The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter (22 page)

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Authors: Tere Stouffer

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In addition, the chess pieces offer advice, give opinions on what they believe to be bad moves, and try to talk their way out of being sacrificed for the good of the game. It’s like having a bunch of loud-mouthed cowards shouting out their advice on the game.

Dueling with Wands

Dueling with wands is not much like dueling with swords or pistols. It involves standing face to face with another wizard, wands out, and seeing who can bark out the fastest, most effective, most disarming (and, if necessary, most pain-inducing) spell, charm, hex, or curse. (See Chapter 12 for a list of blistering curses that will have your opponent crying “uncle” in no time.)

Wizards would no more parry with wands as nonwizards would fence with plastic spoons, because a wand’s strength is in its ability to deliver spells, not in the actual strength of the wood. Wands can and do break, a condition that either renders the wand useless or causes spells to backfire. So you’ll hear no clinking of wands during a wizard duel, just lots of spells being yelled among younger wizards (older wizards who have mastered nonverbal spells will utter no sounds at all), with the one who strikes first—and hardest—winning the battle.

MAGIC TALE

In
Eragon
and
Eldest
, the first two books in the
Inheritance
fantasy series by Christopher Paolini, dueling practice plays a large role both in the lives of dragon riders (who are much like Hogwarts students in that they must learn all the rules of the use of magic) and among elves (themselves very magical). Both riders and elves practice swordplay by applying a spell to the sword blade that blunts and dulls it. In this way, two swordsmen can practice as if in a real battle, but without causing any harm to the opponent.can practice as if in a real battle, but without causing any harm to the opponent.

But wizard duels do share some similarities with the more traditional forms of dueling. Like medieval duels and those conducted regularly between roughly 1500 to the mid-1900s, wizard duels may begin with a formal bow by both contestants, who must pay careful attention, during the duel, to their techniques in gripping and using their wands. Likewise, in both fencing and shooting practice, much time is spent perfecting technique.

But rarely is dueling about niceties. Although dueling with wands is a sport, it can also be a personal war, just as with sword and pistol duels. In this way, although young wizards compete in a Dueling Club at Hogwarts (started by Professor Gilderoy Lockhart), if the two wizards in the duel have a personal grudge, the match will soon turn ugly. Compare a fencing match, which is played with blunt-ended rapiers, to a true sword duel, such as those in
The Lord of the Rings
and
The Chronicles of Narnia,
and you see few niceties or emphasis on technique—just Lord Aragorn or High King Peter slicing off an opponent’s head.

The difference between dueling for sport and dueling for real is as striking as the difference between a professional boxing match and a street brawl: people often get killed in the latter. Think of the quick-draw pistol duels in the Old West, where the idea was to kill the other shooter with the first shot, not to rack up points so that your team wins the dueling match.

In this way, true wizard duels—that is, those played not for sport but those that are a fight for life and death—are intense battles. Dark Wizards strike fast and hard, giving their opponents little time to duck and cover, deflect the curse, or yell a countercurse. And Dark Wizards in a duel do not hesitate to use the Unforgivable Curses (see Chapter 12), which lead to torture, death, or complete control by the Dark Wizard so that his opponent must do his bidding.

MAGIC TALE

The Ministry of Magic is intensely anti-dueling, as have been most government agencies through the ages. Governments ban dueling because the practice flouts the law by searching for justice in a duel rather than in a court of law. Historically, Muggle duels nearly always began with an offense, whether real or perceived. The offender was then not channeled through the legal system but instead challenged to a duel by the offended, who chose the rules: fight to first blood; fight to serious wounding; or fight to death.
West Side Story
depicts a modern-day duel, as Bernardo and Riff fight each other, ostensibly to serious wounding, over perceived offenses. Unfortunately, they end up fighting to the death.

Like duels with swords, wizard duels require the assignment of a second, a trusted representative assigned by each dueler, who assures that the contest is a fair fight.

Gobstones

Gobstones is a game played often by wizard children that’s similar to marbles. However, because few people are expert in marble-playing anymore, here’s the lowdown on the nonwizard version:

1. You first draw a small-ish circle on the ground, as well as a larger circle a few feet outside the first.

2. All players agree on how many
⁵?8-inch marbles to put in the circle and, standing behind the larger circle, players throw that number of marbles into the smaller circle.

3. Taking turns, each player throws, tosses, rolls, or barely flicks a
³?4-inch shooter (also called a taw or boss; a large marble) into the circle, with the goal of hitting the smaller marbles that are in the circle hard enough to knock them out of the circle.

4. As with chess, if you knock a marble out of the circle, you get to keep it. If you’re playing “keepsies,” you get to keep the marble indefinitely. If you’re playing “fair,” you give back all captured marbles at the end of the game.

5. If your shooter stays in the small circle, your turn is over. If the shooter comes out of the small circle, you get to take another turn.

KING’S ENGLISH

In Britain, gob means to spit; thus, gobstones are spitting stones. The word is borrowed from a Scottish Gaelic word that means beak or mouth (the area from which spit originates). Shut your gob is the British version of shut up, and gobsmacked or gobstruck refers to being astonished.

1. The player with the most marbles at the end of the game wins.

If you’ve ever played bocce, the two games are almost identical, except that bocce is like marbles on steroids; the balls used are much larger.

Gobstones, then, is a wizard version of marbles, in which the player whose marble is knocked out of the circle not only loses the marble, but also gets shot with a nasty liquid by the marbles that remain in the circle.

Exploding Snap

Snap is a common children’s card game, played by two or more players. The entire deck of cards is dealt, but players do not look at their cards; instead, each player turns a card face up on a pile in the center of the table. When a player turns up a card of the same color and value (such as two red fives or two black kings), the first player to yell “snap” gets all the cards in the pile. The first player to hold all the cards in the deck wins the game.

Turning this simple children’s game on its ear, wizards play Exploding Snap. Admittedly, the wizard version is initially easier to play than regular Snap, because the dealer doesn’t have to shuffle; wizards use self-shuffling cards. But after the cards are dealt, Exploding Snap has an entirely different personality than Snap, because the cards might explode at any moment. Naturally, the possibility of exploding cards creates a more strategic game than regular Snap.

Another use for exploding cards is to build a house of cards, which, what with the occasional destruction wrought by explosion, is akin to building a house of cards on an active fault line or during a category-five hurricane.

Trading Cards

More of a collectible than a game, trading cards with moving pictures of famous wizards come in packages with Chocolate Frogs. Wizard kids collect and trade the famous wizard cards, either among friends or through common-room notice boards, in the same way that Muggle children collect an Alex Rodriguez or Derek Jeter baseball cards. The most popular cards include:

Chapter 1 shares the accomplishments of these famous wizards, witches, sorceresses, Druids, alchemists, and astronomers.

Chocolate Frogs are both challenging (they tend to jump away) and healthy (staving off the effects of dementors—see Chapter 15); they are considered excellent holiday and get-well gifts.

As with sports stars, the wizards on trading cards tend to value the tribute to them. When Albus Dumbledore faces losing his many titles and privileges within the wizarding community, as well as facing the possibility of a jail sentence in Azkaban, he jokes that they can take away anything, but not his place on Chocolate Frog cards!

Part 3

Magical Places

This part gives you details on London’s wizard gathering spot—Diagon Alley—including the background on stores, bars, the hospital, and other locations. Then, you travel to Hogwarts School and Hogsmeade, England’s only all-wizard town, and sample what the headmaster and shop owners offer there. Finally, you take a quick flight around the globe to visit two additional wizarding schools.

Chapter 7

Where the Witches Go in London

In This Chapter

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