Great Movies
From Bre Whalen:
Ever wonder what the five principal exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration are?
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it is revealed that Gamp’s Law governs the use of magic to create objects. However, there are five principal exceptions to the law that can’t be created or changed by even the most skilled wizard.
As the release of the final Harry Potter movie approaches, fans discover that only one of the exceptions is revealed. Harry Potter expert and author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide ® to The World of Harry Potter, Tere Stouffer, offers her opinions on the remaining exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration.
In Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling reveals only one exception to the law: Food.
Hermione says, “It's impossible to make good food out of nothing! You can Summon it if you know where it is, you can transform it, you can increase the quantity if you've already got some. ’” And that pretty much sums up what we know about Gamp’s Law and its five exceptions.
But what else can’t be conjured or transfigured?
- Money and Shelter: This is two items, but they are often inextricably linked: one can’t have a beautiful or large home without having money to pay for it. Although an interior of a room or area can be expanded, as the Weasleys did while camping at the Quidditch World Cup and while riding ministry-borrowed cars, and valuable objects can be multiplied, if the intention is to suffocate a thief inside a vault at Gringott’s, they can’t be created from scratch.
- Clothing: Even wizards of great skill—Remus Lupin and Molly Weasley included—cannot seem to conjure up new robes and are instead stuck with old, patched ones, ones that are too short, or ones that are hopelessly out of style. If clothing were not one of the exceptions, Lupin would have long ago conjured a new wardrobe, and Ron would have avoided his dress-robe embarrassment at the Yule Ball.
- Body Part Removed by Dark Magic: In the wizarding world, all sorts of body parts can be repaired and even conjured from scratch (like the regrowing of Harry’s bones after his quidditch accident in The Chamber of Secrets.) But these same body parts—and the entire body, in the case of the Killing Curse—cannot be replaced or repaired if Dark Magic was involved, no matter how skilled the healer.
- Temperature: The conjuring of heat or cold or the transfiguring of something warm into something cold (and vice versa). Although wizards can produce water (Aguamenti!) and can emit steam from their wands through the hot-air charm—steam that lightly melts objects like snow or dries objects like sopping-wet clothing—wizards cannot raise or lower the temperature of the air, stop rain or snow from falling, slow or speed the wind, or heat or cool large bodies of water.
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
