Who Created the Sunbane?

[Variol Farseer]

But it's also fair to say that Earthpower came to rely on the Staff. Either way, Earthpower suffered a blow when it was destroyed.

This makes perfect sense in folklore terms. The idea goes all the way back to Ancient Egypt, where there was a story about a sorcerer who removed his heart and hid it in a treetop. Since his life was contained in his heart (the theory went), he couldn't be killed by any amount of damage to his actual body. Then one day someone cut the tree down and destroyed the heart, and of course the sorcerer perished.

The same motif occurs in stories from many different cultures. The most famous recent example, of course, is Tolkien's One Ring, which contained most of the life force of Sauron, so that when it was destroyed, he was effectively destroyed along with it.

The Law and the Earthpower, however, could only be wounded by destroying the Staff of Law: probably because they were so big and also so decentralized — every bit of matter in the Earth participated in them in its own way. The particular power that was gathered into the Staff must have been enough to constitute, as it were, a major structural support for the Law, but the structure could go on standing without it — until Lord Foul started playing the termite and chewing away at the other timbers.

[wayfriend]

I like the one ring analogy better than the sorcerer's heart, because like the one ring, the staff of law was not a part of something that was removed from it, but something that was created independently and then filled (if you will) with a part of that something.

[Variol Farseer]

I’m not quite sure I agree with the distinction, Wayfriend. The Staff of Law was, after all, made from a branch of the One Tree, which was subject to Law itself and just chock-full of Earthpower. So it wasn’t entirely a separate thing, as the gold of the Ring was separate from the body of Sauron.