the remains of that blade ... who knows?  People in Tolkien's work sing for many and varied reasons.  Why assume it's magic?  Again, that's a projection of the reader's views on the text: "Oh, this is a fantasy book.  He must be doing magic."Well, maybe, but maybe he's just singing an old song of lore to himself, because he wants to be sure to remember the verse that discusses being injured by a Ring Wraith weapon.  The latter seems at least as likely as the former.Look, imagine that you read an equivalent passage in a mainstream novel.  The protagonist has been injured, and the healer is muttering to himself in a strange language that the bystanders don't understand.  Is the healer casting a spell?  No ... he's a med student, and he's reciting a procedure from one of his trauma classes, preparatory to helping the protagonist.Just because a book is a fantasy novel doesn't mean that everything that happens within is fantastic.  If Tolkien intended to show Strider exhibiting magical capabilities in that scene, he did a piss-poor job of it ... and considering Tolkien's skill with language, that seems pretty unlikely to me.</blockquote>

Verification