The Power of Galadriel in the Third age- That of a Maiar?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by obloquy

This is good perspective and certainly correct. But to be fair, and not to put the brakes on fun too much, even Tolkien did a good bit of direct power ranking. When these questions come up, I usually have in mind the Nazgul fleeing Glorfindel's revealed wrath, or Gandalf on one side of a door with Durin's Bane on the other: metaphysical conflicts in which spiritual wills press on one another. That dynamic has always made intuitive sense to me, like the Devil fleeing from the sign of the cross or something, and Tolkien's vocabulary of power seems to imply he often had something similar in mind. Power is often something recognized and its proof by manifestation as some technique or other seems rarely necessary, except when two powers are fairly evenly matched.

Well, yes; but even in direct combat matchups, there's a certain rock-paper-scissors dynamic, like the classic infantry-cavalry-artillery triangle. Glorfindel was uniquely dangerous to the W-K, because as a Noldorin Exile he "lived at once on both sides" and thus presented a direct threat in the shadow-dimension where the W-K "lived." Note that the WK does not flee from, in fact taunts, Gandalf, even though in raw "power" GtW almost certainly has more wattage.

(But Gandalf's a Maia! you say. Surely he too "lives on both sides." Except he's an Istar, which means as long as he's in that situation he is, effectively, a conditionally-immortal human sorceror.)