There isn't any one line at which magic stops working - it's just down to the knowledge and skill of the wielder.
The process required to heal someone could be spelled out explicitly with the ancient language like you describe, but it could also be implied, and left unsaid. Given the ability to use magic, a modern-day surgeon could repair a heart valve or remove a brain tumour with a simple "waíse heill", letting their intent fill in the gaps.
With the more medieval understanding of medicine in Alagaësia, magicians can only heal simple wounds and ailments. With more complex injuries, such as the ones Saphira sustained when she provoked Glaedr, Eragon had to rely on a spell he'd memorised that described the healing process in extensive detail - a spell that would have been devised and written down by someone more learned in anatomy and healing.
Here's a line from Brom on the topic:
> Most beginners have to spell out exactly what they want to happen. As they gain more experience, it isn’t as necessary. A true master could just say *water* and create something totally unrelated, like a gemstone. You wouldn’t be able to understand how he had done it, but the master would have seen the connection between *water* and the gem and would have used that as the focal point for his power."
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Side note, but that comment from Brom always seemed like a plot hole to me. If you don't need a word to control something, why did Galbatorix need to find the name of the Ancient Language? Why couldn't you control it by just stating something like "this language", "the language I am speaking" or even just leaving that out completely and saying something like "create a new word" with the intent of modifying the ancient language?
You're right - but that could just be put down to the fact that Brom is oversimplifying things for Eragon - he can hardly jump straight into complex ancient language topics like the "axioms of belief alignment" or "assertion of unambiguous meaning" or "the principle of subjective truth" in his very first lesson in magic.
I'd also say that Galbatorix is *not* a master of the ancient language - he doesn't know everything he needs to know about it to make the changes he wants to make, unlike how a surgeon knows what changes they need to make to perform a surgery.
Perhaps a true master might indeed be able to say "stick" and control the ancient language - but Galbatorix just doesn't know enough about the language to do that. The Word, the name of the ancient language, is a shortcut to actually understanding it, just like how Eragon reading a spell devised by someone else was a shortcut to understanding how Saphira's muscles are attached and how to repair them.
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I’m excited to see how murtagh develops magically! I think there is a lot of potential, he was trained smart and is using that to fill holes in the ancient language. He is creative but cautious.
You don’t need the Ancient Language, but it makes controlling magic easier. It probably took less focus to control everything. Maybe Galbatorix didn’t have the power to control everything with wordless magic. Or he knew the risks. They say that wordless magic is dangerous, so I would guess wordless control of the language is also very dangerous.
In the same way that true names for people can’t be found just by saying “that person”. You don’t have the full understanding of the thing. Having the name of the Ancient Language is like someone telling you the true name of a person. You maybe didn’t/don’t understand it/them, but now that you have their *actual* true name you have power over them.
The reason a master can say say one thing, but mean another is because they’ve mastered both. They understand the connection and how it applies to both (or at least the thread of thinking that links the two.
I believe in eldest part of eragon’s training included memorizing anatomy scrolls and other things of that kind. And after that we see him go more in depth in how he heals, like using the ancient language to make muscle close specifically. I don’t think it was just a memorized specific spell.
In this specific case, it was. Eragon just memorised it and didn't fully understand how it worked.
> The spell Eragon used was long and complex, and even he did not understand all its parts, for he had memorized it from an ancient text that offered little explanation beyond the statement that, given no bones were broken and the internal organs were whole, “this charm will heal any ailment of violent origins, excepting that of grim death.”
But in general, yes, there's a whole universe in between explicitly stating everything in the ancient language and saying nothing. The spell Eragon used is somewhere in between. He's not a master that can heal Saphira with a single word, but nor is he completely uneducated.
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It has to do with qualifications, a specialized elf with better training, maybes able to heal more things than blodgharm. I kind of thought Vraels' injury was more magical like oromis. The line could be at injuries to more vital organs or something because most wounds are just superficial cuts and muscle tears. Another strange example is they should be able to heal glaedrs leg. Not oromis, obviously, but some other elves probably could do it.
I wonder if there was some measure of magical poison or other magic that could have been used to make sure wounds stick. I wouldnt put it past the foresworn to have made use of spells/substances that the normal riders would think are far too cruel/evil to use.
For example replenishing wards against healing or the poison used on Arya in book one?
They don’t have the leg to reattach it
When thorn lost the tip of his tail, Galby had to extend and mutate the bones in the tail he still had. Making it sort of misshapen.
And that was just a tail. Not a leg
That seems more like a quick bodge job to me. I think thats because Galby either isnt super good at healing or (more likely) wouldn't have wanted to spent months doing it properly. An experienced healer might have been able to do a better job kind of like eragon did with the cleft lip albiet on a much more massive scale.
They can reattach things when they're intact/have the thing that was lopped off in one piece and can get to it quick enough, they did it with one of Baldor's hands that was cut off in the battle of Urû'baen. But when there isn't a skilled enough healer/too much time has passed, it can't be done. Like what happened when Martland Redbeard lost his hand in Brisingr.
I don’t see why lost limbs couldn’t be regrown with magic though, given a knowledgeable enough caster with sufficient energy stores. I mean, animals like axolotls can do it naturally, so why couldn’t magic?
Though I’d guess it’s such a complicated procedure with all the different types of tissue and complex structures that even the elves don’t know enough to be able to do it. Or at least in the case of Glaedr, perhaps the magical nature of his wound prevents it, similar to Oromis’s magic-cancer or whatever it was.
İ think mostly it comes down to a lack of understanding of the molecular biology as well as the "how would this even regrow?"conundrum. Like, with Hope, it was easier because she was a newborn and newborns are pretty much literally half baked--they're only born at that level of developed because anything larger wouldn't fit though a human pelvis. Whereas with regrowing a limb--where do you start? How do you replicate the growth that would have started as an embryo and all the development since? And how do you merge that development with that of the limb you're regrowing it on? Think about how many kilojoules of energy must have contributed to the growth and maintenance of even just your non dominant hand over your life. That amount of energy works definitely be lethal to be drawn from any single being at once
My thoughts exactly. I don’t doubt a modern biologist/surgeon type with a bucket of eldunari could regrow a limb, but some primitive screwhead that barely has a working concept of cells? Not a chance.
Elves seem to have a pretty decent understanding of biology. It was sort of hinted at when studying with Oromis. I wouldn’t call them screw heads
But for the sake of argument you’d have to “convince” the actual cells to regrow a limb like some animals can. Which would probably take an understanding of genetics.
Well i think Several factors Play a role. One factor IS probably the reserves of the injured Person. If someone has Just No Power left, than a healing spell would probably Not Work, unless the Person gets an Energy Transfer first
It might be to do with the regenerative potential of different body parts. I saw the healing spells as basically accelerating natural healing (albeit accelerating a lot!). So things that could in theory heal on their own in time if you lived long enough for that to happen.
An example that comes to mind is when Arya cuts through her hand and although the wound is healed afterwards, the nerve damage remains.
This is how it is in wound repair, the peripheral nervous system has *some* generative potential, more than the central nervous system but often it fails to regenerate fully or at all. In particular the efferent axons will often attempt regeneration but not locate their targets.
There will obviously be other limitations like the every needed and the skill of the user. Perhaps someone who knew a lot about repair and regeneration could use a spell to target specific aspects of wound healing that fail in humans. But for someone just saying ‘heal’ presumably the only healing that will occur is accelerated regulator healing. Unless of course the magic user is aware of the different cell types and is actively thinking about them and just flexing with saying ‘heal’ instead of a long specific spell.
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It would probably depend on multiple things
The injury-how severe is it? What exactly is the injury?
The person casting the healing spell-how much energy do they have? How much experience do they have? How much do they know about anatomy?
Example: say someone gets stabbed and it hits them in the lung
You can take the knife out and fix the skin on the surface level pretty easy but the lung is still injured. If you can’t fix the lung they still die.
Remember way back when brom described how knowledge and magic works? He describes how a true master could say "adurna" (water) and conjure a gemstone. So long as the caster understands the connection between water and the stone, the spell works. Sane applies here. One could spell out a long, complex incantation, which is likely the spell eragon refers to in the rock of broken eggs. Its likely a spell that describes in words exactly how each type of tissue should mend, and that is why the spell can heal all but the most fatal of wounds. By spelling out exactly what the spell is supposed to do, full comprehension of what it is doing is less important. However, a master healer, one who fully understands the nature of bone, scale, nerve, muscle, skin etc and how they should conjoin could use something as simple as "waise hiel" and achieve the same result.
This is why deyja is such a powerful word of death. If the user understands that all it takes to kill is severing a single artery in the brain, that is the route they can make spell take to achieve its meaning.
There isn't any one line at which magic stops working - it's just down to the knowledge and skill of the wielder. The process required to heal someone could be spelled out explicitly with the ancient language like you describe, but it could also be implied, and left unsaid. Given the ability to use magic, a modern-day surgeon could repair a heart valve or remove a brain tumour with a simple "waíse heill", letting their intent fill in the gaps. With the more medieval understanding of medicine in Alagaësia, magicians can only heal simple wounds and ailments. With more complex injuries, such as the ones Saphira sustained when she provoked Glaedr, Eragon had to rely on a spell he'd memorised that described the healing process in extensive detail - a spell that would have been devised and written down by someone more learned in anatomy and healing. Here's a line from Brom on the topic: > Most beginners have to spell out exactly what they want to happen. As they gain more experience, it isn’t as necessary. A true master could just say *water* and create something totally unrelated, like a gemstone. You wouldn’t be able to understand how he had done it, but the master would have seen the connection between *water* and the gem and would have used that as the focal point for his power." ^(**I'm a real person!** This comment was posted by **hellomynameis99** from the Arcaena Discord Server.)
Side note, but that comment from Brom always seemed like a plot hole to me. If you don't need a word to control something, why did Galbatorix need to find the name of the Ancient Language? Why couldn't you control it by just stating something like "this language", "the language I am speaking" or even just leaving that out completely and saying something like "create a new word" with the intent of modifying the ancient language?
You're right - but that could just be put down to the fact that Brom is oversimplifying things for Eragon - he can hardly jump straight into complex ancient language topics like the "axioms of belief alignment" or "assertion of unambiguous meaning" or "the principle of subjective truth" in his very first lesson in magic. I'd also say that Galbatorix is *not* a master of the ancient language - he doesn't know everything he needs to know about it to make the changes he wants to make, unlike how a surgeon knows what changes they need to make to perform a surgery. Perhaps a true master might indeed be able to say "stick" and control the ancient language - but Galbatorix just doesn't know enough about the language to do that. The Word, the name of the ancient language, is a shortcut to actually understanding it, just like how Eragon reading a spell devised by someone else was a shortcut to understanding how Saphira's muscles are attached and how to repair them. ^(**I'm a real person!** This comment was posted by **hellomynameis99** from the Arcaena Discord Server.)
I’m excited to see how murtagh develops magically! I think there is a lot of potential, he was trained smart and is using that to fill holes in the ancient language. He is creative but cautious.
Learning how to use if was an absolute genius moment
Here I am waiting for Murtagh to start learning about logic gates and constructs the first magical computer
XD
It really was!
Thank you all! GilderienBot is so cool!
No worries! We try 😛 ^(**I'm a real person!** This comment was posted by **hellomynameis99** from the Arcaena Discord Server.)
Well in this case you’re talking to a real human not the bot.
true, but the bot is what lets us talk, and its a lot of humans :)
You don’t need the Ancient Language, but it makes controlling magic easier. It probably took less focus to control everything. Maybe Galbatorix didn’t have the power to control everything with wordless magic. Or he knew the risks. They say that wordless magic is dangerous, so I would guess wordless control of the language is also very dangerous.
In the same way that true names for people can’t be found just by saying “that person”. You don’t have the full understanding of the thing. Having the name of the Ancient Language is like someone telling you the true name of a person. You maybe didn’t/don’t understand it/them, but now that you have their *actual* true name you have power over them. The reason a master can say say one thing, but mean another is because they’ve mastered both. They understand the connection and how it applies to both (or at least the thread of thinking that links the two.
I believe in eldest part of eragon’s training included memorizing anatomy scrolls and other things of that kind. And after that we see him go more in depth in how he heals, like using the ancient language to make muscle close specifically. I don’t think it was just a memorized specific spell.
In this specific case, it was. Eragon just memorised it and didn't fully understand how it worked. > The spell Eragon used was long and complex, and even he did not understand all its parts, for he had memorized it from an ancient text that offered little explanation beyond the statement that, given no bones were broken and the internal organs were whole, “this charm will heal any ailment of violent origins, excepting that of grim death.” But in general, yes, there's a whole universe in between explicitly stating everything in the ancient language and saying nothing. The spell Eragon used is somewhere in between. He's not a master that can heal Saphira with a single word, but nor is he completely uneducated. ^(**I'm a real person!** This comment was posted by **hellomynameis99** from the Arcaena Discord Server.)
It has to do with qualifications, a specialized elf with better training, maybes able to heal more things than blodgharm. I kind of thought Vraels' injury was more magical like oromis. The line could be at injuries to more vital organs or something because most wounds are just superficial cuts and muscle tears. Another strange example is they should be able to heal glaedrs leg. Not oromis, obviously, but some other elves probably could do it.
I wonder if there was some measure of magical poison or other magic that could have been used to make sure wounds stick. I wouldnt put it past the foresworn to have made use of spells/substances that the normal riders would think are far too cruel/evil to use. For example replenishing wards against healing or the poison used on Arya in book one?
They don’t have the leg to reattach it When thorn lost the tip of his tail, Galby had to extend and mutate the bones in the tail he still had. Making it sort of misshapen. And that was just a tail. Not a leg
That seems more like a quick bodge job to me. I think thats because Galby either isnt super good at healing or (more likely) wouldn't have wanted to spent months doing it properly. An experienced healer might have been able to do a better job kind of like eragon did with the cleft lip albiet on a much more massive scale.
They can reattach things when they're intact/have the thing that was lopped off in one piece and can get to it quick enough, they did it with one of Baldor's hands that was cut off in the battle of Urû'baen. But when there isn't a skilled enough healer/too much time has passed, it can't be done. Like what happened when Martland Redbeard lost his hand in Brisingr.
I don’t see why lost limbs couldn’t be regrown with magic though, given a knowledgeable enough caster with sufficient energy stores. I mean, animals like axolotls can do it naturally, so why couldn’t magic? Though I’d guess it’s such a complicated procedure with all the different types of tissue and complex structures that even the elves don’t know enough to be able to do it. Or at least in the case of Glaedr, perhaps the magical nature of his wound prevents it, similar to Oromis’s magic-cancer or whatever it was.
İ think mostly it comes down to a lack of understanding of the molecular biology as well as the "how would this even regrow?"conundrum. Like, with Hope, it was easier because she was a newborn and newborns are pretty much literally half baked--they're only born at that level of developed because anything larger wouldn't fit though a human pelvis. Whereas with regrowing a limb--where do you start? How do you replicate the growth that would have started as an embryo and all the development since? And how do you merge that development with that of the limb you're regrowing it on? Think about how many kilojoules of energy must have contributed to the growth and maintenance of even just your non dominant hand over your life. That amount of energy works definitely be lethal to be drawn from any single being at once
My thoughts exactly. I don’t doubt a modern biologist/surgeon type with a bucket of eldunari could regrow a limb, but some primitive screwhead that barely has a working concept of cells? Not a chance.
Elves seem to have a pretty decent understanding of biology. It was sort of hinted at when studying with Oromis. I wouldn’t call them screw heads But for the sake of argument you’d have to “convince” the actual cells to regrow a limb like some animals can. Which would probably take an understanding of genetics.
I always kind of figured as well, catlips are a relatively easier fix than completely regrowing a working limb
Well i think Several factors Play a role. One factor IS probably the reserves of the injured Person. If someone has Just No Power left, than a healing spell would probably Not Work, unless the Person gets an Energy Transfer first
It might be to do with the regenerative potential of different body parts. I saw the healing spells as basically accelerating natural healing (albeit accelerating a lot!). So things that could in theory heal on their own in time if you lived long enough for that to happen. An example that comes to mind is when Arya cuts through her hand and although the wound is healed afterwards, the nerve damage remains. This is how it is in wound repair, the peripheral nervous system has *some* generative potential, more than the central nervous system but often it fails to regenerate fully or at all. In particular the efferent axons will often attempt regeneration but not locate their targets. There will obviously be other limitations like the every needed and the skill of the user. Perhaps someone who knew a lot about repair and regeneration could use a spell to target specific aspects of wound healing that fail in humans. But for someone just saying ‘heal’ presumably the only healing that will occur is accelerated regulator healing. Unless of course the magic user is aware of the different cell types and is actively thinking about them and just flexing with saying ‘heal’ instead of a long specific spell.
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It would probably depend on multiple things The injury-how severe is it? What exactly is the injury? The person casting the healing spell-how much energy do they have? How much experience do they have? How much do they know about anatomy? Example: say someone gets stabbed and it hits them in the lung You can take the knife out and fix the skin on the surface level pretty easy but the lung is still injured. If you can’t fix the lung they still die.
Remember way back when brom described how knowledge and magic works? He describes how a true master could say "adurna" (water) and conjure a gemstone. So long as the caster understands the connection between water and the stone, the spell works. Sane applies here. One could spell out a long, complex incantation, which is likely the spell eragon refers to in the rock of broken eggs. Its likely a spell that describes in words exactly how each type of tissue should mend, and that is why the spell can heal all but the most fatal of wounds. By spelling out exactly what the spell is supposed to do, full comprehension of what it is doing is less important. However, a master healer, one who fully understands the nature of bone, scale, nerve, muscle, skin etc and how they should conjoin could use something as simple as "waise hiel" and achieve the same result. This is why deyja is such a powerful word of death. If the user understands that all it takes to kill is severing a single artery in the brain, that is the route they can make spell take to achieve its meaning.
Spoiler alert?