Hagrid could cast spells from with his broken wand inside of his umbrella, it stands to reason that a cane wand could cast spells without unsheathing the wand.

 

There are stories that say wands are filled with runes, and every new spell cast, the rune version is inscribed so the wand learns more magic over time. The elder wand simply knows all spells already and fully capable of using them.
Other say a wand is a portable ritual circle inside it.

 

I like this; especially if it only applies to the first wand. Poor families might still insist on shuffling around hand-me-down wands because 7 Galleons is still a lot to invest, particularly for a pre-teen who is likely to whack his wand against the steering wheel of a defiant flying car.

Mrs. Weasley patted Ron on the shoulder, "You pass your OWLs, and we'll make sure that you get a wand that suits you."

"What happens if I don't pass?"

"You wouldn't need a wand then, would you?"

Until Pottermore standardized the cost, I suspected that Harry's wand was unusually cheap because the most expensive part- the phoenix feather- was contributed from a friend.

 

I've always been interested in staves when it comes to Harry Potter. More than once I've had the thought of writing a fic about it.

My theory goes as thus:

All wizards are capable of channeling and shaping magic without an implement to assist them. However, different implements have different upsides and downsides. Wands are simply the easiest to use and achieve satisfactory results with.. even if Spectacular results are harder to achieve with one than say, a Staff.

There are also different sorts of implements. A wand is a tool meant to help you shape and guide your magic quickly and precisely. It's diverse, easier to use, easier to handle, and all around more convienent for your every-day wizard who doesn't have to worry about getting the absolute most possible power out of every spell. A staff is primarily an amplification tool with some benefits when it comes to shaping and guiding, but not nearly as much as a wand.

A theoretical situation for you:

Three wizards are all casting a spell meant to summon fire in some shape or another. One with a wand, one with a staff, and one without any sort of implement. Each of them is a master at using their tool (or lack thereof) of choice.

The wand-wizard summons his fire quickly, easily, and shapes it exactly how he wishes it to be shaped. He can make the fire dance or move or shift in whatever pattern or way he wants it to. No matter what he's trying to do with the fire, he can do it easier than the other two, but when it comes to pure power, he lags behind the staff wizard. And unlike the wizard without an implement, he is entirely reliant on his wand. If he is unable to use it for any reason, he's basically helpless, since the wand does so much of the shaping and guiding of the magic for him. Wand wizards are the easiest of the three to read and predict.

The staff-wizard summons his fire quickly as well, but it's a greater effort on his part, and his control is not as good as the Wand Wizard's, He can summon a fireball, or a fire wall, or other such things, but most delicate control and shaping are beyond him. Also, just like the wand-wizard, if his staff is taken from him, he is greatly weakened. However, because the staff does not do as much of the shaping for him, he can still accomplish some things, however, his results will be much weaker, slower, and less controlled than that of the wizard without any sort of tool. Staff wizards also tend to be easier to predict and read than a toolless wizard, though not so much as wanded wizards.

The wizard without any sort of implement or magical tool summons his fire a bit slower, his fire is neither as precise and easily controlled as the wand-wizard, or as powerful as the staff wizard. But the only way to stop him from casting his spell is to make him completely unable to concentrate, whereas both the Wand and Staff wizard are almost entirely reliant on their implements. Furthermore, since his casting is so intensely personal, his intent and what he is casting are harder to read for an opponent.

Each of these 'styles' has other up sides and down sides, but this was meant to be a 'simple' comparison.

So why are Wands so Dominant? Why do you rarely see staves and almost never see wandless casting? The answer is a combination of several factors.

A. Conveinence. Wands are the easiest to use and the most versatile tool. They're also the easiest to learn. In a day and age where magical combat isn't nearly as common or important of a skill as it once was, they're simply the most efficient tool for your lay-wizard's purposes.

B. Ease of Production. Creating a staff is a long, arduous, and rather personal effort. Each staff is the product of weeks or even months of effort. Not to mention the fact that the required materials are a much, much larger investment.

C. Tradition. Wands have been used for Generations. They've become so inimical and important to wizardry that they're seen almost as a symbol of wizardry itself. For this reason, they're wide spread, and the use of them is taught almost exclusively throughout the wizarding world's primary educational institutions.

D. Loss of Knowledge. This one is inter-related with tradition. Since wands have been used for so long, much of staff-lore has been lost. There are no Ollivander's for staves, due to the difficult, time consuming, and somewhat personal nature of the staff-creation process. While the knowledge still exists, it may as well be entirely lost and forgotten in the minds of your average lay-wizard.

E. Wandless casting is seen as generally inferior. The 'learning curve' is extremely steep. With no implements to help you shape the magic, you must master every aspect yourself as well as you can. The amount of hours and effort put in to mastering wandless casting is exponential when compared to wanded casting.

..so, yeah, that's the idea. What do you think?

Edit: That's probably the nerdiest thing I've ever written. Holy shit.

 

- HP and DH.

I think if staffs were so powerful, then they would be used anyway, as complexity of creating a suitable wand for yourself is extremely high and they are used after all - that's why there are wandmakers, not every Joe from the street can make a wand as powerful as Ollivanders. According to Pottermore the foreigners from all over the world buy Ollivander wands, so it seems they are the best. Another cap against "British magical world is backwards stagnant place".

The same would apply for staffs - demand creates supply, after all. If need arose there would be staff-makers, ministry would fund research, lost secrets would be rediscovered, but we don't see it. In the Quidditch World Cup final a hundred thousands wizards and witches from practically all countries rised their wand in greeting.

So therefore I think that despite giving you a badass wise wizard look (coincidentally that's why I think many has a thing for them) staffs are simply primitive focusing tool if they where ever used at all: unwieldy and unfocused - the most compatible vision of it for me is in the jbern's "The Lie I've Lived" fic.

 

Wands came into use around the time when wizards segregated from mundane society and had to conceal themselves. A wizard of any level can conceal a wand on his person while you need advanced charms to conceal a staff.

This alone convinced the majority of contemporary magical scholars to prefer wands and to figure out new incantations to use with the new foci. Most of these were updated to the lingua franca of the time, Latin, which facilitated standardization of the most common spells among a far larger group of magicians.

 

@Bikiluf I don't know if that fits the timeline very well; the Ollivanders have been making wands for (I think) around two thousand years before the statute of secrecy. That suggests to me that wands have been a part of wizarding culture for much longer.

Anyway my thoughts on the preference of wands over staves is simply ease of use. Sure a big bearded wizard with a big staff looks awesome in the painting of a prog rocker's van, but imagine how unwieldy a massive stick like that would be to use? It also begs the question: which direction does the spell come out? If it's axially like a wand then it's going to be more unwieldy than a wand probably from center-of-balance issues (see also: Jaffa staff weapons in the Stargate universe). If spells come out radially then you have a pretty good chance of shooting yourself in the face every time you pick up your staff.

 

I do like the idea of mundane items being disguised as wands/staves, however. Umbrella wands, maybe rolled up newspaper wands (hah, how would that work?), cane-staves, et cetera. A bit silly of an idea, but I could see "spy" wizards in other countries using such things to blend in among muggles.

 

That could also work as a sort of concealed weapon for assassins. Drawing a wand/walking around with your wand drawn is a big warning sign, but no one would see it coming if you were able to cast with your sports section.

That's also something that I haven't seen explored in fics much: what is the socially accepted way of drawing your wand in public to do some minor magic, or is it just not done? Do wizards in general acknowledge the deadly potential of wands in their daily life, or is that merely a secondary function no one really thinks about?

 

Maybe the same as walking around with a knife--if you've got one out, you'd better be about to use it for like cutting an apple or cleaning your nails or something, lol.

Yay post number 500!

 

Staff-to-wand seems more like a technology jump than anything else. Those who craft such things got better and better at making them, and eventually figured out how to make them smaller.

Do note that wands require movements to cast spells. If staffs worked the same way, it would be absolutely exhausting to use them after only a short period of casting magic. It's far easier to flick and swish a wand than it is to swing and twirl a staff. So it's either an issue of convenience, or an issue of wands just being better than staffs.

It's also possible that wizards have never used staffs at all, and the common image of them doing so springs from Muggles in the distant past seeing old wizards with walking sticks or staffs casting magic, and assuming it's the staff, and not noticing the wand in their other hand.

As to the creation of wands themselves, Ollivander does indeed prefer to use three specific types of cores. That's because, according to him, other cores are too 'temperamental,' and that's a detriment for some reason.

If one assumes that wordhammer's conjecture is true, or at least close to the truth, that would imply that it's not so much a matter of different cores giving the wand different powers, as it is different wand cores giving wands different personalities. It's entirely possible that Phoenix Feather, Unicorn Tail Hair, and Dragon Heartstring merely produce extremely congenial wands that learn quickly and get along fairly well with everyone. That would explain why Ollivander uses them to the exclusion of all others, and why he shuns things like Veela Hair. Fleur's wand works perfectly well for her, so it's obviously not a mechanical issue. It's not that they're inferior hardware. Rather, Veela Hair may not take terribly well to a normal person for a variety of reasons (personality mismatch, only likes those with Veela blood, shuns those that aren't beautiful, ect), which makes wands made with Veela Hair cores 'temperamental.'

If I had to guess as to the various issues of wand theory, I'd put together something like this:

Wood: Wood has to come from Bowtruckle infested trees. That's a fact. Other wood just isn't magical enough to make a wand with. Certain woods are noted as having something to do with the personality or inclination of the wizard the wand gets matched to, which implies that the wood used to craft a wand has some effect on a wand's personality ("The wand chooses the wizard," and wood affects personality, so certain wands with certain woods are much more inclined to pick certain kinds of people over others).

- Core: The core of the wand determines the bulk of the personality of the wand itself, and governs a wand's ability to learn. Ollivander must cater to a large base of diverse people, and thus favors the three core types with the most congenial and agreeable personalities, but other manufacturers in different locations of the world that have a smaller or more predictable base of clients might prefer other core materials, which match their most common customer types more closely.

- Length: When Ollivander is fitting a wand for someone, he uses a magical tapemeasure to measure the various dimensions of their body. While I have no proof, the fact that wands are not of standard length, but have deliberately varying lengths, suggests to me that it isn't wand core at all that determines, for lack of a better word, the 'strength' of a wand, so much as it is how close a wand's Arithmantic dimensions match the Arithmancy of a wizard's body. Ollivander wouldn't use the measuring unless it mattered, and if we rule out both wood (from Pottermore) and the core (from wordhammer's theory), then there's only one other varying aspect of a wand that could rule this particular ratio.

It has been argued and proven extensively that Harry Potter has no power levels in the conventional sense, and I happen to have argued against it quite vehemently in past arguments. There is no difference from one wizard to the next in "magical power." It's not even a concept that seems to exist in the Harry Potter universe. That being said, there is a clear variance in how well a wizard can use their wand that varies from wizard to wizard, and seems to have little to do with the skill of the owner themselves. I believe that how well the length of a wand matches up with the dimensions of a wizard's own body may very well be the determining point for this vague X factor of "how well the wand and wizard synch together." And since Arithmancy is literally magical mathematics (albeit one that (debatably) is focused on celestial bodies and their relations to the mundane world), it stands to reason that there is probably an Arithmancy formula or equation that wandmakers can use to determine the best possible length match for a particular witch or wizard.

Or to put it another way, Voldemort's wand was not "powerful stuff" because it was Yew and Phoenix Feather, but rather because 13 1/2 inches was a particularly good match to the measurements of Tom Riddle's own body.

 

You have to keep in mind that the measurement were taken when the wizard/witch was 11 years old. The formula would have to factor that in some way.

 

Whose to say that the arithmetic ratio doesn't stay the same from the age of 11 until the wizard is fully grown?

 

It could be that a wizard's magic/soul is expressed phenotypically through their physical proportions.

 

This is my favorite theory, and the fic that I think developed it best is More Equal than you Know by The Obsidian Warlock (sadly abandoned). A thousand years ago a wizard had to perform an hour-long ritual to achieve the same thing a modern wizard can do with his wand in a second. The author explains that by waving the wand and speaking the incantation the wizard is actually performing the very same ritual (e.g. transfiguration of material), only thousands of times faster. Wands aren't just wooden sticks with magic feathers stuck in them: they're actually the magic equivalent of a microprocessor.

However, the story I linked doesn't go into detail about how such a device would be created. I imagine it would be a lot more complicated than drilling a hole in a stick of wood and putting a core inside, like many fics describe wandmaking.

As for staves/staffs: just imagine they're the old, bulky computers while wands are the modern, sleek ones with more processing power, better efficiency (channeling more magic), etc.