Harry Potter & the Half-Intelligent Reader ('splain THIS to me, pls!)

Cafe Society
1

Hey Potter-universe “residents”, I am re-reading Books 5 & 6 so I feel semi-intelligent re: Harry, et al, by the time Movie 5 arrives in July 2007 (and if that coinicides somewhat with Book 7 release, all the better!) . These will be read only during lunch hours between then and now, so it’s possible it may take me up until July 12 to feel intelligent enough to watch the movie (and read the final book). Meantime I have a question re: Book 4 that I’d like to have developed further for me, if those of you in the perennial know about HP would deign to do so:

What the heck is the deal with Priori Incantatem? OK, I know what happened, and what resulted, when HP and LV met on the graveyard playing field at the end of Book 4, but my question is, if two wands containing the same core can result in this spell when cast simultaneously, why doesn’t this happen all the time in Potterverse? Surely these two cannot be the ONLY magical folks who share a common core in a wand. I seem to recall that the missing Olivander’s shop had wands stacked to the very high ceilings on pretty much every available shelf (reminiscent of the sheep’s shop in Alice Thru The Looking Glass, very cool!). Wouldn’t it make sense that some/several or more of these would share a core? How many totally different unicorns’ tails can one get a hair from, or how many totally unique phoenixes are about to grab feathers from?

Further, this is the only case of Priori Incantatem even historically mentioned by JKR. I just think the odds have to be against this being a “once in a lifetime” occurrance. Certainly Dumbledore knew what it was all about. I seem to recall him sagely nodding at Harry’s tale of Voldy’s return and saying, “oh yes, the old Priori Incantatem dilemma, I see…”, tho he didn’t enlighten the likes of US regarding his previous experience with this.

And since this dilemma does exist between HP and Voldy, do you speculate that “the end” for either of them will NOT happen with any wand action? Are they doomed to some kind of physical display of strength between them? Does this seem to reinforce the possibility of a 3rd party’s interference in their final confrontation (since I don’t see Harry suddenly getting fabulous at silent spellcasting and I am sure it’s been said that Voldy is more than a fair occlumens, if not up to Snape’s level of course).

I guess I think Priori Incantatem was a last-minute, not very well thought out inclusion at the end of the most bloated of the HP books, but it does sort of paint JKR into a corner if I am interpreting it correctly with how the final confrontation can happen. Or maybe it was a brilliant, sheer-genius piece of plotting that will enhance the end of the series and will make complete sense at that point. I vacillate. Sort of.

But I am open to suggestion/explanation!

–Beck

2

I never thought much about what Priori might indicate for any future encounters between Harry and Voldemort. That’s really interesting–I can’t believe it never occurred to me. So, there’s always the possibility that either Harry or Voldy will end up using someone else’s wand in a pinch at the Final Confrontation.

Like you said, Ollivander stocks thousands of wands. Surely at least two of them have hair from the same unicorn, or heartstrings from the same dragon, or whatever. But what are the odds that any two of those wands will be used against each other at exactly the same moment? Harry and Voldy were both attempting to cast a spell at the same time. (I was all excited for a minute because I thought they were trying to cast the same spell at the same time, while I was thinking about this, but then–IIRC, of course–I remembered that Harry was casting Expelliarmus because it was about the best he could do, and Voldy was casting Avada Kedavra.)

But yeah. I say it’s all in the timing. Or it’s a plot device to give Harry five seconds with his parents. Nah, it’s the timing.

3

Ok, this is freaky, but bear with me.

Time was when I was much younger, that upon occasion someone in the neighborhood would click on their garage door opener and someone else’s would open. Apparently this was due to either the two systems sharing the same code or signals getting mixed or something (I’m not real physics minded).

I liken the PI to that sort of thing. Sure, it’s happened before-but it’s not a common thing at all. Why would it be brought up in the books, unless it is pertinent to the plot? (speaking of things like that, though-it has always bugged me that Rowling never mentioned Hogsmeade until it was needed. Surely the twins would have razzed Ron about his not being able to go in books 1 and 2, no?).

So, PI can and does happen. I think it was a brilliant device and one that is probably quite crucial to the conclusion. Pure speculation: I bet Snape shows his true colors in the end, but inadvertently causes the demise of LV and saves HP-but not because Snape wanted to. (why yes, I just finished watching LOTR, why do you ask? heh).

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It’s not just two wands sharing the same core and casting a spell at the same time. The trigger is when the wands are made to battle each other. As when Harry and Voldie cast an offensive spell against each other at the same time. That is what makes it a very rare occurance.

And yes, that does make the final battle between Harry and Voldie interesting, they will not be able to directly attack each other with wand magic without giving the other one an ‘out’ so to speak. Its always possible that it would be a physical confrontation. JKR has gone to great lengths to establish that Voldie was unable to phyiscally touch Harry and that the spell in the end of book 4 ended that block.

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And learning that Voldemort had taken Harry’s blood to get around that obstacle inspired a gleam of something like triumph in Dumbledore’s eye. So I think you’re definitely right that there’s going to be more to that story.

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[QUOTE=Antinor01]
It’s not just two wands sharing the same core and casting a spell at the same time. The trigger is when the wands are made to battle each other. As when Harry and Voldie cast an offensive spell against each other at the same time. That is what makes it a very rare occurance.

OK, but we’ve seen lots of “battles” even at Hogwarts, such as the “demo” between Snape and Lockheart, the Death Eaters and the kids/Order of Phoenix at the end of both Books 5 (in the Minstry) & 6 (at school), even the DA training sessions are rife with wizards/witches in battle with one another, and you can’t tell me that only Harry and Draco (or James Potter and Snape when in school) have ever “drawn on” one another inside or outside the school in all its history—I’d think the kids themselves would be testing each other all the time, in every year – and this is a very rare occurance? Still seems a bit “instant-plottish” to me. I won’t argue whether it will have future significance–I actually think it HAS to, especially since we have now established that those two wands in particular cannot be used in battle simultaneously, and we know a big battle of some kind is inevitable. But I still wonder if PI was a spur-of-the-moment invention for the purposes of Book 4’s confrontation and now has to be dealt with instead of being a deliberate device since conception.

Then again, I sometimes believe JKR just made up the concept of Horcruxes at the point where she was writing Book 6 (I don’t feel Book 2 foreshadowed them at all really—altho we knew the diary was a pretty cool feat by LV, we weren’t really given a thorough understanding of its nature then, not anywhere nearly enough to think, “Oh! The diary must be a magical device that contains a piece of Voldy’s soul! In which case since it is just a piece, there must be other pieces, where do you suppose they are and what kind of magic is this? Guess we’ll find all this out later in the series…”)

I suppose one can find inconsistencies anywhere if one wants to, true of any work of fiction, and true of life!

–Beck

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I tend to think she had planned it all along. Think about when Harry got his wand, there was a huge deal made of the fact that it was a ‘brother’ to Voldies. If I remember correctly they even established that only 2 feathers had been taken from Fawkes, the ones in the core of those two wands. There was another conversation where Ollivander is talking about how he was nearly gored to death by a centaur who he was plucking a strand of hair from the tail of. It is made pretty clear that it was only one hair from that particular centaur.

I may be way off in my assessment, but it seems that most wands are unique in being the only one formed from the feather,hair etc of that one creature and that there even being wands that are related in that way is fairly rare.

8

A centaur’s head looks roughly the same as yours or mine. Unless this centaur had exceptionally deformed teeth*, it’s unlikely a centaur was in a position to do any goring at all. Ollivander was probably talking about a unicorn.

I don’t remember off the top of my head, BTW; did Dumbledore say Priori Incantatem was extremely rare, or just rare?

I’m not really interested in writing and defending a retcon for Rowling, but it could be that low-level, schoolboy-grudge-type “battles” aren’t invested with enough enmity for the phenomenon to manifest in the context of the squabbles, hazings, and minor assaults that occur in Hogwarts. So, it’s not that twinned wands don’t exist in quantity, so much as they don’t often interact in a context of sufficient ferocity to generate the effect.

*Yeah, I know it takes place in England, but still. :smiley:

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Sorry about that, I meant unicorn but typed out the wrong thing.

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As to the “what will this mean for the final battle?” thoughts, one of the ideas put forth is that that’s why Ollivander was taken; not just so that the good side wouldn’t have access to the best wands, but so that he could make a new one for Voldemort.

11

Actually, thinking about this, I recall that the effects of Priori Incantatem were distinctly Phoenix-relate. Harry could hear what sounded like phoenix song. Whether this just means the effects are different for each type of wand core - a unicorn hair wand might have the sound of hooves or whatever - or that it only works with phoenix feathers, which would make the effect rare since phoenixes are themselves very rare.

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It would probably work with any wand since PI can be invoked as a spell without the two wands thing. They did a PI on Harrys wand after the World Cup to see if it was the wand used to invoke the dark mark and there was no phoenix related stuff mentioned.

13

I thought it was not so much that the two wands can’t work against one another-but that the two wands could not work as effectively against one another. Afterall, if HP and LV hadn’t incanted (is that a word?) simultaneously, than HP would be dead.

So, what are the odds of two wands sharing the same core, being used against each other in a battle of intense emotions, and being used at precisely the same time? Not good, IMO.

14

That’s true. But the spell and the effect seem to be two different things.

15

Very true. I would still tend to think it would work on any ‘brother’ wands with the effect varying based on the core item.