Math seems to be against Feanor having made SEVEN Palantir. As far as we know, seven seeing stones were prought from sinking numenor by Elendil... we have no idea how many there originally were. Such great magics are usually made to serve some purpose. Feanor had seven sons (+ 2 halfbrothers, father, 6 nephews, 1 niece, several members of the family also had spouses...). Theese are the people Feanor would have wanted to communicate with. So seven palantirs do not add up. Either one son or the father would have to do without. Maybe there were originally 18. One for each blood-relative and one for Feanor. At least we can assume there was 8. How many ended up below the sea when Numenor sank? Why might Galadriel not have palantir anyway. If 18 were made, 1 was given to her from the start. She is feanors dear niece after all.
She would not need one though.
Galadriel is likely the oldest elf living and she spent much time with sons of feanor learning the wisdom of that family. Galadriel is quite able to reproduce many works of feanor. The bottle she gives to Frodo seems to have similarities with silmarils, so why not a mirror of water that has similarities with palantir.
Besize she has an eleven ring, not to mention that of AIR! Air is the ancient element associated with visions and such.
Janne Harju
PS. I’d say that magic is rather fluid thing in definition. Make armor, shield and sword using modern industrial carbon steel, light arc welding, aluminium compounds, damasking, light airoplane steel, electric-chemical plating etc. Take the set to the early middle age. It will functionally be magic. The sword you can use to strike through the iron batons locals call swords. You can name the sword Excalibur. Eleves are not magic beings. But they are superior craftsmen and their skill extend to creating such items like gems that store the light of the trees. They are also skilled in many other fields like healing arts. The song-duel of Sauron and Finrod and the feats of Luthien are the great exemptions to this. None is using spells, rather skills that are almost magical in their greatness. Finrods songduel is almost like some parts of Kalevala. It is not a metaphore for spellcasting. It is song-duel, a type of innate laws-of-nature magic confrontation that will have very real consaquences to the loser even though no ”spells” are ”cast.” I think Narils post about the nature of eleven magic as a function of the knowledge of the laws of nature was very good. The natural greatness of skills and wisdom the eleves have, manifested in their own ways in the moriquendi even... think of Legolas. He does many things that seem like magic to us, they are nothing more then applying principles learned to practise however. One just can walk on snow without sinking, if one knows how to do it [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] .
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