Aha, you knew it was coming. It was only a matter of time.

Anyway, I find the idea of magical power in Dresden a curious thing.

It's clear from the series that the power for magic is derived from all sorts of things: emotions, will, death, etc.

Magical exhaustion exists (Dresden gets tired out all the time) but clearly it isn't a simple "you have X amount of magic and you use it as you cast spells until it runs out" type of thing, because an exhausted wizard, if he finds a new source of emotion, can continue to cast magic. For example, in White Night Dresden, though exhausted, casts a powerful shield using the lust from Lara as a source.

So it's seems that wizards don't have a set limit on their power, but rather they have as much power as they are able to find.

But we also know that some wizards are inherently stronger than others. Dresden is often said to have a great amount of brute strength just because he was born with it. But how does this mesh with the theory above? Does it mean that Dresden somehow feels emotions stronger that, say, Elaine? I doubt it.

One idea that I have is that calling Dresden a brute strength wizard by birth is actually an over-simplification.

It's not that Dresden and Elaine both do X magic and Dresden just happens to be stronger due to Y value of magical strength. I would say that Dresden and Elaine rather do magic in completely different ways, not taught (as they had the same teacher) but just as a result of the way their minds work. Harry's way of doing magic, his ways of thinking and willing and using his emotions etc. will predispose the magic he uses more towards brute strength, whereas Elaine's predisposes hers more to subtlety.

This explains how both Dresden and Elaine, though they are using the same source for their magic, have different "power levels": it is not a matter of the source but rather of method (instinctive method, not taught method). It also explains how, over a long period of time, someone like Harry can learn subtlety as he adjusts his method for it. It may also mean that someone like Elaine can do the same but for power.

Thoughts?

 

This seems like a quite valid theory, and is also backed up by the discussion of Molly's abilities.

In fact, it seems to me that the Dresden form of magic can be most accurately described in parallel to muscle, with several forms of specialization and limited multipurpose value. I'm quite curious to see if Dresden wizards can be equally and highly skilled in multiple fields.

 

Unless perhaps the emotion is not the source of the power, but rather a sort of "tool" Dresden uses as a focus, similar to the words (Forzare, etc) and the staff.

So for example, when Dresden's magic "gastank" is 100% full even relatively minor emotions make it easy to draw upon it. But when he has only 10% left he needs more powerfull emotions to reach the last bits of magic in his tank.

It is also possible that experienced wizards like Ebenezar and so on don't need emotions the way Dresden does, and that one day as he grows in skill, Dresden too will be able to use his magic without constantly needing different emotions to help.

This might be an interesting question to post to the official forums. Butcher does post there at times so there is a chance we could get his opinion. Though I guess the answer might be spoilerish.

 

Doesnt it say somewhere in Small Favor that Wizards draw in most of their power from their surroundings? Thats why the pentagram or whatever that the Denarians used worked so well against Ivy and Dresden it prevented them from drawing in anymore power from their surroundings. Thats why Harry drew in as much as possible before it went up.

 

Good lord, are there any limits to the unholy powers of IRC to spawn dissertations on magical theory?

Nope, clearly not. Anyway, regarding Dresden's "brute" power, this clearly is something that sets him out to a certain degree from other wizards. Just look at Ramirez, around Harry's age, similar-ish experiences to Harry in fights and he's clearly a fairly skilled Wizard with Council training. Yet while Harry can sustain a shield that simply blocks all incoming projectiles and certain magical forces (he even upgrades it to make it more resilient to different elements such as fire) Ramirez has to make a shield of water/air that diffuses the force behind an attack, rather than erecting an outright magical wall like Harry does.

This seems to challenge the Harry and Elaine have different way's of thinking analogy, I'll have to have a look at some of JB's posts on his forums on the issue.

Still, should provide for some interesting discussion, eh Taure?

 

@Taure: Has it ever been said a wizard can 'learn' to grow stronger as they age? Or is this just an assumption? If it only took time for a weaker more controlled wizard (Elaine for example) to 'catch up' to Dresden why is such an emphasis placed on strength? Harry observed that Quintis... Snakeboy from Deadbeats had only a modest talent, yet honed to a razor edge. He was around the Merlin's age, why was he not at the Merlin's strength?

 

Not that I recall, but then it hasn't been said that they don't either. Which is why I had that handy qualifier "may".

Even if you gain power over time or as you get better at magic or become more experienced, this doesn't mean that people of the same age must be equally powerful. Some people's powers may grow at different rates, and then you have the fact that people don't start the race equal.

But yeah, not committing to anything in terms of a definite statement as to whether it is possible to grow in power or not.

 

He might have been. As yet, there has been no evidence of the Merlin's capabilities.

@Ragon: Yes it does.

The two facts combined in Small Favor were what made the Archive so powerful. She utilized entirely precise, fairly weak (in an absolute sense) magic.

I again posit a parallel to human muscle: you have endurance, precision, speed, and power.

Given that Butcher is an acknowledged LARPer, I find it likely that he assigns abilities on a point system such as that used in D&D character creation.

 

The ability of wizards to draw magic from their surroundings is another oddity.

I'm tempted to say that it's just another way of getting magic, just as you can get magic from death and emotions etc.

The reason why Dresden had to gather up magic in SF was because magic wouldn't work inside the circle so he only had what he could take in with him.

Thresholds are also interesting. You'd think that a wizard, if he can draw magic from his surroundings, would be able to use magic even after he had crossed a threshold, because he could use the magic in the surroundings within the threshold. Yet we have descriptions of a wizard's magic behind left behind when he passes through a threshold uninvited, which rather goes against the idea that a wizard mainly gets his magic from his surroundings, because it seems to imply that the magic is something that the wizard possesses to leave behind.

 

I would say the reason you get stronger as you get older is just experience really. You learn to use the minimum amount of power for best result. Dresden uses lots of power to use fire to kill something and McCoy uses a fraction of the power to get the same result. Its all about the experience and learning to use your power wisely.


@Taure. Like I said he couldnt draw magic from his surroundings inside the circle so he drew in as much as possible before hand.

 

Or it could be that Harry uses emotions etc. better and channel more raw 'magical power' out of them than other people can. People wouldn't just call Harry an extremely powerful wizard if any other wizard could learn to harness magic like he could.

That wouldn't explain the barely magical people that we see from time to time at Mac's pub.

 

I think this might refer to the ability of a wizard to draw in magic from his surroundings. As a matter of reference, the only times we specifically see Dresden utilize internal magic are the Soulfire, and when he is preparing a death curse. The wording around the death curse that this internal magic is a MUCH more finite resource than external magic, and is in fact tied to the wizard's life.

Edit - To accommodate for Dresden's declared strength, I feel that it reflects on the quantity of magic he can draw in from the environment. Alternatively, this may refer to the amount of internal magic/life force he has.

To me, this suggests that magic is performed by using small pieces of internal magic (smaller as control increases) to draw in external magic, shape it, and utilize it. This then logically proceeds to a concept that the magic is essentially fueled by their life, which is also supported by the assorted descriptions of magic provided throughout the stories.

Given the explanation of soulfire as essentially using the soul as fuel, this theory then implies that the soul exists separate of life, which is supported by the various fae, demons and outsiders, which possess life, but not a soul, and the ghosts, which are (if I recall correctly) souls without life.

 

Sesc: might it have been in relation to a child gaining power as they grow older?

I posted this topic on the Jim Butcher forums too, here's one reply I made which, amusingly, came out much more as a "skill = power" than I had intended.

With regards to Darius' point, I think my point in that post is applicable (the italics bit). So Harry is still special because of his powerful spell-casting ability, just for a slightly different reasoning.

I'm not sure. There does seem to be this irreconcilable contradiction in Dresden: on different occasions magic appears to be coming from either outside the wizard or inside the wizard, and the event in Small Favour with the circle shows that they cannot both be true (that indicates heavily that magic comes from without).

Edit for Glernaj:

So would what makes Harry a powerful wizard be the quantity of that internal magic he has? Or his ability to draw his magic from his surroundings?

If the second, it still remains essentially a methodological distinction when it comes to power levels.

If the first, it would be an answer, provided that the system by which magic is used that you set forth is actually true. Though one wonders why Harry doesn't feel exhausted when he leaves behind this internal magic (which is what gives the ability to draw external magic) at a threshold, but does when it runs out as he uses it.

Also, if this internal magic is what determines how much external magic you can draw in, then why is it that, for example, what happened with Lara is possible? In that case Harry would be running low on his internal magic by your theory, as he was exhausted, yet when a new source of external (external to the internal power source, that is, not external to Harry) power (power from the emotion of lust) came along he was able to manage a shield as powerful as any he had ever made.

 

Not necessarily, I feel there make actually be a discrete limit to the amount of power a given wizard can draw into himself from the environment at any one time.

Of course, Luccio's comment in Small Favors regarding how long each of them would be able to sustain the greater circle containing the Archive suggests that his strength is most likely in the amount of internal magic he has available.

 

As an interesting note the Merlin started out as a 'brute force' caster a la Dresden.

 

The way I believe the threshold magic works is that it severely restricts the ability to draw in external magic. Thus, it has no effect on the internal magic. My most probable answer for the situation with Lara was that the heightened emotion made him unconsciously more willing to go closer to death.

 

For the threshold question, could it be possible that within the limits of a threshold, the magic is intrinsically "bound" or "claimed" by the threshold, and thus couldn't be absorbed, collected, or manipulated by a wizard who had crossed the threshold? And then the wizard whose threshold it was could draw on it more easily, since they already had a "claim" on it?

Why do I get the feeling i'm ignoring some basic threshold fact?

 

I don't have my copy of White Night with me, so someone will have to check this for me.

I seem to recall during the boat fight, when Harry is drawing heat energy in for his giant fire spell, he mentions something about how when he normally casts spells, he uses his own energy/his will as a source. It says something in there about how wizards can't create energy, they have to take it from somewhere else or something.

Personally, my opinion is, they use their own energy for the normal sized stuff, but when it comes time for a huge spell, or when they're running on empty, they draw in from the environment.

I really hope Butcher goes more in depth later on.

 

@Samuel Black: While your opinion has merit your example is moot. Harry drew in energy form the lake, not to fuel his GigaFuego, but to freeze the water, securing an escape route.

Also remember the Nightmare form Grave Peril, how he stole some of Harry's power? HOw would that factor into things?