Brandon Sanderson has three nifty posts on the laws of magic. In the First Law he talks about soft and hard magic. The quick and sloppy version is that hard magic has rules and soft magic does not. E.g. the ring of power is hard magic – wear the ring, turn invisible, attract the Nazgûl. Gandalf’s wizardry is soft magic. It can, like, defeat balrogs and stuff?
Someone once asked me, “Isn’t soft magic just hard magic that hasn’t been explained?” No. No it is not. But it can seem that way and at the time I didn’t have a good answer. And now I have just so many thoughts on this subject.
Sanderson does discuss the tonal difference between hard and soft magic. Namely that soft magic creates a sense of wonder and epic scale, the idea that we are mere mortals living in a grand and incomprehensible world. That’s what Gandalf’s magic feels like, as does much of the magic in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle and the ritualistic magic in Greer Gilman’s Cloud and Ashes. The tonal difference between hard and soft magic is important and often what dictates the choice of one over the other, but it certainly isn’t everything.
So let’s expand the discussion, yes?
Soft magic is used to explore that which is unknowable.
The world is not composed of inherently explainable or understandable things. I have a certain intensity of loyalty and that loyalty is important to me. I know some people who mirror that intensity in person, but can’t maintain it at a distance. I’ve spent years trying and failing to understand this. It’s not wrong, it’s just far enough beyond my understanding of reality to get it.
Our Hearts Condemn Us, a song by Jozef Van Wissem, evokes very specific feelings for me. I can play it for you (go ahead. It’s a wonderful song). I can describe it: it is dangerous, elsewhere, otherworldly, yellow, distant, and a little painful. I could go into detail about where I first heard it and how I can’t divorce it from the movie Only Lovers Left Alive, but I bet I can’t make you feel exactly what I’m feeling. And if I did, I don’t know how I would know that I had.
In fiction, soft magic can explore everything from death to the limits of language to the complexity of the body.
Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is about the young wizard Ged, who, in ignorance and arrogance, summons a scary shadow-monster-thing. At the end of the book, Ged chases the shadow past the ends of the earth, where sand and water create a liminal country. So what is that country?
I don’t know, really. It is a beyond, beyond knowledge and experience. It is the feeling of reaching outside our limits and coming to a new understanding. It is like death, but is not death. It’s an exploration of something past our comprehension.
Some other examples: The Veil that Sirius Black collapses into in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. This is also not quite death. It’s elsewhere. It’s unreachable. It’s a deep and terrible loss. In Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars two characters dream each other’s lives, so that while one is awake, the other sleeps. Their lives are interwoven, but disconnected, deeply intimate without understanding how or why or what.
Soft magic is used to create a metaphor.
Metaphor is one of the most common uses of soft magic, and magic in general, in no small part because we expect meaning in our fiction and read fiercely for metaphor. Really, just about every example I drudge up for this post could come back to metaphor.
The shadow that Ged summons in A Wizard of Earthsea is a metaphor. It’s Ged’s own destructive tendencies, his arrogance and self-importance, which is at times so dangerous it causes physical wounds. Le Guin uses soft magic because this is a story about introspection and long, quiet days at sea. It’s about coming to a fuller understanding of our own faults through many journeys and many days. There’s nothing physical or certain about it, but rather a hope that with time we will grow and change.
Certainly, a creature of hard magic could suggest this as well. The shadow might have had clearly delineated powers that Ged had to face. It could have been explained exactly how one summons a shadow like this. In Fonda Lee’s Jade City, Lanshinwan must face his own dangerous arrogance, but he does so in the context of hard magic. Jade City is about naming our destructive, selfish tendencies, giving them shape and clarity, turning them into an enemy we can face head-on with jade and fist. That isn’t Ged’s story. That’s a different story.
As I said, hard magic is imbued with plenty of metaphor: the ring in Lord of the Rings is narcissism and obsession. But some things work better as soft magic. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dracula is transported overseas in a coffin filled with his native soil. Traveling, especially overseas, is dangerous and when we come to the other side, we’re suddenly outsiders, strangers. Our native soil is safe and familiar, a remind of where we belong. Jewell Gomez uses this idea in The Gilda Stories, with a slant toward hard magic. Vampires line their clothes and walls with their native soil so they can face the sunset and take showers (water in general is dangerous, rather than crossing it specifically). This isn’t explained much, so it’s still soft magic, but it’s used so practically and specifically that it leans toward hard magic. Personally, I don’t think it works as well. The protective nature of our home soil is such a deeply rooted (heh, get it?) and mythic idea, that explaining it pragmatically and outside the metaphor of travel makes it feel a little silly.
Soft magic is used to evoke a mood.
On YouTube, Nerdwriter has a video about the sound of magic in the Harry Potter film series and the mood that invokes. The directors specifically avoid anything futuristic or scifi and, especially later in the series, mix the verbal spell and the sound the wand makes to emphasize how the magic is emerging from the wizard.
In Dictionary of the Khazars, a shepherd enters a city with his flock and spends years trying to get out, only to go deeper into the city. Personally I enjoy the mood best, that of wandering in a strange place, seemingly endlessly. But I acknowledge that there is a long and deep squishy place between mood and metaphor. It could be said that this is a metaphor for being trapped in an unfamiliar place.
For me, an idea is tipped from metaphor to mood when turning it into a metaphor breaks the mood. It’s when something is understood better within the space of an idea, rather than as a single, nailed down idea.
The best example I can think of is basically all of Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide, which is far more surrealism than story. At one point, in passing, the movie Orpheus slips from a film screen and flows down the River Seine, the audience running after it. It’s so prettyyyyy. I can think of a metaphor, but naming it is beside the point and unhelpful. What’s important is that half-caught feeling, that fleeting image, of film-goers with their coats unbuttoned and their skirts rustling, chasing the rippling black-and-white image of Jean Marais.
Finally, soft magic can express a character’s growth and understanding of the world.
This works for both soft magic and hard magic with some flexibility. By going a little beyond how we’ve seen the magic used previously, without breaking our understanding of it, a character can express a deeper understanding of the magic and whatever metaphor that magic stands for.
I’m going to talk about grammar for a second. I apologize. In English, the rules state that past simple is used to talk about completed activities: I killed a dragon. It is dead and I am the best St. George. The end. There is another tense (present perfect simple) which is used to talk about events in the past that may happen again: I have killed a dragon. Perhaps I will go on a quest and kill more dragons. However, because language grows out of people throwing it at each other like rocks, I can use I killed a dragon and I have killed a dragon to mean the same thing. I know I can do this because I’ve been speaking English for just way too long and I understand how to communicate with it, in spite of the rules (to say nothing of slang and my propensity for ‘I is’).
This type of soft magic must be used carefully. It can deus ex machina the hero. In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them, the wizards decide to erase the memory of an entire city, including through walls, because they have a gizmo that can erase one person’s memory. This is bad flexibility because it doesn’t fit within the scope of how we understand the magic. It leaves too many questions unanswered and, more importantly, it’s too easy and doesn’t further any characters’ growth.
So let’s return to Earthsea one more time. Ged is searching for the shadow’s name. Standing in the sand and water, Ged realizes that his shadow can have no name but his own. He names it and takes it into himself. How does that fit into the magic system?
At face value, it doesn’t. But let’s explore what we know about Earthsea’s magic. There is some hard magic: wizards can bind people to their will if they use that person’s real name. There’s also soft magic. Magic can be about mending – pots, but also emotional rifts. If it is about mending, it is also about breaking. Naming is about understanding, seeing, knowing.
So there’s nothing in the magic that says by naming this creature, it will become part of Ged. We haven’t seen anything like that before or been told it’s possible. But through the storytelling, the themes, and Ged’s journey, we can see how by naming the shadow, Ged has come to understand that the shadow is none other then himself and his own arrogance. He see what the shadow is and knows how to mend the wrong he has done. He comes to an unknowable place, understands his own destructive capabilities, and names it. By using magic in a way that is new but fits within the metaphor and mood of the story, we see how Ged has grown and changed.
I admit, many of these ideas – mood, metaphor, mystery – overlap. And your interpretation of these books may not be the same as mine. You may read Earthsea and find you know what the liminal country is, but think the shadow is not so easily named. The magic of Earthsea may not be grand and sweeping at all, but simple and everyday. Or, perhaps, you will read A Wizard of Earthsea and understand how the liminal country, the shadow, and the naming have all been chosen to evoke a disquieting but hopeful mood, create the metaphor of personal understanding, and reach toward the unknowable nature of humanity.
For someone else’s take on what soft magic is, how it works, and why it works, I recommend Hello Future Me’s In Defense of Soft Magic.