What is the stone in a wizards staff?

[Axbolt]

In the hobbit Radagast the brown uses the stone from his staff to draw evil from the sick hedgehog, and for the first time I noticed that in the films all the wizards (Radagast, Gandalf, Saruman) seem to have a “stone of power” in there staff, it made me wonder what the significance of this might be, if there is any?

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Axbolt

In the hobbit Radagast the brown uses the stone from his staff to draw evil from the sick hedgehog, and for the first time I noticed that in the films all the wizards (Radagast, Gandalf, Saruman) seem to have a “stone of power” in there staff, it made me wonder what the significance of this might be, if there is any?

Welcome, Axbolt!

My guess is that they might be the kidney stones passed by Christopher Tolkien when told of the liberties taken by filmmakers with The Hobbit.

Actually, I haven't seen those movies, so I don't know if that might have been mentioned in a deleted scene, perhaps.

[Axbolt]

An interesting thought, maybe kidney stones are powerful!

[William Cloud Hicklin]

These gems are extraordinarily rare stones, possessed of strange powers, which, remarkably, are found not in the ground but grow in the living tissue of trees- but only in places where there were great discharges of power in the Elder Days by Valar or greater Maiar. One such region is the forest of South Lindon, which still remembers the War of Wrath and the sinking of Beleriand. And yet even there only one tree in a hundred thousand, maybe, will have but the smallest stone.

Such a stone grows with the tree, from smallest sapling to maturity, from speck to in most cases the size of a pea, but to be suitable for a staff the size of a quail's egg. These staffs must be cut and fashioned in such a way that the stone is never disturbed from its place of growth, rather the staff is carved so that the wood surrounding the gem becomes the head. This is a challenging feat of woodworking, contrary to the grain of the wood, because such gems grow not in the dead heartwood of the tree, but take their substance, like the growing tree itself, from the living layer of cambium just beneath the tree's rind.

For this reason they are called by the Elves Ondrifim, or in the Common Tongue, "Barkenstones."

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

My guess is that they might be the kidney stones passed by Christopher Tolkien...

I can hear him now, whilst trying to urinate in the loo:

"YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

[Belegorn]

For Radagast in the movie, it might have been a crack rock. Keeping his stores close and safe.