Subject: Re: Here it is! Magic in North America: Part One
Author:
Posted on: 2016-03-08 19:07:00 UTC
AWESOME!!!!
But I can't for the life of me work out how one would pronounce 'No-Majs'. 'Js' is an invalid letter combination in English... Is there a hiiden 'e' sound, do you think?
I guess I should put up a disclaimer first, huh? A'right - this piece of writing is owned by J.K. Rowling, and was found on Pottermore.com. I do not own anything, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah...
History of Magic in North America: 14th - 17th Century
Fourteenth Century – Seventeenth Century
By J.K. Rowling
Though European explorers called it ‘the New World’ when they first reached the continent, wizards had known about America long before Muggles (Note: while every nationality has its own term for ‘Muggle,’ the American community uses the slang term No-Maj, short for ‘No Magic’). Various modes of magical travel – brooms and Apparition among them – not to mention visions and premonitions, meant that even far-flung wizarding communities were in contact with each other from the Middle Ages onwards.
The Native American magical community and those of Europe and Africa had known about each other long before the immigration of European No-Majs in the seventeenth century. They were already aware of the many similarities between their communities. Certain families were clearly ‘magical’, and magic also appeared unexpectedly in families where hitherto there had been no known witch or wizard. The overall ratio of wizards to non-wizards seemed consistent across populations, as did the attitudes of No-Majs, wherever they were born. In the Native American community, some witches and wizards were accepted and even lauded within their tribes, gaining reputations for healing as medicine men, or outstanding hunters. However, others were stigmatised for their beliefs, often on the basis that they were possessed by malevolent spirits.
The legend of the Native American ‘skin walker’ – an evil witch or wizard that can transform into an animal at will – has its basis in fact. A legend grew up around the Native American Animagi, that they had sacrificed close family members to gain their powers of transformation. In fact, the majority of Animagi assumed animal forms to escape persecution or to hunt for the tribe. Such derogatory rumours often originated with No-Maj medicine men, who were sometimes faking magical powers themselves, and fearful of exposure.
The Native American wizarding community was particularly gifted in animal and plant magic, its potions in particular being of a sophistication beyond much that was known in Europe. The most glaring difference between magic practised by Native Americans and the wizards of Europe was the absence of a wand.
The magic wand originated in Europe. Wands channel magic so as to make its effects both more precise and more powerful, although it is generally held to be a mark of the very greatest witches and wizards that they have also been able to produce wandless magic of a very high quality. As the Native American Animagi and potion-makers demonstrated, wandless magic can attain great complexity, but Charms and Transfiguration are very difficult without one.
No one else taking issue with JKR basically saying that A) a respected and revered NDN art is made up by people jealous of animagi, and that B) NDN "wizards" were pretty much only good as animagi and potion making, the latter being something that it's been implied even a squib can do.
Alright then.
a) I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Skin-walkers? What she says is that they exist (as Animagi) and that rumours built up about them, mostly among the colonials. Wikipedia claims that the Navajo version (it's not clear on whether there are others) is viewed as wildly evil. (I'll also observe that in the Dresden Files, skinwalkers are amoral psychopathic shapeshifters who can barely be killed; JKR is being far nicer about it than most.)
b) Particularly gifted != only good at. Wand-using wizards are implied to be 'particularly gifted at' Charms and Transfiguration - but that doesn't mean Harry Potter can't be spectacularly good at other things, too.
c) I think it's pretty clear that these narratives are from the viewpoint of a near-present Colonial American. The Natives drop off the page as soon as Europeans start to do things, there's absolutely no mention of the enslaved African wizards who were almost certainly there, and the very dubious decisions of the magical government (see: part 3) are accepted at face-value. So it's actually the narrator saying 'oh, yeah, Native magic is identical to ours, except they suck at most of it'.
Someone - oh, yep, it was firemagic again - pointed out that Animagi in particular must be (at least slightly) different among the Native American peoples - because they don't have access to the required mandrake leaves.
hS
And do not even think about the semi-divine beings Butcher places as original skinwalkers. Eldritch Abomination is an euphemism for these guys.
You're going to pass judgement on everyone without even reading the whole thread?
All right, then.
~Neshomeh
P.S. Check firemagic's posts.
P.P.S. Just because wand-using wizards value types of magic that don't require one less doesn't mean they're less difficult or worthy. Severus Snape would be appalled at your lack of respect for the art of potion-making.
When did 'No-Maj' first show up in use, as far as canon goes? Not in-universe, but when did we first find out about it?
Because it occurs to me that the Hogwarts IT tech guy tumblr was using the term a good couple weeks at least before this.
-July, pondering
I went back and read the archives. Sheer genius—although, did McGonagall retire or something? They refer to the Headmaster as "he" (and also Headmaster rather than Headmistress, but I already said that).
I don't think anything will make me stop using "Muggle," though. Don't see why the term wouldn't have come over with British wizarding colonists. Maybe "No-Maj" is a fad?
~Neshomeh
-JKR apparently doesn't know how Americans form slang. ;)
-Magic is objective. It doesn't vary depending on how you think it works, or what your beliefs are in general. Entirely separate cultures both had Animagi, it's hereditary both sides of the pond, and the magic wand is entirely useable by both. This is quite different to a lot of worlds.
-'American' magic may or may not have a Native connection. I assume this will come in in part two? The fact that the magical communities knew each other beforehand makes it less likely that the immigrant magicians would suppress the locals, but who knows (yet)?
-Oh, yeah: the magical communities knew each other beforehand. Which means that the whole 'keep everything secret from Muggles' thing is not only very, very old - no-one told the Roman Empire about America, for instance (or the East Asian seagoing powers, for that matter!) - but also universal, since the Natives clearly didn't know the Muggles were coming.
-Though there exists a possibility that Leif Erikson was a wizard, along with his father. They certainly had a lot of luck discovering things in the west, didn't they?
hS
Clearly magic is NOT objective, as well. By Rowling's own word, part of the process to becoming an Animagus involved holding a mandrake leaf under your tongue for a month.
Mandrakes are a Mediterranean plant not found in the Americas.
Also, I kind of take issue with the skin walker thing. For one thing skin walkers are a Navajo belief, and more importantly - those beliefs are not just superstition, they are part of an actively practiced religion. This is kind of JKR taking the faith of a minority group and going 'ok but that is all wrong it was just frauds and people who didn't know what they were talking about.' And that has... some unfortunate implications, all things considered.
Also, Fun Fact: In Magnus Chase series, Leif Erikson was a demigod, son of Skirnir - messenger of Frey.
In Terry Pratchett's pre-Discworld novel Strata, the Norse discovery of America stuck.
Leiv Eiriksson... discovered Vinland, more than three hundred years after the Battle of Haelcor had ended the third and last Remen Empire.
The big migration followed automatically. The Turks were again pushing west and north. Leiv's father, Eirik, was a shrewd salesman. His Greenland had turned out nowhere like as green as it had been in his imagination, but from Vinland Leiv had thoughtfully brought rich berries and wild grains. The Northmen went west again.
They leap-frogged colony after colony down the eastern seaboard, up into the base rugged lands around Tyker's Sea and down the Long Fjord into the Middle Seas. It was the landscape of their dreams. They called it Valhalla.
There were natives. But the newcomers were only half-hearted farmers -- underneath the agricultural veneer they thought bloody. Those tribes they couldn't out fight they out- thought. When they met the Objibwa Confederacy they made treaties. And they spread, and merged.
By all the theories it should have ended there. Neither the natives nor the invaders had the textbook kind of social dynamic that builds Remes. The Northmen should have become just another tribe, with blue eyes and fair hair.
The theories were wrong. Something latent in both races was sparked into fire. It was a big continent, and it was rich.
In short, 300 years after Leiv, a fleet arrived at the mouth of the Mediterranean. Most of the vessels were under sail although there were one or two, small, fast and inclined to blow up, that could move into the wind. The sails of the big ships bore the Great Eagle of Valhalla on a striped background alternating the colours of the sky, the snow and blood.
The Battle of Gibraltar was short. Europe had been through 200 years of stagnation.
There was no answer to cannon.
...there was a worn mound in the heart of Valhalla where the water from the five inland seas spilled over into the Long Fjord. Eirick's Beard, they called the water. Red Eric had been buried in the mound. It was a big tourist attraction.
We never set foot on Earth during the course of the book**. Pre-Disc Pterry loved sketching in worldbuilding.
hS
**Or do we? There's a certain... implication in Kin's plans at the end of the story that I only just noticed... hmm.
AWESOME!!!!
But I can't for the life of me work out how one would pronounce 'No-Majs'. 'Js' is an invalid letter combination in English... Is there a hiiden 'e' sound, do you think?
No-Madge, here the lone J has a similar sound that you see in words in Judge. Just my two cents.
And I can definitely picture Americans deciding to spell something that way.
--American-on-the-Keyboard
A friend pointed out to me that, as far as American slang goes, we normally don't make slang by stopping a word partway through? It tends to either be acronyms, words from another language that got slurred and changed, or something more or less unrelated that got associated with it at some point. For a really obvious comparison, television gets shortened to TV rather than calling it a tele. So I'd expect the term to be like, 'Enem' (N-M, no-magic) or somesuch.
Alternately, it could be whatever term the first large population of wizards to come to the country used, corrupted and mangled until it only halfway sounds like the original phrase. If Norwegian wizards were the first to start coming to America en masse, then the slang would be a weird version of whatever the Norwegians called their nonmagical people.
Why yes I do like to nitpick really inconsequential setting details!
... now we know that the North American magical community was entirely segregated from the No-Maj one for at least 130 years, and possibly over 200. They've certainly had time to develop their own way of creating slang.
This isn't just an equivalent to 'Muggle' - it's a word for 'foreigner', and very close to being a word for 'enemy'.
HP!verse America is a very dark place.
hS
Whoa. I'd never realized that before. That is how US slang works. Wow.
--Key, who should really go to bed.
It's fascinating, language, and how culture knocks about with it, creating words like 'yobbo', 'bung', and 'dingus.'