Damelon and the Earthblood

[wayfriend]

And yet, there WAS a Guardian, named ak-Haru Kenaustin Ardenol. His existence, and our meeting of him, sort of verifies the claim.

It might all be "a lie", but if so, it is a grand hoax which has been perpetrated over millenia. I don't think it's likely.

Besides -- why add the part about the Elohim Appointed Guardian? Donaldson went to some expense to add that. It seems unlikely that it would be worth the expense for something that turns out to be a joy buzzer.

[hue of fuzzpaws]

Quotes regarding the Staff of Law.

LFB, pg 37

. . . the other gripped a long wooden staff shod with metal and intricately carved from end to end.

Pg 211

Then Covenant noticed Mhoram’s staff. It was metal-shod like the Staff of Law . . . but it was innocent of the carvings that articulated the Staff.

TPTP, pg 336

It was metal-shod at both ends, and between its heels it was intricately carved with runes and symbols of theurgy.
The Staff of Law.


WGW, pg 483

And between them, the old definition forged into the heels of the Staff of Law. . . His forearm shed its bark, gleamed like new wood.

In her hands, the new Staff began to live.

Living Law filled the bands of lore: living power shone in every fibre of the wood. The old Staff had been rune-carved to define its purpose. But this Staff was alive, almost sentient: it did not need runes.

[dlbpharmd]

Living Law filled the bands of lore: living power shone in every fibre of the wood. The old Staff had been rune-carved to define its purpose. But this Staff was alive, almost sentient: it did not need runes.

So, why does the SoL need runes now?

[wayfriend]

This has been hashed about before. Donaldson addresses it somewhat in the GI too.

My best guess is that the runes represent lore. The runes on the first staff were added by the Lords to reflect their lore. This makes the Staff as much an instrument of the Lords as of Earthpower. Their lore went into the Staff, the Staff now reflects and enacts their lore.

The new Staff lacked runes, which means that it is powerful, but it has never been weilded by anyone with lore, and so no runes are found on it. Useful in and of itself in weilding raw Earthpower and sustaining Law. But it cannot do anything requiring lore - it has none, and if the wielder lacks the lore as well, then certain things cannot be done.

CW added the lore he believed was necessary. The lore of the Laws of Life and Death. So now the Staff has that capacity, to make possible certain acts that it could not undertake before.

Linden needed that lore in order to achieve what she did in the last chapter - to navigate between the Laws of Life and Death and pull TC out of a hat. She had the power, but she lacked the lore - the skill. CW put the lore, the skill, into the Staff, making it possible for her to achieve it.

The nearest analogy I can think of is ... alas ... D&D. In that FRG, a skilled person can "put a spell in a can" - create an artifact that would allow someone who could not cast that spell to achieve the same result. Someone who is not a cleric could heal someone as if they had cast a clerical healing spell, for example. They're not casting the healing spell themselves - they lack the skill. But through the artifact they can cast it by proxy.

I think the runes on the Staff are just about the same thing. It's "lore on a stick", if you will. Someone without the lore but who weilded the Staff would get that lore by proxy. CW put the lore on the stick. And Linden weilded it by proxy.

[Ur Dead]

Nicely said Wayfriend.

and thanks to Hue of Bone for bringing those passages.

The first staff came from the One Tree.

The second was from a "Perfect Structure" and a "Fluid of Earthpower"

Both were bare of carving at their beginning.. With the first it was carved with many runes of lore at it end. It wasn't enough to keep the light lit when the darkness came. The second has only one set carved into it right now.

This leaves much into what may be coming from the last two books. The staff may be completed, a qwest(unknown now) may be required for completion and the dark may pass utterly from the Land.

[Alberich]

Random thought on the staff's metal heels:

Longwrath's oddly unreliable manacles? Vain wears the Staff's bands also and is, in a sense, shackled by them into the new Staff of Law.

Does anyone have any theories re Longwrath, his madness and his strange power to escape his metal handcuffs?

[Bran Pendragon]

I was also thinking that there's only one staff of Law and that the staff Linden made in WGW and is lugging around now will somehow travel back in time to land in Berek's hand - I posted it somewhere else not realising it had been discussed already in this thread.

My prediction is that Berek DID get it from the One Tree, but that it hadn't always been there - Linden's going to put her staff there to somehow stop the Worm from destroy the Earth. Berek's going to remove it, in the process removing the 'protection' the staff was generating, and somehow leaving the Worm more vulnerable to being roused. Which is when the Elohim is going to start protecting it. I think SRD is annoyed enough by the inconsistency regarding the identity of the original Guardian that he'll come up with some clever way to resolve it a bit more cleanly in the two remaining books. (Whoever asked the question in the GI probably pushed back AATE's completion by 2 months while SRD tried to work out how to untangle it! )

[amanibhavam]

But if we are going to see Linden constantly planting crucial elements of the Land's history backwards so that they can happen later will we at one point get to see her creating the Arch and the World within it and Covenant creeping in behind her back as LF, laughing?