What magic from the HP books is anomalous in some way?

Dedalus Diggle conjuring shooting stars is a big one. The range it implies, being able to cast spells that take effect in the upper atmosphere, is out of step with the range of HP magic we generally see.

Dumbledore casually conjuring hundreds of sleeping bags at once - enough for the entire population of Hogwarts - in Prisoner of Azkaban is another. You can maybe say this isn't an anomaly because it is Dumbledore casting the magic, but even so it is a bit unusual, not least because if he can conjure hundreds of sleeping bags at once then presumably he could also conjure hundreds of lethal projectiles at once.

Another "range" anomaly is Dumbledore banishing Harry's trunk in HBP from Privet Drive directly to The Burrow. Being able to cast a spell in London that takes effect several hundred miles away is a lot longer range than most other magic we see, and also raises a number of amusing scenarios where you could just banish exploding erumpent horns into Malfoy Manor etc.

Any others you can think of?

 

Dumbledore 'conjuring' all of those sleeping bags might be more along the lines of summoning them from elsewhere in Hogwarts. It may not even be him who did it - after all, the elves aren't physically present for feasts but still 'send' the food to the Great Hall, albeit that being a fixed location.

Diggle could be some sort of extremely high-up illusion or enchantment - after all, in Hogwarts we see a night sky in the Great Hall plenty of occasions, and yet the implication is not that the void of 'space' has been summoned into the upper rafters.

'It's in Hogwarts' is a bigger ameliorating factor than it being Dumbledore in many edge cases imho.

No idea about the trunk, that's fucking crazy, the fact that he can do it with an actively magic object doubly so. The Knights of Walpurgis should have woken up to a rain of grenades the night after their first debut.

 

The vanishing cabinets are one I think. There's no implied limit on their range, and they have no downsides. They either can't be warded against, or no one thinks to ward against them. Portkeys seem to be difficult to create, and one use only. Apparition requires concentration, can go disastrously wrong, and seems to get much more difficult when it's side along. It's unknown if there is an actual limit to the distance, but the existence and implied expense of international portkeys implies that for most, it can only be used domestically. Floo travel relies on existing networks, burns a resource, and can be remotely interfered with. Aside from the initial difficulty of making a pair of vanishing cabinets, there seem to be no downsides, and they can be used infinitely.

 

McGonagall conjuring food in CoS before that was forbidden.

 

Dumbledore also summons bottles of butterbeer apparently from hundreds of miles away when he goes to pick up Harry from the Dursleys in HBP.

 

This whole thread just makes me wonder how powerful the summoning charm is in the hands of a master. What can't you summon?

The strict dictionary definition of summoning is to urgently command to show up. It's not the gathering charm, or the getting charm, or the wanting charm, though I'm sure that's how it behaves for most wizards.

It has a counter-charm, clearly. The locket wasn't summonable for one. But that might be the only limitation, and who is going to go through the trouble unless the object is singularly valuable?

And the corollary, the banishing charm. Go Away. What can't you make go away?

 

Summoning and banishing from thin air rather than having the object actually physically travel the distance seems like something I'd chalk up to "it's Dumbledore" and just assume it was a unique piece of magic he could perform and no one else. Unique magic that few or no others can do is a thing (Voldemort's flight, which I think only Snape is also shown doing besides?). Just seems too ridiculous otherwise.

I would also include Time Turners in this. Ignoring the fact that a time machine introduces unnecessary complications into a story (why didn't they just fly the eagles to Mordor use a Time Turner to fix problems), even Rowling eventually recognized the problem when in OOTP she just had them all conveniently explode. And apparently there was a huge breakthrough in time magic because between POA and Cursed Child they went from closed loops to alternate timeline creation.

 

The idea that Voldemort invented self directed flight was always silly to me. I feel like it should just be a more onerous method of flying than riding a broom stick or sitting on a flying carpet, mostly used for emergencies.

With that being said, Dumbledore being able to see through the invisibility cloak in PS is an anomalous piece of magic. My guess would be that JKR had yet to invent the Hallows at that point, but it does sort of undermine the cloak's unique properties. I guess we can either assume that Dumbledore had some form of alarm set on the room with the mirror of Erised, and figured that it was probably Harry when he arrived and couldn't see anyone, or that he developed a specific spell after studying the cloak.

 

The shooting stars instead of rain are mentioned on the news in PS/SS as being reported "as far apart as Kent, Yorkshire, and Dundee." Given that those specific locations mentioned, instead of "across the country," I'm thinking that they are the result of individual wizards in each of the locations, rather than just one. I'm imagining a charm similar to the Dark Mark or the Flame-Freezing charm, a spell cast as a "cloud" in the sky that turns falling rain into shooting stars. It is sufficiently whimsical that I could easily see it as an uncommon but not difficult spell from a long time ago. It's just that wizards haven't had much reason to use it for a while, what with the whole secrecy thing.

 

Lily also flies as a child. And Harry either apparates or flies as a child too.

'It's Dumbledore' is a really lame excuse to me, and frankly, I hate the 'unique magic effect' issues of the series because many of them are only unique until JK needed them to be more common later for plot purposes-- like the Patronus or Occlumency.

 

Rowling has an unfortunate habit of adding elements that would have solved or invalidated problems introduced in earlier books*, as well as creating plot holes in earlier books for the sake of immediate plot convenience**.

Good books, wonderful setting. She just didn't sit down and plan everything out all at once, which led to some continuity errors.

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* In PS/SS, Dumbledore apparently flew to the Ministry on a broomstick instead of using Floo or Apparation. The Stunning Spell introduced in GoF would have been really useful to prevent Pettigrew escaping in PoA.
** To make the camping situation more difficult for the trio in DH, suddenly you can't directly create food with magic, leading to some of the points in this thread.

 

JKR's worldbuilding is a haphazard mess, nothing new there.

 

Does she create the food or does she summon a plate of sandwiches from the kitchen that the elves refill as they are being eaten?.