Is Harry a Metamorphmagus?

[Christopher Nehren]

No: HPFGUIDX 116531


On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 14:17:03 EDT, Vivamus scribbled these
curious markings:
> JKR has already said that none of the three (Harry, Ron, Hermione) will
> become animagi -- but could Harry be a metamorphmagus?   He did, after all,
> make his hair grow back, which one could argue is changing his shape.  Tonks
> also told him that being a metamorphmagus was not only hard, it was based on
> an inborn ability -- as with parseltongue.

Actually, if you take very careful notice of the words that Tonks uses
in her explanation in the beginning of OotP, you'll see that she uses
the word *appearance*. This is an extremely subtle difference, but it's
also an extremely important one. To change one's appearance suggests
that the stuff which constitutes one's essence remains, but it's just
the reflected and refracted photons which change (that's of course
assuming that magical appearance changes modify the physics of the
universe -- I could and probably will at one point make a post about
this basic aspect of magic). To change one's shape suggests that one
actually does change the "stuff" -- the matter -- constituting one's
self. 

I'm currently working on an essay for HP Lexicon which covers this
topic. Thank you for mentioning Harry's hair growing issue.

> Make sense?

Yep.

Christopher

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