Wards

[danajsparks.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering where the idea of magical protective wards comes from. It's a fairly ubiquitous concept in HP fan fiction, but I'm not finding anything about wards in the books. There is the blood protection on 4 Privet Drive, but I don't think that's ever called a ward.

Comments

[jodel-from-aol.livejournal.com]

The concept shows up in canon, but the rterm never does. Given that Rowling boasts of not reading or liking fantasy much, I suspect that she simply was displaying her ignorance.

The term has been around in fantasy writing for decades. I suspect that it may be a legitimate import from people who actually researched magical ritual and theory before writing their stories, and wanted to get the vocabulary right. Of course there is no guarantee that they did so, or that the term hasn't shifted through use by people who *didn't* do their research first, but it was probably a real term once. Even if only a hypothetical one.