[the phantom]

Originally Posted by me

Yep. I've established that Haldir is an unnecessary show off. Surely you'll concede that point.

Originally Posted by SPM

Nope. Not unless you provide some convincing evidence that he was prepared to reveal the workings of Elven magic (technology etc) to a group of virtual strangers, as opposed to simply showing them how they crossed rivers

The way they crossed rivers was every bit as "magic" as their cloaks and boats and televisions. If he didn't care about one, why would he care about the other? What could be gained from hiding the secret of Elven rope from the Fellowship anyway?

Also, by the time they left Lothlorien they were not strangers, but were given much Elvish technology. Each piece of tech was explained as well. They found out about the lembas. They were taught to handle the boats. They were told about the virtues of their cloaks. Why weren't they told about THE ROPE?! It makes no sense!! If the rope had special properties as important as auto-untie then they would have been informed.

No, no, no... there is no argument to that. Don't try it.

Seriously. I'm warning you, SPM.

Still waiting for an answer to this:
Moreover, there is nothing in the passage that you reference which could specifically relate to Entwives, save for the presence of gnarled trees. And Middle-earth is hardly devoid of trees, gnarled or otherwise.

Well, of course. If something in the passage could "specifically relate to Entwives" we wouldn't have this thread, would we? The answer would be settled.

The whole point of this thread is that Tolkien hid the Entwives and I found them. You can't hide under a sign that says "I'm right here!" can you? So the lack of an official Entwife marker goes without saying.

Originally Posted by Fenris Penguin

But, just because there are limitations to the 'magic' in Middle-earth doesn't mean everything from Middle-earth is exactly how it is in our 'real world.'....
Old Man Willow (in Middle-earth) was simply a tree, but he certainly doesn't behave like the trees we have in reality. And as Tolkien points out in Letter 212, trees in his world can 'go bad.':

Woah! Stop right there. No need to go further. You made my point for me. "Tolkien points out"!

When Middle-Earth is different from this world Tolkien tells us about it. But unless he says otherwise, it is the same. Tolkien never has an in depth discussion of gravity, thus we can assume that the rules work the same.

Tolkien worked hard to make Middle Earth real. If you can find an exception or two, I guarantee you that given more years of life Tolkien would have corrected it.

The Lord of the Rings is in the fantasy genre and not everything from the real world behaves as it does in Tolkien's story. So, we end up with ropes that can untie themselves, nasty trees that try to eat hobbits, gynormous spiders...and so on.

Tolkien explains the trees, and the hobbits, and the spiders. They are NOT magical unexplained fantasy things. Tolkien defines them- makes them real. I've said it before and here it is again- just because LOTR is placed in the "fantasy" section at the library does not mean any old stupid unexplained thing can happen and be accepted. That's dumb. If LOTR was like that no one would read it.

There! If anyone ever again tries to use the "but it's fantasy" argument on my thread I'm just going to link them back to this post.