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It’s interesting that you cite those particular instances of magic Garen insofar as they are “spells”. The earliest appearance of the word spel in English was in none other than Tolkien’s favourite work, Beowulf where it means a narrative or prolonged (and learned?) discourse, and sometimes, even, a sermon. Now, as time went on, “spell” began to become more and more closely associated with magical incantations, but the references to story or narrative, and even to time (“let’s sit here for a spell”) remain.
Tolkien, obviously, knew very well what a ‘spel’ was: a discourse or narrative told by someone. In the case of the magical spells “cast” by his characters, then, they are not doing anything ‘un’ or even ‘supernatural’ they are just telling particular kinds of stories or narratives. More intriguingly, they are doing so with an idea to instruct. In all the instances of spel in Beowulf the word is used not just to tell a story, but a story that is being told with a specific purpose: there is a point to the telling, and this point is invariably to provoke action from the listener, or to sway their opinion.
So these narratives, or discourses (or sermons?) that people give to inanimate objects in Middle-earth are being told in order to ‘convince’ or to sway these inanimate objects to behave in particular ways. Just as the ‘magic’ that lies behind the Lorien cloaks or the One Ring are really just forms of ‘technology’ that we don’t understand, so too are the spells cast really just forms (or even dialects) of language that we don’t know. In effect, when Gandalf casts his spell on the door he is speaking a ‘stone-language’ and ‘convincing’ the door to remain shut.
(As I write this, I seem to recall davem making very much this same point in another thread, somewhere, sometime. Should try to dig that up and reference it here.)
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Scribbling scrabbling.
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