In book five, Umbridge forces an unknown number of students to write lines in detention using a quill that
- uses their own blood as ink
- cuts a copy of the text into the back of their hand
- the cuts from the quill heal quickly at first, but with sufficient repetition form scars.
One of the single most infuriatingly avoidable mistakes in fan fiction is the idea that magical society frequently uses these quills for contracts, usually, per the fan fiction author, only under legal restrictions. Occasionally you will see the author assert that using these makes the written text a binding contract. Others will allow that this is true only if one signs their name using the quill. A few have made the explicit inference that after using this quill in detention, [Harry] is now magically prevented from lying at all. Others, state that he avoided this because he did not sign the papers.
This departure from cannon depends on accepting neither Mrs. Rowling’s website description of Umbridge and her quill1 or the published version in Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists2 as canonical. In the essentially identical text in both places, Mrs. Rowling establishes the backstory for this particular torture tool: it was Umbridge’s own invention.
This departure from cannon is understandable in that neither work is among the more well known. It is infuriating however because it is so trivially avoidable, and even trivially fixable if an author is unaware if the fact and it gets pointed out in a comment.
It is entirely likely that at least some wizards do attach significance to signing contracts in blood. Whether or not that has any actual magical significance is left undefined by Mrs. Rowling, and is a legitimate place for speculation by a fan fiction author. Given that the magical population probably does believe the idea though, even if it is not fact based (even in their world), it is equally likely that charmed quills exist to facilitate the process.
What makes Umbridge’s version unique is the cutting/scaring aspect. It is unlikely that the “official” version cuts the user’s hand, risking blood dripping down the hand onto the presumably official contract being signed. The user of the quill is signing an important document. He or she would not want to risk it being marred by random blood drops/splatters from his/her cut up hand. Nor, if he/she is wealthy enough for signing such contracts to be a frequent occurrence, does the witch/wizard want to risk having a scar with his/her signature on the back of his/her hand. Thus official versions are more like getting blood drawn at a medical clinic. There is a small prick at most, that might need some pressure to stop the bleeding, but (because … magic) probably doesn’t.
According to this theory, Umbridge took one of the standard quills and modified it to make an instrument of torture. She altered its behaviour, changing the pin-prick into a cut that mirrors the words written by the quill. She was unable to fully remove the healing magic that normally prevents the witch/wizard from needing to apply pressure to the pin-prick from which the official version draws blood. However she was able to turn the resulting cut into a curse scar that cannot be fully healed or removed, even with healing magic. Thus it requires a number of repetitions of the same text for the scar to form (to override the initial healing function she was insufficiently skilled to fully remove). Once the scar does form however, it is permanent (and not even the scar-removing murtlap essence fully heals it).
One can see how this neatly fits as a nearly drop in replacement. The pure blood recognises the contract quill, but then does a double take. “Wait, you said it cuts your hand open? It doesn’t just form a pin-prick?” You actually increase the outrage.
- She’s breaking the law mis-using a contract quill.
- She’s created a torture device
- She’s using said torture device on a child supposedly in her care (as a teacher)
- She’s trying to trap him into a contract
It is totally unnecessary to replace one of the few relatively reasonable backstories that Mrs. Rowling has given us. There are plenty of plot holes in this universe, let us not create more of them.
Mrs. J. K. Rowling. “Dolores Umbridge” The J.K. Rowling Index Originally Published 2014-10-31.↩︎
Mrs. J. K. Rowling. Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists. Pottermore Publishing (2016)↩︎