Essay: The Wand Chooses the Wizard

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Voldemort’s and Harry’s wands refuse to fight each other because they have the same core: a phoenix feather from Fawkes. This was the third wand revelation that JK Rowling gave her readers, the first two being that the wand chooses the wizard and that a damaged wand (like Ron’s wand in Chamber of Secrets) can backfire on the user or otherwise behave unpredictably. Once we learn more rules of the Wand Game in Deathly Hallows it is clear that Ron’s broken wand is responding as if the he is no longer its master; the wand/owner covenant is broken.

I have written in previous essays about the metaphorical quantum entanglement between Harry and Voldemort, but this is not the only type of metaphorical entanglement in the Harry Potter series. Wizards and their wands are also entangled. After it breaks, Ron and his wand are no longer entangled—if they ever truly were, since Rowling reveals early on that he is using Charlie’s old wand. It is unclear why he would be using Charlie’s old wand, unless Charlie also inherited this from a family member and wanted to acquire a wand that had truly chosen him before going off to Romania to study dragons. It seems like it would be a good idea to have a simpatico wand to cast the spells necessary to control fire-breathing dragons.

In Deathly Hallows, when Harry’s phoenix-feather-and-holly wand breaks on Christmas Eve (which is linked to holly), he feels “as if the best part of his magical power had been torn from him.” He also recalls feeling “the wand spin like the needle of a compass and shoot golden flames at his enemy” when he is fleeing Privet Drive. This mystifies him and Voldemort, who is using Lucius Malfoy’s wand at that time—a wand he has not properly “won” from Lucius. Ollivander also does not understand why Harry’s wand acts on its own, though Harry has an epiphany about this after he dies.

In Deathly Hallows, we learn that wands do not want to act against their owners; a wand is linked to a single master, and it seems that a wand that has dueled with an enemy who is out to kill can “remember” this and act on its own against that enemy if the wand’s owner is in jeopardy from the same person again, as Harry was during his flight from Privet Drive, when his wand seemed to “remember” Voldemort. The wand is clearly reacting to Voldemort the person, not just to Voldemort’s wand, which is a brother wand to Harry’s and which he used to cast the Killing Curse against Harry in Goblet of Fire. So even though Voldemort is using a different wand now, Harry’s wand seems to “remember” who was wielding the wand when the spell was cast and it reacts against Voldemort, independently attacking him without Harry consciously choosing to use his wand to cast a spell.

This is comparable to magical children who “accidentally” perform magic when they are extremely emotional or in peril, such as when Harry unconsciously magically protects himself before he knows he is a wizard. This is also the reaction that Neville’s great-uncle was hoping to get when he dropped Neville off Blackpool Pier, and Neville obliged; he performed magic that saved his life.

Once a child is old enough to have a wand, some of the child’s magic seems to reside in the wand itself, another example of metaphorical quantum entanglement in the series, because that child’s power was initially a single entity residing in the child, but after the wand chose the child, some of the child’s power seems to be split off and becomes a part of the wand’s power. This produces the same result for Harry, when he is fleeing Privet Drive, as when he was under the age of eleven and performed accidental defensive magic. This can also explain his sensation of having lost part of his magic when the holly-and-phoenix-feather wand breaks.

JK Rowling confirms this hypothesis in the commentaries “authored” by Albus Dumbledore in Tales of Beedle the Bard. In the commentary on The Tale of the Three Brothers, she/he writes:

…wands do indeed absorb the expertise of those who use them, though this is an unpredictable and imperfect business… Nevertheless, a hypothetical wand that had passed through the hands of many Dark wizards would be likely to have, at the very least, a marked affinity for the most dangerous kinds of magic.

The commentary goes on to say that the reason that most witches and wizards prefer a wand that has chosen them to second-hand wands is because the wand may have “learned habits from its previous owner that might not be compatible with the new user’s style of magic,” and that this accounts for the “practice of burying (or burning) the wand with its owner, once he or she has died” in order to prevent a wand from “learning from too many masters.”

In addition to this, Harry’s wand evidently “imbibed” power from Voldemort’s wand when the brother wands dueled in the graveyard, and this power is turned against Harry’s enemy when he is attacked during the flight from Surrey. This becomes the last “rule” of the Wand Game, and we do not learn it until nearly the end of the seventh book, but it is consistent with what we already know about a person’s innate magical ability rising up and protecting that person when the need is great, because the wand itself is an extension of the magical power of the wizard who is its master. The two, human and wand, collided, became entangled, and they share divided parts of what was once a single entity: that wizard’s magical power.

The third wand revelation—about brother wands not being willing to fight each other—fulfills foreshadowing from the first book, when Ollivander tells Harry that his and Voldemort’s wands each have a feather from the same phoenix, which is another instance when metaphorical quantum entanglement affects the rules of the Wand Game. The weighing-of-the-wands in Goblet of Fire also reminds readers of this connection, despite Ollivander not mentioning it at the weighing. But Harry wonders if he might mention it, which sets up the conflict between the brother wands later in the fourth book. The wand-weighing also provides Harry with the name of Viktor Krum’s wand-maker, Gregorovitch, which becomes important in Deathly Hallows.

Despite the linked wands in Goblet of Fire, Rowling does not obviously tip off readers in the fourth book that The Wand Game is a game and that more rules are forthcoming. However, after the first six books, we know that confrontations between her characters must occur in the context of war-like games or game-like battles, so the internal logic of Harry’s world dictates that the most prominent weapons in the series (wands) must also be equipment for a game. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 10: All’s Fair in War and Quidditch and Episode 11: Wargames.)

Harry and Voldemort’s ultimate confrontation with wands must take on game-like overtones. Given what has gone before, it makes sense that there is more to the Wand Game than just wands choosing their wizards, broken wands backfiring, and brother-wands not being able to duel each other. Rowling could have stuck to these three rules, but this would be more limiting than what she decided to do, and she may have wanted to avoid telegraphing more of her rules sooner so that the climax of the last book would not be obvious. It is significant, though, that every single rule of the Wand Game—both these three and the others that are later revealed—all constitute metaphorical quantum entanglement.

The Disarming Charm first appears in the second book in the Harry Potter series and we see it again in the third and fourth books; Harry also teaches it to Dumbledore’s Army in the fifth book, though some DA members call it pointless. Draco Malfoy specifically chooses to disarm Dumbledore in the sixth book, rather than killing him, as he was ordered to do. It is unclear whether he has regularly used this spell, rather than more obvious offensive spells, but we know that he witnessed this spell performed by Snape against Gilderoy Lockhart during the Dueling Club meeting in the second book. Ultimately, if Draco had not used Harry’s “signature move” Harry could not have defeated Voldemort in the way that he did.

However, all that we learn about this spell in books two through six is that the person being disarmed, at best, loses possession of their wand, and at worst may be thrown backward violently. The wand being loyal to the disarmer, its new master, is not addressed prior to the seventh book, though we repeatedly see the person doing the disarming catch the disarmed person’s wand, as if that person is now the wand’s master.

Considering how often disarming occurs in DA meetings, it also seems that if the person who has done the disarming returns the wand to the original owner, the shift in ownership is negated and the previous wand/owner relationship reasserts itself. If this were not true, the moment that DA members were disarmed during meetings they would no longer be masters of their wands. It is also possible that since “practice sessions” are not true duels, they don’t cause shifts in wand/master relations. The intent of the disarming may important, just as Harry’s wand registers that Voldemort’s intent is to kill Harry when their wands link, so he is ever after “classified” as an enemy by Harry’s wand.

Thus we see a rule of the Wand Game displayed before the fourth book, when the third explicit rule is given to readers because of the phoenix-feather wands linking, but we do not know that the Wand Game is a game, nor that disarming someone making you master of that person’s wand is a rule of the Wand Game until the seventh book in the series.

On Harry’s seventeenth birthday he awakes saying Gregorovitch. He knows that Voldemort is seeking a person of this name because of the link between them—because of their metaphorical quantum entanglement. Though he cannot say why yet, Harry thinks the name has to do with Quidditch. It does, both metaphorically and literally; Gregorivitch made Viktor Krum’s wand and Harry links Viktor with Quidditch, despite his also being a fellow Champion and someone who dated one of his best friends.

At Bill and Fleur’s wedding, Harry noticed that Krum “was causing a stir, particularly amongst the veela cousins. He was, after all, a famous Quidditch player.” Of the many ways that Harry could think of Krum (Hermione’s ex, a fellow Triwizard Champion, even as a friend) the only one that springs to mind is linked to Quidditch. Whether Harry is hunting Horcruxes or working out Voldemort’s next move, Quidditch, a game that is also a mock war, is always intimately involved, drawing together the threads of the Quidditch and Wand Game metaphors, which is part of how Rowling tells us that wands are part of an elaborate game.

Voldemort seems unaware of various important aspects of the Wand Game, which is consistent for someone who disregards toys and games and everything to do with childhood. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids' Table.) As the seventh book begins, Voldemort is searching for a better piece of game equipment, a better weapon to use against Harry. He requires Lucius Malfoy to give him his wand, give being the operative word. 

Despite having kidnapped Ollivander for his wand-expertise, Voldemort does not understand that this is not the way to take possession of a wand. He is not its new master merely because he has asked for it and Lucius hands it to him, though he successfully uses it to kill Charity Burbage, the Hogwarts Muggle Studies teacher. She is not in a position to fight back so Voldemort is not dueling against someone who is master of their wand, making this an insufficient test of his mastery over Lucius Malfoy’s wand. Because of this, he has no reason to expect to prevail with this wand against Harry, even if Harry’s wand had not also recognized Voldemort as an enemy. This mirrors Voldemort’s problem at the end of the book, but with a twist, since by then he is wielding a wand over which Harry is the master, a far worse situation than merely fighting someone who is master of their wand while you are not master of yours.

Harry might have known this sooner if he had a hotter temper; after his wand breaks he uses Hermione’s for guard duty, thinking, “Hermione looked frightened that he might curse her with her own wand.” Harry would have failed; the curse would have rebounded upon him and he would have learned another Wand Game rule, which he later guesses at: your own wand cannot be made to do something by someone else that is not your will. It seems significant that Rowling has Harry think that Hermione looked frightened that Harry might curse her with her own wand just after Harry’s wand becomes useless to him. From here to the end of the book, Harry’s wand-mastery is in almost constant flux, and his wand-mastery is crucial to Voldemort’s defeat.

Ron’s adventures after leaving Harry and Hermione include disarming a Snatcher trying to apprehend him, which gives him a “spare” wand for Harry, though it is not a wand over which Harry is master. He does not find the blackthorn wand that Ron gives him very effective, since he did not win it from its previous owner, Ron did that. As ever, Hermione does not relate to games; she does not grasp the Wand Game any better than Quidditch, telling Harry, “You just need to practice,” and, “It’s all a matter of confidence.” Harry needs to disarm the previous owner or otherwise defeat that owner in some sort of battle—even hand-to-hand combat, which is how he becomes master of Draco’s wand—in order to be the wand’s true master. Nothing will change that. Surely Voldemort does not lack practice or confidence when he fails to kill Harry with Lucius Malfoy’s wand.

The Wand Game is of utmost importance when Harry and Ron charge into the room at Malfoy Manor where Bellatrix LeStrange is torturing Hermione. Ron disarms Bellatrix with Wormtail’s wand, over which he is master, having taken it by force, and by doing this, he also becomes master of Bellatrix’s wand. She seems as ignorant of the Wand Game rules as Voldemort, threatening to stab Hermione to convince Ron to simply put down the wands he is holding, but this means that Ron is still master of them. If she had Disarmed him, which is an unlikely choice for Voldemort and his followers, she would have had the advantage.

Is it possible that Snape might have told the Dueling Club about this in Chamber of Secrets if the one meeting of the club had not broken up in chaos, once Harry spoke Parseltongue to the snake Draco conjured? Perhaps. However, it is more likely that Rowling was withholding this information from her characters—and therefore her readers—because the revelations about some very important Wand Game rules could have constituted a massive spoiler for the end of the seventh book in the series.

After Bellatrix has Ron put down the wands he is holding—Wormtail’s and Bellatrix’s—Draco picking up these wands does not make him their master either. Ironically, all of this is occurring as Harry “channels” Voldemort, who is breaking into Grindelwald’s prison cell, where he has gone in hopes of learning the location of the Elder Wand. If Voldemort had put some thought into it, he would have realized that Dumbledore’s defeat of Grindelwald long ago made Dumbledore master of the Elder Wand. But almost at the exact moment that Voldemort learns the wand’s location, Harry becomes its Master.

Dobby’s effort to rescue Harry, Ron, Hermione, and the others held prisoner at the Malfoys’ produces enough chaos that Harry can forcibly take all three wands that Draco is holding: Wormtail’s wand, over which Ron had been master (but now Harry is); Bellatrix’s wand (over which Ron had also been master, having disarmed her); and most importantly, Harry takes Draco’s wand. Harry realizes much later that this makes him master over any wand recognizing Draco as master, including the Elder Wand, which Dumbledore lost mastery of when Draco disarmed him. Harry is now master of Wormtail’s, Bellatrix’s, and Draco’s wands, plus the Elder Wand.

At Shell Cottage, Harry asks Ollivander to mend his broken wand, the one made of phoenix feather and holly; Ollivander says that it is beyond his skills. He correctly identifies the wands that Harry shows him: Bellatrix’s and Draco’s. (Ron has Wormtail’s again.)

 “This was the wand of Draco Malfoy.”

“Was?” repeated Harry. “Isn’t it still his?”

“Perhaps not. If you took it–”

“–I did–”

“–then it may be yours. Of course, the manner of taking matters. Much also depends upon the wand itself. In general, however, where a wand has been won, its allegiance will change.”

Ollivander does not say that all wands bound to Draco are subject to Harry’s will; Harry guesses this later. Voldemort expects Lucius Malfoy’s wand to work for him despite not “winning” it from Lucius, but it should surprise no one that it does not work that well for him. Ollivander gives Voldemort too much credit for understanding the Wand Game (or he is withholding information from Voldemort, and hoping that he does not pick up on this).

Voldemort kills Grindelwald and works out the location of the Elder Wand, but he does not consider how to properly transfer mastery of it. Through his link to Voldemort, Harry witnesses his enemy break open Dumbledore’s tomb to take possession—but not mastery—of a wand now recognizing only Harry as master.

Hermione contemplates using Bellatrix’s wand as part of her disguise during the Gringotts break-in but she feels as uneasy about this as Harry is with the blackthorn wand; she does not know that Harry is the master of Bellatrix’s wand, since he took it from Draco by force. The same is true of Wormtail’s wand, which Ron is using. Hermione’s uneasiness is probably also in part because of something mentioned in the commentary on The Tale of the Three Brothers; Bellatrix Lestrange’s wand very likely “learned habits” that are “not compatible” with Hermione’s “style of magic”. So even if she had won the wand outright from Bellatrix, the previous entanglement between Bellatrix and the wand might have meant that it still would not work well for Hermione.

Of the three, only Harry, with Draco’s old wand, is master of his weapon, which he won from not only a fellow archetypal Youth (see Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 7: Fountain of Youth) but from someone who performed Harry’s signature move to disarm Dumbledore, so Harry is likely to be far more sympatico in general with this wand than Hermione or Ron are with Bellatrix’s or Wormtail’s wands, on principle. This is just as well; if Ron or Hermione had realized that they each needed to “win” their wand from Harry and did this for form’s sake, either Hermione or Ron would have become master of the Elder Wand, completely altering the book’s climax. Harry is more astute about this now. Rowling writes:

Harry looked down at the hawthorn wand that had once belonged to Draco Malfoy. He had been surprised, but pleased, to discover that it worked for him at least as well as Hermione’s had done. Remembering what Ollivander had told them of the secret workings of wands, Harry thought he knew what Hermione’s problem was: She had not won the walnut wand’s allegiance by taking it personally from Bellatrix.

Near the end of the seventh book, when Harry, Ron and Hermione are in the Shrieking Shack, Harry covertly witnesses a conversation between Voldemort and Snape that reveals that Voldemort is growing savvier about the Wand Game but still does not understand it entirely. He says:

 “The Elder Wand cannot serve me properly, Severus, because I am not its true master. The Elder Wand belongs to the wizard who killed its last owner. You killed Albus Dumbledore. While you live, Severus, the Elder Wand cannot be truly mine.”

Voldemort is partially correct. He is right about not being the wand’s “true master” but not about murder being the only way to transfer wand-ownership. He fails to grasp that murder is just one way to win a wand’s allegiance, but he should know this since he is aware that Dumbledore won the wand from Grindelwald without killing him. He is also wrong about Snape being its master because he does not know that Draco disarmed Dumbledore before Snape killed him, nor does he know that even if Dumbledore had still been master of the Elder Wand at the moment of his death, because he designed and controlled his own death he was never defeated by Snape, who was doing Dumbledore’s will, as Harry later tells him. Thus Snape would not have been master of the Elder Wand even if Draco had not disarmed Dumbledore.

One of Voldemort’s assumptions is an incorrect idea about the Wand Game; the second is knowledge that he lacks because he sent others to kill Dumbledore; his third assumption comes from Snape’s being a successful spy, hiding his true allegiance. Even if Voldemort had known that Draco disarmed Dumbledore he might still assume that murder trumps disarming; it would be like him to discount the Disarming Charm, Harry’s “signature move”, and now also Draco’s, instead favoring the Killing Curse, which is Voldemort’s signature move. It surely never occurs to him that Dumbledore would arrange his own death, since Voldemort is dedicated to avoiding death at all costs and he believes that Snape killing Dumbledore is a defeat for Dumbledore and a victory for him, not the other way around.

Harry, as ever, plays fairly. After he stops playing possum and prepares to duel his enemy one last time, he tells Voldemort that Draco was master of the Elder Wand, not Snape, and that Harry disarmed Draco weeks earlier, so while Voldemort did not previously know about Draco disarming Dumbledore, he knows now. Harry, consummate player of games, suspects that he knows what this means: Harry is the Master of the Elder Wand. He tells Voldemort everything, leveling the playing field just as he did with Cedric. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 19: Not Playing to Win.) Yet the one who does not respect games, toys and fairy tales (but instinctively only attacks Harry in games or in game-like battles) does not care about game rules, even when the rules probably mean his defeat. He thinks he is above all rules, period.

Voldemort goes for broke, casting the one spell that will mean his death if it backfires, rather than testing Harry’s hypothesis with a different spell. Harry again casts the Disarming Charm, trying to prevent someone from doing harm rather than doing harm himself, even to his mortal enemy and his parents’ murderer, though he knows that that enemy is attempting to murder him. He does not grasp for power, as Dumbledore repeatedly noted, and is again given power.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 25: The Wand Game. Copyright 2017-2018 by Quantum Harry Productions and B.L. Purdom. See other posts on this blog for direct links to all episodes of Quantum Harry.

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