Magic in Middle-earth

[Hot, crispy nice hobbit]

Gee, apart from the very old mouth of Sauron (who is so old that he not just forget his own age, but also forgot that Sauron disliked being called Sauron)... This thread has not concerned much about 'Magic' in general.

But here's something that I remembered reading:

On this occation the presents were unusually good. The hobbit-children were so excited that for a while they almost forgot about eating. There were toys the like of which they had never seen before, all beautiful and some obviously magical. Many of them had indeed been ordered a year before, and had come all the way from the Mountain and from Dale, and were of real dwarf-make.

It had been generally agreed in this thread that Magic is attributed to 'Preservation' and 'Dominance'. But isn't it much more practical to associate magic with things that are extraordinary... That is do not happen once, say, every 3000 years? Because if you look on the First Age or the Second Age, practically everything ranging from Elves transforming into bats and birds, to swords talking had occured.

Magic means differently to different people. To Sam or any everyday hobbit, it is something fanciful. i.e. Gandalf's fireworks, Elf-magic. To Theoden, it is something menacing or extraordinary. e.g. the appearance of Gandalf with walking trees. The Numenoreans learned many of their crafts from the Elves who visited from time to time to the island of Numenor, and yet by the Third Age, they have detoriated into a people fearing of the super-natural.

No, magic is a word that is overused in today's world. Personally, I should not even say that Wizards and Sorcerors wield black or white magic. Anything that is corporeal should be given that credit while anything that is illusional will not endure.