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I am just curious why there is nothing to protect from magical spells other than spells. For example an armor or some shield.

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  • Don't they put Neville in a bomb suit at some point and toss him around the room?
    – Mazura
    Sep 22, 2019 at 23:57
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    @Mazura that sounds a lot like a fanfic.
    – Gloweye
    Sep 23, 2019 at 7:28
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    Moody did have armour in the movies. It was very obvious, didn't look very comfortable and would probably only help blocking relatively weak curses, so it's not something that would be particularly useful to anyone but aurors, and even then only the paranoid ones.
    – Luaan
    Sep 23, 2019 at 7:49
  • The Death Eaters rely on hit-and-run tactics, the Aurors are Policemen, not Army troops... Even if the Wizarding World do have spellproof armour, when would we see anyone who A) had access to it and B) had cause to wear it?
    – Chronocidal
    Sep 23, 2019 at 11:28
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    There is one, it's called the plot armor!
    – Hans Olo
    Sep 23, 2019 at 19:58

2 Answers 2

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101

Such a thing does exist in-canon

‘You wouldn’t believe how many people, even people who work at the Ministry, can’t do a decent Shield Charm,’ said George. ‘Course, they didn’t have you teaching them, Harry.’ ‘That’s right … well, we thought Shield Hats were a bit of a laugh. You know, challenge your mate to jinx you while wearing it and watch his face when the jinx just bounces off. But the Ministry bought five hundred for all its support staff! And we’re still getting massive orders!’
‘So we’ve expanded into a range of Shield Cloaks, Shield Gloves …’
‘… I mean, they wouldn’t help much against the Unforgivable Curses, but for minor to moderate hexes or jinxes …’

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince : Draco's Detour

What's baffling is why no-one thought of this before. We can presumably chalk that one up to the relative safety of the Wizarding World for hundreds of years.

On a lesser note, people routinely use dragon-hide gloves to handle magical potions, their skin being notoriously resistant to many forms of magic.

One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone : Diagon Alley

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  • 45
    Or, perhaps, nobody who thought of it felt generous enough to give away their secrets. The wizarding world seems less open with powerful secrets than its muggle equivalent.
    – wizzwizz4
    Sep 22, 2019 at 17:50
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    "Relative safety of the WW for hundreds of years", yeah, like Voldy's first war, and the Grindelwald War....
    – Gloweye
    Sep 23, 2019 at 7:27
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    There are quite many instances of wizards not thinking of simple combinations or gadgets for centuries. I think an overall explanation could be, that the minds of wizards simply work different than human minds. How a car works is almost not understandable for an intelligent wizard, but complex spells are quite natural. This just started to change in recent years, when more wizards started to mingle with muggles and a newer generation started to think different and started to invent to us muggles seemingly simple applications, which the normal wizard mind just does not think of.
    – Falco
    Sep 23, 2019 at 8:21
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    @Falco there's also a lot fewer wizards than there are muggles. Bear in mind how long the industrial revolution took to come around to; how many things had to be in the right place at the right time, and how so comparatively few people in the muggle world were actually doing the important innovation. When you scale this down to the wizarding world it's quite probable that things would be even slower. It's also worth considering that perhaps as I alluded to there were some previously absent inventions that made such shield clothing feasible.
    – Muzer
    Sep 23, 2019 at 10:43
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    @Falco to me, it always looked like most wizards are barely capable of repeating the spells and curses they once learnt from others. Inventing new things happens rarely, perhaps because it requires logic and as Hermione points out in the first book, most Wizards lack logical thinking. If we rank by the capability of inventing new things, the Weasley twins are the most powerful wizards in the storyline, which explains a lot (e.g. they were capable of breaking the Marauder’s Map in their first year).
    – Holger
    Sep 23, 2019 at 11:02
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In Chapter Thirty-six of Order of the Phoenix Voldemort indeed uses a shield that deflects spells:

Dumbledore flicked his own wand. The force of the spell that emanated from it was such that Harry, though shielded by his stone guard, felt his hair stand on end as it passed, and this time Voldemort was forced to conjure a shining silver shield out of thin air to deflect it. The spell, whatever it was, caused no visible damage to the shield, though a deep, gonglike note reverberated from it, an oddly chilling sound...

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    since this "shield" is obviously conjured it would fall under the spell-VS-spell premise of the question
    – flowtron
    Sep 23, 2019 at 6:46
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    Is this a physical metal shield that is imbued with a magical property to deflect spells? Or is this just a spell with a shield-like visual that deflects spells?
    – Ellesedil
    Sep 23, 2019 at 17:34
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    @flowtron The shield is not a spell. It was conjured via a spell.
    – Alex
    Sep 23, 2019 at 22:36
  • @Ellesedil It’s simply described as a silver shield that Voldemort conjured.
    – Alex
    Sep 23, 2019 at 22:39
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    @Alex .. guess why I put it in quotation-marks .. since it is not a proper shield.
    – flowtron
    Sep 24, 2019 at 6:41

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