The Lord of the Rings Exposed - The Magic Mirror and the "Palantir" Exposed
(To read a shorter version of this article, click here.)
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I am writing this article about The Lord of the Rings to encourage you to seek God about this topic -- to seek God about what He wants you to know regarding The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books. Are they full of magic that real witches and wizards use, or are they just fantasy stories that are harmless? Is Gandalf, the wizard character, redeemable, or not?
We will focus on two items in this article that we will spend a little time looking at. Before we go there, I’d like to show you, briefly, how many times certain important words appear in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
“Magic” appears 18 Times in The Fellowship of the Ring.
The words “Magic”, “Magician,” and “Magical” appear 18 times in The Fellowship of the Ring. “Sorcerer” and “sorcery” each appear once. “Wizard” appears 58 times in the actual text of the story. The word “power” is often found in the context of magical power throughout the book. (I used a word search box on a pdf file to count these words for me.)
The Magic Mirror or Pool of Galadriel
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Galadriel, an elf lady, takes some people to view a magic pool. There, Samwise Gamgee (a hobbit) gazes into the magic pool and magically sees events happening far away (allegedly). Tolkien writes:
“Down a long flight of steps …. At the bottom, upon a low pedestal carved like a branching tree, stood a basin of silver, wide and shallow, and beside it stood a silver ewer.
With water from the stream Galadriel filled the basin to the brim, and breathed on it, and when the water was still again she spoke. `Here is the Mirror of Galadriel,' she said. 'I have brought you here so that you may look in it, if you will.'