Skip to main content

harry potter - Fred's or George's transfiguration skill



After reading this question and its answer I realized. How come one of the twins, Fred or George, does not matter that much was able to transform Ron's teddy bear into a great spider? Let's quote Professor McGonagall:



‘Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts,’ she said. ‘Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned.’ Then she changed her desk into a pig and back again.



After this, everybody is excited to transfigure something. But:



After making a lot of complicated notes, they were each given a match and started trying to turn it into a needle. By the end of the lesson, only Hermione Granger had made any difference to her match; Professor McGonagall showed the class how it had gone all silver and pointy and gave Hermione a rare smile.


Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone, ch. 8, The Potion Master



And this is only one of the mentions about Transfiguration being one of the hardest magic. Not to mention, that wizards normally get a wand at the age of eleven. Although, against this argument might stand the fact, that Weasley family was rather poor, unable to buy new wand for Ron - he used old Charlie's wand, so Fred or George might have nicked the wand.



I mean, Fred or George would not care, if it was dangerous - on the contrary. But how come, was one of them able to do such magic at the age of five? Think about what he would need:



  • a wand (I assume from what J.K.Rowling said about wandless magic)

  • to know the proper incantation

  • the proper pronunciation/articulation of the incantation

  • the correct wand moves



Answer



There's next to no details in what Ron says, and it's ambiguous at best, but I think the most reasonable canon explanation is unintentional magic. Especially since Ron would have been at an age where he'd possibly carry a teddy bear around with him everywhere he went, and therefore the two incidents may have happened at much the same time.


In the Potterverse, unintentional magic is generally done by witches and wizards under school age (eleven years old) during times of extreme stress, fear or anger. They also tend to manage feats that they couldn't dream of performing intentionally when first learning to control their magic. Harry was able to either levitate or even apparate onto the roof of his school and make his hair grow back, neither of which he would have been capable of doing intentionally in his first year.



However, we've also seen that it doesn't require a particularly stressful situation to trigger unintentional magic; Harry made a pane of glass disappear just because Dudley pushed him over. It's not entirely unreasonable to think that, at the age of five, Fred may have been upset enough at Ron breaking his toy broomstick that he could have unintentionally transfigured a teddy bear into a giant spider.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

story identification - I'm looking for a book about an experiment a couple decided to do on their child to make him smarter

I'm looking for a book I read in the 90's...it was about an experiment a couple decided to do on their child to make him smarter. I think the child ended up being too smart or something but I remember it getting kind of scary...his brain got bigger and bigger. I know I'm being vague but I was really young when I read it and it was way too advanced for me but I'm trying to find it!