What powers do you think are appropriate for an HP wizard in Middle Earth?

In broad terms, there are three approaches to take:

1. The wizard keeps their HP powers.

2. The wizard's HP powers are replaced with the abilities of a Middle-Earth native (elf or Istar or Maia), which usually must be learnt afresh.

3. The wizard keeps their HP powers but these are "translated" into a set of abilities more suited to the LotR world.

Personally, I am not a fan of #1, as I feel like pure HP powers clash badly with the LotR world. It can work for a quick crackish story, but not for a serious effort.

I like either of #2 and #3. And if you go route #2 then that's fairly simple, no more needs to be said.

But route #3 leaves a lot to be decided and is fraught with peril. I actually think #3 has the most potential, but is often badly done - the "translation" is often just HP powers but weaker or unreliable, often inconsistently unreliable to meet the demands of the plot.

Which leads to the question of this thread. If you're taking route #3, what powers do you give to your HP wizard?

My thoughts:

A. Levitation, banishing, and summoning, and some animation (such as animating a mop to mop the floor).

B. Conjuration of light, fire, water.

C. Shield Charm.

D. Legilimency and occlumency.

E. Potions, including with substitute ingredients using what is available in Middle-Earth

F. Ability to enchant items to be unbreakable, sharp, and light.

G. Animagus transformation.

H. Ability to control animals.

I. Ability to accelerate growth of plants.

To this list I would also include "arcane magic", including dark arts, which is suitable LotR-ish in tone that it doesn't clash with the setting. Stuff like the creation of inferi and horcruxes, as well as maybe some of the less direct way of protecting locations, such as unplottability and repelling charms.

In exchange for losing a ton of their powers, I'd probably give the wizard liberation from their wand, letting them cast the magic wandlessly, or in cases of enchantment, through some form of artifice.

How would you do it?

 

#1 only. If you change the powers then can it really be still called a HP wizard?

 

The very nature of a crossover is to be an AU of the fictional universe which involves changing things about the worldbuilding. Insisting that nothing from the canonical system can be changed just sounds like a rejection of the premise of doing a crossover in the first place. In any event, this thread is focused on the question of how to best implement option #3.

 

I prefer @Steelbadger 's approach.

HP magic stays the same, but your protagonist does not have access to them, or is working to regain them.

Also agree with Andrela, implementing 2 or 3 really distorts the purposes of having a crossover in the first place. Sure, in fanfiction you can do anything, but there's not really much fun in reading 2 or 3 unless 3 is the challenge itself. And the answer to 3 is Steelbadger's approach. So....


TLDR: https://forums.darklordpotter.net/threads/the-shadow-of-angmar-hp-lotr.28486/

 

Andrela brings up an issue I do have with this sort of question - if you change too much in the course writing a crossover I think you end up not really writing a crossover, so much as an AU of only one of the universes.

So in order for #3 to work, for me, you have to keep a lot of the flavour of HP magic. And for me that means you need the wizard in question to be using their magic for small, every day things rather than just the more arcane, big deal type stuff that is my perception of LotR magic. So whatever powers you give them, they need to be able to do small, normal things as well as big stuff.

In your list, A is a definite for me, that needs to be there. As are B, C, D, and G.

Potions...could work, but unless you imbue them with knowledge somehow, they surely need to be doing a lot of experimentation and basically re-developing potions from scratch, which is a big deal. Not every wizard has that knowledge, and for those that do it seems to me like it'd be a time consuming process.

F feels too limited for me, I'd expand on it and give them pretty broad abilities to imbue objects with magical traits. It lets you hark back to some HP stuff and keep some of the feel of HP magic - doorknobs that bite elves for example.

H and I don't really feel HP to me, except in limited senses. A parselmouth being able to control and direct snakes, for example, works for me. If you went down the route of being able to speak to and command a specific other type of animal, it wouldn't be too far a step for me, but it being all animals under their control is just a bit too far for it to feel HP for me.

 

All I can say is that 2 and 3 leave a bad taste in my mouth, even if they were to be done properly. I don't even see the point of reading such a story if I'm in the mood to read hp fanfiction.

I'd rather they be limited to HP magic without their wand, though the Ilvermony story makes it seem like creating a minimal functioning wand isn't too hard, so that might ruin things.

 

1.5 Wizard is born there and orphaned there/taken there as a baby or possibly small child. Has no understanding of his magical heritage and performs accidental magic. With a limited understanding of magic, the main character should not immediately wreck everyone else, but instead has to basically invent the wheel himself. Sires children and basically becomes the founder of a new people.
I'm actually forming a bit of a plot bunny where to save Harry, his parents come up with a way to send him to a different dimension, and they send the book with him.

 

https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/ilvermorny
Keep in mind James is a muggle and althought Isolt seems to have some sort of connection with the horned serpent, the wand isn't even for her, but rather an unrelated kid.

 

It all depends on the story. I see no reason why you couldn't write a compelling story with a canonically powerful HP wizard in Middle Earth, but if you feel some powers are not fitting for the setting, then rather than changing the HP magic I'd add necessary spoilers to Middle Earth.

Say you feel transfiguration would break the setting, then have the Will of Aulë resist the effort. If you think orcs shouldn't bee too easy cannon fodder for your wizard, add magical resistance similar to HP canon giants. There's no reason why fiendfyre should work the same way in Middle Earth as it does in Hogwarts.

Middle Earth has plenty of gods and demigods and magic of it's own to stop HP magic from being any more game breaking than it is in HP canon if used creatively.

Potions is the only thing I'd definitely take away from a HP wizard, as finding replacements for missing ingredients just feels too convenient. Unless you really make them work for it by building a whole new theory of potion making based on ingredients found locally.

 

I think I've talked around this a few times in the SoA WbA thread, but I kinda consider 1 and 3 to not really be entirely mutually exclusive.

The reason for this is that the nature of Tolkien magic is largely unaddressed. Personally, I interpret it as being an extension of the music of the ainur which is used to create the entire world. This means that there is only a single hard limitation that must be imposed by any system which is some reinterpreted subset of the powers available to the ainur: you cannot create life.

You can repurpose existing life, you can even create a simulacrum of it, but you cannot create souls (the flame imperishable). That ability is the sole province of Eru. This doesn't really clash with Harry Potter magic. I don't think anyone would argue that portraits, for example, have their own soul, and it's also worth pointing out that animals also do not really require a full soul.

A not quite so hard-and-fast rule is that you can't really fuck with human souls. There's a bit of leeway here. You can extend a human's life indefinitely, but any such action will come at a cost, and it is simply impossible to return a human to life without Eru's blessing. Usefully, this matches a similar known law in Harry Potter magic.

The rest of it, the flash and the bang of Harry Potter magic isn't, in my view, mechanically incompatible with Tolkien magic. It's merely thematically incompatible. Fundamentally, Harry Potter magic is simple and mundane, while Tolkien magic is meant to be entirely mysterious. That is the major hurdle to overcome, but it is maybe not as hard as it might at first seem.

Tolkien's form of magic doesn't have the neat 'edges' Harry Potter magic does. It's not about spells, wands or wizards, not really. Every action by every person has some inherent power to it, but native power, knowledge, wisdom, ability, or valour can elevate a seemingly ordinary action to one of great significance. Men, for example, are not inherently capable of 'magic' according to Tolkien, and yet you cannot deny that Aragorn's ability to heal might seem magical, or that the Dunedain smiths who wrought the barrow blade used by Merry to greatly injure the Which King did not do something beyond the ordinary. Those who use magic in Tolkien don't work in terms of spells, but instead out of a deeper understanding of the world they inhabit, there results beyond the physical may be elicited as simply as we might pick up a ball. Men still operate in that world and can still perform actions which have effects beyond the physical, but they can't really perceive the reasoning behind this, the deeper threads of the world which connect cause and effect at a level beyond physical perception.

An example of this is in Galadriel's seeming ability to read the minds of those around her. Not only can she see the thoughts of others, but she can communicate her own thoughts to them without the need to speak. Tolkien considers language to be a fundamental quality of being a thinking, feeling being. Any being will naturally seek to communicate, and any physical being will seek to create a language through which that communication may be achieved. The Valar developed Valarin as part of their adoption of incarnate forms, and before that they communicated entirely through a direct mind-to-mind meeting. I'd posit that to a being such as Galadriel, the mind-to-mind form of communication might simply be the most clear method of communication.

Consider the difference between text-only (or audio-only) communication, and in-person communication. When communicating with someone face-to-face there is much more going on than the mere words being exchanged. I imagine mind-to-mind communication to be similar in concept, only taken further. Fundamentally, though, it is not, to her, a spell. It's more like me deciding to have a difficult conversation in person rather than over text message. Still ordinary, but better suited to the task at hand.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that I think Harry Potter style spells work reasonable well as a 'humanisation' of 'magic', as might be used by Elves or Ainur, to allow Men to influence the world despite being nearly blind to the strings they need to pull. Within SoA this is imagined as a power granted to Humans by Eru in order that they might learn to help him in the Second Music. Through the application of Harry Potter magic, and interactions with the deeper threads, Men might become more capable of understanding the world as Elves or Ainur do.

This means that the rules of Harry Potter magic which to not have parallels in Tolkien's system are really just limits in the translation of transcendental concepts to a human-understandable form. It also allows a story to weave together both mundane and mystical magics without either of them necessarily being 'out of context problems' for the setting.

In Shadow of Angmar I try to tiptoe around this distinction, with an additional facet that is Tolkien's 'goeteia', or Black Magic. Essentially, a 'bad' use of magic (whether mundane or mystical) is one which attempts to dominate the will or mind of others through some application of the power. I interpret this fairly loosely, by giving all things an echo of the music which was sung to create them, and an ongoing 'life' where that music may be twisted to other purposes by simple dint of repeated exposure over a great many years. Actions which seek to return those musical strains to their uncorrupted, natural forms, are 'good' magic, while actions which seek to overturn the natural order are 'bad'.

Because of the fairly 'blind' way that Harry Potter magic is applied it is much easier to fall into utilising goeteia through it, while the more mystical Tolkien style magic requires that the practitioner know what they are doing, and decide to go through with it anyway. I find this to be very helpful as well, as it allows a level of conflict to exist even between the magical interpretations of Harry Potter and Tolkien. This is helpful as it is through that conflict that I am able to explore the relationship between the two.

There is still one fairly problematic magic which needs to be considered, though: apparation. Fuck that shit.