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What is the missing piece?

This is gonna drive me insane. Ok. So. In Trollhunters part 3 episode 8: For the glory of Merlin, I have been wondering about what piece of the amulet was missing when merlin was rebuilding it (since Jim smashed it in episode 7 to get to Merlin’s cave). When Merlin had “finished” reconstructing the amulet, he said there was a piece of the amulet missing. But the amulet looked like it had all its parts to me.

So, I decided to try and figure out what was missing from the amulet by cross-referencing a screenshot of the broken amulet with images of the amulet.

First, I decided to use the concept art of the amulet that is in pieces and put some colored-coded dots, lines, circles, and boxes on the pieces. And sure enough, nothing was missing.

Initially I thought it might have been the small plate that connects the wheel to the ridge of the amulet. But that couldn’t be it because the rectangular piece of metal was already on the small wheel.

Well, ok. Maybe the concept art of the pieces might not be ideal, since some of the shapes and pieces look different. Then let’s take a look at the pieces of the amulet on Merlin’s blueprint found in Tales of Arcadia's third instalment: Wizards.

More color-coding later. Looking back and forth at the blue print and the pieces in the episode. Yeah, nothing's missing.

So yeah, I really don't think anything was missing from the amulet, as far as I could tell. But apparently, the show says otherwise and now I am stumped.

Also, let’s talk about what was used to replace this mysterious missing piece. Remember what it was that replaced the missing piece? Well, I'll tell you.

It’s one of Claire’s hair clips.

A hair clip…

That’s what used to replace the missing piece.

And Merlin just slips it in the amulet like there’s no problem with this idea.

Just look at it! Look at it and tell me that hair clip wouldn’t have caused any problems with the amulet’s gears.

Seriously that hair clip would have either made the amulet pop, jammed the gears, or have been crushed. But nope.

And would you look at that, it worked. Shoving a hair clip into a powerful, magical amulet made it work.

Merlin’s just like: “Wait, that worked?”

Yeah, I’d be confused to if shoving a small hair piece into a mystical device that gives the wearer a suit of armor, complete with a sword made of daylight, fixed the thing.

Welp, this has been my post about something that is so useless that I tried to figure out.

I have an English-to-Latin dictionary on me, and I took 4 Latin classes back when I was in high school, so I'm gonna try my best to translate it. I will admit I am not all that good at Latin.

Ad is a prep word that goes along with the accusative of a noun, the accusative being Lucem which uses a third or fifth declension singular ending, and it could mean to, toward, at, or by. 'To' is very likely what is being used here. However, Ad is rarely ever used in a translation; it's usually an indicator that the accusative should go first.

Lucem, as stated before, is an accusative noun. Since Ad is going with it, we can assume that it is a noun and not a verb. Whether it is either third masculine & feminine or fifth declension, I am not sure. In the dictionary, it gives the nominative and genitive, meaning Lucem is Lux as a nominative and Lucis as a genitive. It can be translated as light, light of day, or daylight.

Gloria is a feminine, nominative noun. It can be translated as glory, fame, or pride.

Mea is an adjective, and it's going with Gloria. You can tell when an adjective is going with a noun due to them having similar endings. It can be translated as me, mine, or my.

And now, it's time to put it all together, which can be tricky if we are doing a whole ass sentence in Latin, but this one is short and sweet. The Latin word order goes subject(nominative)-object(accusative)-verb. Since we have an Ad going with Lucem, we say the object first.

My best guess is that "Ad lucem gloria mea" translates to "Light my glory".

My reason for this is because this is what sounds right. During the process of figuring out what word means what in English, you take a few of the translations and form them together to see what sounds right.

So the first time I saw this I just sort of ignored it. I might have recognized gloria mea to mean “my glory” and assumed it was something to do with the Amulet’s incantation. But now that I’m rewatching these episodes, I wanted to break it down in greater detail.

Now this isn’t a complete sentence, and that makes it difficult to translate. It means either, “my glory for daylight” or “to daylight by my glory”. Due to the lack of diacritics in Netflix subtitles I can’t be sure if gloria mea is supposed to be gloria méa or gloriā méā, which changes its function. If it was a complete sentence I probably would be able to deduct, but it’s not. So I’m guessing. I could be wrong.

Personally I’m going to say it’s ad lūcem gloriā méā, which translates to “to daylight by my glory”. I picked this translation because I think it makes more sense. Merlin using his “glory” to create “daylight”, which we can probably deduce means the armor and sword.

It makes me wonder if “glory” in this case is maybe another word for magic? Regardless of which translation you go with, it seems to be the glory that is in some way substantiating Daylight.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first time Latin comes up in this show. Blinky says a bunch of things in it and finds a Roman penny in Gatto’s Keep, claiming he hasn’t seen one of those in ages. Also from what I can tell Trollish appears to be based off of it. (I’m working on a more detailed discussion of the troll language because that’s a really interesting rabbit hole.)