Enchantment or advancement.

[Mnemosyne]

Originally Posted by Rumil

Was it Arthur C Clarke that said any sufficiently advanced technology is viewed as 'magic' by those unfamiliar with it? I'm sure Tolkien would have hated the idea that eg. Sting was the product of high-tech rather than 'craft' but the effect is the same, both Sting and a light-sabre could cut deep into a wooden beam at a single stroke!

Eh... really? Sting could cleave spiderwebs, because spiders were a threat in the land where it was forged, but as far as I know the enemies of the elves of the First Age weren't Evil Ents that required +3 Woodchopping Swords. One of the better things, IMO, about fantastic weapons is that they can be specialized like that, so that you don't have superweapons like lightsabers, sonic screwdrivers, etc., that people need to come up with increasingly creative methods to stop.

Which is rather beside the point.

What I find to be an irritating trend in non-realistic literature is this need to come up with scientific explanations for everything that is beyond the reader's understanding. It was cool when Anne McCaffrey did it, but I hope no one will disagree with me when I say that the "midichlorian" explanation of the Force killed a lot of the fun of Star Wars.

Where did this need to rationalize everything come from?

In Tolkien you don't get that: you get runes of virtue and songs so powerful they inspire visions and athelas and curses that have an effect. And you get old, powerful objects the like of which will never be made again--the Silmarils, which contain only a fraction of the light of the Trees, whose power is harnessed, again at a fraction of its true level, in Frodo's star-glass (which then passes over the Sea )

The enchantment is more powerful than advancement, I would argue, because the Story has to continue. In one sense the continuity of artifacts like this is what makes them powerful.

One other area I would extend this inquiry into, and that's the healing arts of the Elves and of Gondor. Aside from the mention of athelas and possibly some singing, we never get any detail of what this knowledge was or how it worked. I've run across stories in fantasy that do try to give detail and it never works for me because I can tell that the writer is a modern-day person, using modern-day knowledge to diagnose someone ailing and then trying to mask that knowledge. (The quickest example that comes to mind is a piece of fan fiction in which Aragorn performed surgery on a man with cancer!)

So to what extent is less more when an author portrays items of wondrous power? Is an explanation of how it works more or less appealing than a tale of its history proving how effective it's been in the past?