Quote:
Originally Posted by Polydamas
The idea of magery as a special gift which only some people have is also yucky (like "obviously aristocrats are better at everything than commoners" yuck or "person from my culture is shipwrecked in a distant land and soon does everything better than the natives because he is from my cultures" yuck), and I am having trouble thinking of stories where magic works that way.
|
In The Lord of the Rings, magic seems to be the province of elves and wizards; hobbits don't use it, and men who do fall into the power of the Dark Lord.
In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged is born with a talent for magic.
In the Discworld novels, it seems that only certain people are born with the gift for witchery or wizardry.
In The Witches of Karres, the ability to work with klatha is the domain of people from Karres and a few talented people from elsewhere.
In the Sharing Knife novels, magical talent is the sphere of a distinctive ethnic group, the Lakewalkers.
It seems to be quite a common trope, actually.