Quote:
"Are these magic cloaks?"
"I do not know what you mean by that... Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all these things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make."
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With this example, we fall back into tar-ancalime's issue of point of view. For the elves, who are inherently magical persons, this would not be magic, but would be art, quite ordinary for them. But for hobbits and men, who are not capable of crafting such things, it would fall into the area of magic. The cloaks are not magical in that they are not given their power by any charm or spell, but they are magical in that they can accomplish by their mere existence that which is beyond human craftsmanship, hence magical. Under these standards, magic is in the eye of the beholder. To a dog, a television is pretty darn magical, but to the TV repairman, it is just ordinary stuff.
With the decline of the presence of elves in Middle Earth, we see a decline in magic... or art, if you prefer to think of it that way. That being said, however, art and technology can co-exist, but can technology and magic? It seems to me that by it's mere nature, technology eliminates the possibility of magic. The advent of the Age of Men in Middle Earth would seem to bring with it a renaissance of technology and an end to magic. That's where I get the impression of sadness in Tolkein's work, a yearning for the magical in a place where magic is rapidly disappearing.