High Lord Tolkien wrote:shadowbinding shoe wrote:
Donaldson said that the 7th Word was missing from all of the Wards Kevin made. It was the word for Law which Kevin disavowed with his intention to spoil Creation with his Ritual of Desecration.
Not doubting you but where did he say this?
It's been a while so I'm not certain. It was either in Fatal Revenant in one of the talks Linden has with the MaDoubt where the MaDoubt explain the history of the Land or (and I think this is the right one) it was in one of the answers Donaldson gave in the GI.
... Well, I've done some checking and I'm no longer certain it was explicitly said anywhere.
What we know for sure is that:
1) This word is missing from the first and second Wards Kevin made while all the rest are present and accounted for
2) The Theomach gives the missing word and explains its meaning:
"The sixth,
harad, may be understood as a stricture against selfishness, tyranny, malice, or other forms of despair. It binds the speaker to make no use of Earthpower which does not serve or preserve the munificence of creation."
3) Donaldson says in more than one of his GI answers that leaving out the seventh word (in the First Chronicles) is intentional and is intended to hint at something to us.
Paul S.
My question is about the Words of Power -- was your intention to hint that there may in fact be an entire "language of power" that might exist (of which perhaps the old lords had only discovered/translated 7)? Perhaps the "words of power" are actually the native language of something more powerful (like Lord Foul and The Creator)?
However, since you've said that you are both not a linguist and only invent what you need for the story... maybe the answer is simply that you liked the number seven and those seven words were all you needed for the story you were telling?
Thanks for the time!
Paul S.
It's true that I'm human. Therefore I make mistakes. Accidents happen. Nonetheless it strains credulity to think that I announced (over and over again) that there are 7 Words--and then only bothered to invent 6 because 7 was too much work. No, I consider it far more likely that the author is positively begging his readers to draw inferences.
Of course, one has to be cautious in these situations. I've observed on more than one occasion in this interview that "hinting at more than is actually revealed" is one of my many world-building techniques. But still....
(07/27/2007)
ron beck: after re-reading the previous books in the series I am about half way through the Fatal Revenant, and the (missing) 7th word of power (Harad) is finally revealed. If the Theomach is to be believed, it signifies that anyone using the words of power may not wield Earthpower to advance the cause of Despair.
In the earlier books when the Words of Power are invoked, this one is not used. Will we discover the possible philosophical ramifications of this omission, or am I thinking too much about this?
or (even more likely) is it a Read and Find Out?
In this case, I don't think there's much explanation required. In one way or another, Kevin is responsible for what the "new" Lords both do and do not know. So if *you* were contemplating performing a Ritual of Desecration, which of the Seven Words would *you* suppress? In other words, I think it's obvious that the "loss" of that particular word was Kevin's doing.
(01/21/2008)
... Still, it does seem to me that Kevin may have had powerful reasons for suppressing "harad". The rest of the Seven Words must surely have been found in the First and Second Wards, since they all occur in "The Illearth War".
(12/21/2007)
So Donaldson supports my supposition that the seventh (or sixth) word was intentionally suppressed by High Lord Kevin when he made his Wards.
I had a slightly different perception of what happened here than Donaldson seem to imply in his answers though. I assumed that because Kevin decided to do something that goes against the very meaning of this magic word by enacting the Ritual of Desecration, he somehow renounced this concept and excised it from his very being. Meaning that he couldn't teach anyone this word anymore because it wasn't part of who he was any longer.
But Donaldson seems to say that Kevin just wanted people to think well of him and so didn't tell them about the Law or moral he was defying with his Ritual of Desecration. Could he really be so deluded at that point to believe that the people of his future would see no wrong with what he did even if it was 'for the greater good' (of defeating Foul and the Demondim?)
Would the word have been discovered eventually in one of the latter Wards, say the 6th. Would Kevin have thought that by the time they reached this stage in their education they would be mature enough to learn that he wasn't perfect? Though (going for an analogy) teaching children that causing nuclear holocaust on their graduation day after you spent all their years with you teaching them all the intricacies of fission and fusion bomb making seem like a very bad idea.