And nobody ever caught up to Pettigrew (who has to have been there at some point to collect the wand) and thought to ask him just what happened.

Although I thought that we were given a maybe-hint in HBP. Later undermined by the nonsense we were handed in DHs.

Dumbledore speaks as though he was convinced that Voldemort intended to create his last Horcrux from Harry’s death. It is certainly a tenable hypothesis. It would certainly appear to fit the pattern which had formed regarding Tom Riddle’s methods by that point.

But in the light of DHs we have no compelling reason to continue to believe it. Tom certainly was not thinking along the lines of creating a Horcrux when Harry went back to Godric’s Hollow in the Dark Lord’s head.

****

But then DHs was released and the whole reasoning behind the Fidelius charm became completely, irrevocably unworkable.

Where to start?

Well, in the first place after implying in her website FAQ answer that the death of a Secret Keeper effectively changes nothing, she lobbed another spitball at us with the information that now that the Secret Keeper was dead, all the persons who had been privy to the Secret rather than simply continuing to know the Secret, had now been promoted to Secret Keepers in their own right. With the power to reveal the information to others.

I certainly wouldn’t say that this “changes nothing”, myself.

I can see this as a reasonably plausible method of letting a Secret gradually work its way back into public domain. If every 2nd-generation Secret Keeper tells whoever they choose about the Secret, then upon their death the people they told presumably do not forget it, and are similarly able to share the information. Assuming the Secret still matters to anyone, by the time the secret has passed through a couple of “generations” of Keepers it is probably no longer much of a secret.

But even the handling of this was botched. It is clear that the only reason for changing the way the spell worked was so that the trio could be forced out of #12 and into the endless camping trip by a dramatically hitchhiking, side-alonging DE being inadvertantly “escorted” to the doorstep.

But would it have even done that? Sure, Yaxley would have been able to get in. And to get back on his own. He had been escorted to the very door by a legitimate Secret Keeper. That’s how it works.

But that wouldn’t have made him a Secret Keeper. He only was someone who now shared the secret. He couldn’t have brought the rest of the DEs in with him. He couldn’t have even told them were it was. That’s how it works.

They made their panicy escape and Ron’s nasty splinch for nothing.

They should have called Kreachur to let them know when the coast was clear, gone back and lain in wait for Yaxley when he showed up again. And taken one DE out of commission at least.

There were three of them and one of him. Couldn’t they have overpowered him at the time? I agree that this would have no doubt led to a potentially interesting discussion of what they were to do with him when they had him. I doubt that Harry would have agreed to kill him.

They could have had Kreachur contact someone in the Order to catch him and take charge of him. To Obliviate him at the very least.

And the question was never really addressed about the fact that Snape, who was now one of the Secret Keepers, and who could have led the whole pack of DEs there to try to capture Harry, and who moreover had pretty clearly already been there and had searched the house, didn’t do it?

And no one considers this as a relevant factor?

And, for that matter, where was the follow-up?

Harry has already made peace with Kreachur, and Kreachur is behaving like a devotedly loyal House Elf. Doesn’t the responsibility go both ways? Dosen’t our “heroic” (it says in the fine print) protagonist even consider calling his servant out of a house where the security has been compromised? Not even to ask him whether the DEs have managed to get in? Not even to tell him to protect himself by going somewhere else where he would be safe? Why did Kreachur later turn up at Hogwarts, anyway? Who sent him there?

For that matter, couldn’t he summoned Kreachur, and have sent him to Hogwarts, and made arrangements for him to bring them food from the kitchens?

And maybe information on Snape and the Carrows, when he could get it?

After all, not being seen is the mark of a good House Elf. For that matter, would the Carrows even take notice of a House Elf?

That might have been a bit more productive than mooning over Ginny’s name where it showed up on the Marauder’s Map

Hell’s bells, these are obvious actions to take in response to the situation. They are not difficult to think of. Not if you are brighter than a stick of wood, anyway.

****

Which brings us to those amazing, semi-sentient sticks of wood.

They didn’t have to be balognium.

They really didn’t.

So, what about those all-too-clever sticks of wood.

It’s obvious that something tricky to do with a wand was always going figure in the final outcome. We weren’t given Ollivander and his “the wand chooses the wizard” in Book 1 as local color. Nor were we reminded of the matter by Ollivander in Book 4 by accident. Wandlore, and probably wand ownership has always been on the table.

But “tricky” doesn’t have to equate with balognium. It needed better groundwork, and the inital clue placement needed better follow-through.

We got no indication from Ron that he had any trouble using Charlie’s old wand until he broke it and tried to mend it with spellotape. We got no comment, not even in passing that his new wand in Book 3 worked even better than his old one. It would have been nice, and I think would have given nothing of importance away if we had been given one.

For that matter, it might have been nice if Neville had dropped the information that he was also using a legacy wand at some point earlier than the climax of OotP. Or if someone in the DA had accidently picked up someone else’s wand by mistake in one of their marathon sessions of everyone disarming each other and had trouble using it.

However, we also were informed by Ollivander that issues of wand lore operate according to “subtle” laws. Excuse me, but what was subtle about the handling of wand behavior in DHs?

That’s the real problem, isn’t it? It would be easy enough to accept that the Elder Wand, and its behavior is unique. Particularly if she had turned loose the hint that there was a legendary super-wand somewhere out there earlier in the series. The European wandmaker Gregorovitch’s existence is slipped to us in Book 4 so the hunt for the Elder Wand was definitely already on the menu by then, (indeed, I read somewhere online that the original title for Book 7 was ‘Harry Potter and the Elder Wand’) but we heard nothing of the wand itself until we got the story of the three brothers. And, imho, that was introducing us to it a bit too late. We did not need to know of its supposed qualities before then, but I really think we did need to know of its existence.

Ron certainly knew about it. He’s read Beedle. Why didn‘t he say something.

I have already stated elsewhere my own opinion that it all might have played better if Professor Binns had dismissed the existence of the Elder wand (probably under one of its other names) at the same time that he dismissed the existence of the Chamber of Secrets. Indeed it might have played very well indeed for Binns to have established a pattern of dismissing the existence of legendary artifacts, occurances, and spells over the trio’s five years in his class. Sometimes rightfully so.

But we lost any hope of subtle when we started suddenly getting qualities which might have been applicable to the “unique” Elder Wand applied with a trowel to every wand in sight. If the laws are subtle, they probably are subtle enough to present little difficulty under most cases. I think that Rowling “overwrote” the business of wands that don’t cooperate with owners they haven’t “chosen” themselves.

The original premise that wands choose their wizards could be worked with seamlessly. The premise that someone else’s wand would never work as well for you as one that “chose” you could be equated to someone else’s spectacles not working as well for you as your own, even if you can see pretty well through them. The wood and the core of a properly fitted wand resonate together at a frequency of magic that matches you and gives you a better performance. No real problem with any of that, and nothing that we were shown in Books 1–6 has any problem with that interpretation.

Suddenly in Book 7 all wands are suddenly the Elder Wand. Wooden bimbos who will go off with anyone who can take them away from their original owner. This is backwards. Only the Elder Wand ought to be the Elder Wand.

And for that matter even the Elder Wand doesn’t need to behave like that. If Rowling hadn’t been bankrupt of imagination by then, she’d have worked it out by some other rationale.

Which also reels in the unexplored thread of just what did Albus intend by his claim that he had intended for Snape to have the Elder Wand. Just how was that supposed to play out?

Albus knew that Tom would want to find a new, better wand to use against Harry after the tug-of-war in the graveyard went against him. He also knew that Gellert Grindelwald was still alive and that there had been rumors back around the start of his rise for power that he had acquired a very famous and powerful wand. There was every chance that Tom would discover those rumors. After all, some of Tom’s followers were from the geographic area that Gellert had ruled until Tom finished school. Indeed, although Albus seems never to have learned of Tom’s first foray into the forests of Albania, Tom had actually been in the area right around the time that Grindelwald’s defeat took place, and, given the sort of wizard that Tom tends to hang out with, he might have already heard the rumors himself. Albus must have known that it was only a matter of time before Tom was on the trail of the ELder Wand.

And so long as Gellert was alive Albus knew that there was a better than average chance that Tom would realize that Albus had taken the Wand when he had defeated Gellert.

So what was supposed to come of passing the wand to Snape? He does not appear to have filled Snape in on the fact that his wand was the Elder Wand. You would have thought that would have mattered.

Did he ever intend for Snape to keep the Wand? Or was Harry (whose tendency to use Expeliarmus first is pretty well known) supposed to take it from Snape, giving him all three of the Hallows? Albus had already made a point of insisting that Snape was to seek Harry out before the final confrontation to give him his last message. Was a wand exchange supposed to be a part of that meeting?

Or did he intend something else? We have no clue.

In the event, what he appears to have done by this particular facet of his orchestration of his own murder was to deliberately set Snape up to die. Much as he had effectively set up Moody (or anyone else who was unlucky) in the escape from Privet Drive, and possibly Emmeline Vance the summer earlier.

Plus, we also have a considerable question as to whether Albus was ever the rightful “Master ” of the Elder Wand.

Gellert did his bit by claiming that he had never “had” the wand. So we don't know that he ever had the mastery of it. He stole the thing, he hexed Gregorovitch as he escaped, but he didn't kill Gregorovitch to get it. We don't know that Albus had the Mastery of it either. He certainly doesn't come out and claim to have had. 

“I was fit to own the Elder Wand, and not boast of it, and not to kill with it. I was permitted to tame it and to use it, because I took it, not for gain, but to save others from it.”

That really doesn't come out and say that he was the Master of it, does it. It almost comes across as if he was concealing the fact that the mastery of that Wand had ceased years earlier. 

Of course since we have to shower Harry Stu with ever more evidence of “special” obviously at the end of the story Harry had won the Mastery and uses it to fix his old wand that he likes much better, and which was otherwise unrepairable. 

Being given fabulous artifacts that he has no desire to use seems to be a pattern with Harry.

****

The LiveJournalist known as Swythyv and were kicking this around for the last few weeks before the Haloween update, and poking at the Hallows (which are another bit of balognium to examine) from a number of different directions. Makes me really wish I wrote fanfic, because the possibilities are just about endless. 

But I think insofar as reconciling a variant of Harry, Tom, and the Elder Wand which would actually read goes, the thing that probably needs to be kept in mind is that the Elder Wand is supposed to be unique.

What is needed isn't a wand which will go off and obey just anyone. What is needed is a wand which flatly refuses to cooperate with Tom. One that choses Harry because he isn't Tom. One that, when offered the choice, will kill the soul fragment that IS Tom and not touch Harry.

As I say above, Rowling overwrote the wand business when she started applying what were supposed to be subtle laws with a trowel to every wand in sight. It would have worked better if she had scaled it back a bit and had given us a bit more discussion about the Elder Wand after they figured it out that this was what Tom was searching for. The thing is supposed to be a legend for heaven's sake. There have got to be some attributed qualities to it. It would have been something relevant to chew on during the endless camping trip.

But in any case, we know that wands clearly relate to their holders on some level, since they supposedly “choose” their (first) owners. And magic appears to be an attribute of the soul, so when a wizard channels his magic through his wand he is engaging in a fairly intimate process. It probably isn't that big of a stretch to postulate that wands are reacting to on some level to their holder’s souls.

What Swythyv and I came up with is that they don't (or at least the Elder Wand doesn't) particularly like incomplete ones. The soul, as Slughorn insists, is supposed to remain intact. Or at least all of the pieces are supposed to remain present in the body.

We’ve been getting hints that magic is soul-based, or at least an attribute of the soul since CoS. Indeed, ever since PS/SS. Harry wasn’t born a Parselmouth after all. Neither was Ginny. And yet she was directing a basilisk through the school when she was under Tom’s control, and even though Harry clearly wasn’t possessed, he was still able to chat up a boa constrictor in the zoo. What do Harry and Ginny have in common here?

We got the major hint with NH Nick’s little talk at the end of OotP where he assures Harry that only witches and wizards are capable of manifesting as ghosts. The other shoe drops in HBP when Snape officially identifies a ghost as the imprint of a departed soul. Clearly there is something about the souls of wizards which distinguishes them from the souls of Muggles. And, given that they are basically all one species, the only thing that is a viable candidate for that difference is the ability to channel magic.

Ergo: it is a tenible hypothesis to conclude that magic is connected to a wizard’s soul, and that his wand is, in a very practical manner, his “soul mate”.

Tom's old yew wand was with him every step of the way as he butchered his soul. And it actively assisted him to do it. That wand was going to have no objections to the state of Tom’s soul. It would never have let him down if it could help it. We don’t know how well Lucius Malfoy’s wand actually cooperated with Tom, just that he was able to AK Charity Burbage with it. And even if it was balking, he would have only interpreted that as its being an inferior wand. But the Elder Wand’s reputation would have made its lack of compliance apparant.

And if the Elder Wand refused to obey him the place to look isn’t the wand, but at Tom himself. What is most likely to be different about Tom from all the other wizards through whose hands it has passed over the centuries? Eh?

The Elder Wand clearly has no objection to killing, and as such has no apparant objection to damaged souls, but why not give us a hint that it may have an objection to incomplete ones. Even if only once we got to King’s Cross (which would make a certain amount of sense, it isn’t information that would be widely known out in the world, nor would Harry have had any reasonable source for finding it out. Even the wandmakers probably wouldn’t have known about that peculiarity).

One little shift, and we'd be rid of the necessity for just about all of the stupidity that Rowling lumbered us with in Book 7. Harry wouldn’t be the master of the Elder Wand because he yanked Draco's hawthorn wand out of his hand a couple of months earlier. He would be the Master of the Elder Wand because when offered the choice of killing only one of the two of them earlier that evening, the wand chose to kill Tom. Harry's Expeliarmus gave it the excuse it needed to go back and finish the job.

I mean why, why, if Tom Riddle’s personal choices were so bloody bad, can’t they be rolled into constituting the very reason why he ended up defeating himself? Not because of the choices that he didn’t make — because he was incapable of it — but because of the choices that he actually made?

If that premise is added to the mix — and, yes, I know Rowling didn't, she doesn't seem to have a lot of apreciation for mechanics — it just about serves the purpose. The Wand didn't like Riddle from the get-go and was being as uncooperative toward him as the blackthorn wand had been to Harry or Bellatrix's wand was for Hermione. (Which probably ought to not have been quite so exaggerated in their resistence to their present holders, but a comment in passing that they just didn't work as well as their own wands would have been perfectly reasonable.) When the Elder Wand was offered the choice of killing Harry, or a fragment of its current holder's soul, it took the fragment, and pulled Tom into the waiting station at the same time it knocked Harry into it.

If the Elder Wand is unique — really unique — you have some chance of pulling that off. And the elements for the proper sort of uniqueness are all right there. The wand is set up as haveing always been more powerful than any other wand out there. It is centuries old at the very least. It has been through a lot of hands and has connected with a lot of wizard’s souls. If any wand was ever going to develop a degree of self-consiousness and independent thought, or some power of active “choice” of its own it is this wand.

Tom is even fully aware of and complains about it's active lack of cooperation — which is the only reason why he would have disposed of as useful a tool as Snape. All that is needed is one good reason to explain why the wand is refusing to work with Tom. A reason directly related to Tom.

And we’ve got one! And she didn’t use it!

Actually what she gave us hinges far too much upon the (suddenly introduced) premise that all wands recognize each other, and the totally unantcipated happenstance of Harry facing Tom with what was originally Draco's wand. And I flatly don’t believe it as presented. It’s not just balognium. It’s bullshit.

The two spells do seem to have gone off together, as they did the last time Harry and Tom came face-to-face in the graveyard. Had the wands shared a core we would have got another Priori Incantatum. Had the spells behaved normally, the AK would have simply run roughshod over the Expeliarmus and nailed Harry unless he was able to dodge out of the way. That normal wands recognize one another strikes me as pure balognium, but the Elder Wand might be able to. Or at least it might resonate to something in the source of the magic which is generating the Expeliarmus that it is plowing through with it’s AK. (Which it is also resisting delivering, since it is not going to cooperate with its holder any more than it can avoid.)

I really do think that postulating that the Elder Wand is semi-sentient — which in itself is a stretch — plays far better than to postulate that all wands are semi-sentient. And that if the Elder Wand has been without a true Master for a while, then it is probably shopping. That AK in the forest clearing established a connection between Tom and Harry, and the Wand was aware of both of them.

And it made its choice.

Possibly just to get away from Tom.

****

I really am inclined to think that Albus's original plan was for Snape to get the wand, make a point of meeting Harry before the final confrontation in order to pass him that final message, and for Harry, whose first line of defense is pretty much always Expeliarmus, to disarm him of it.

Giving Harry custody of all three of the Hallows. Whether he had the true Mastery or not, it would at least keep the Elder Wand out of Tom’s hands. I’m not sure where it was supposed to go from there, and frankly I suspect Rowling doesn’t either.

What I think was a mistake, was when she decided to convince reader that despite the fact that wands and their wizards are supposed to be intimately connected, wands are also, at the same time, effectively little wooden bimbos who will happily go off with any bully who can take them away from their former “protector”. (In which case you really have to wonder about Neville's Gran, forcing the kid to use a “legacy wand” that he hadn’t won.) I am not altogether convinced that Rowling had really thought this through, although in itself it will about play.

The problem here is that it's completely out of scale. Either wands are faithless wooden bimbos, consiously looking out to abandon their masters for a more “powerful” one, or they aren’t. If they are just sticks of wood with a magical core which responds well to one person or another due to the kind of magical harmonics that I have postulated in the essay on wandmaking, and which are inherent in the wand and the person, there isn't so much of a problem. If using a wand is like wearing reading glasses from the drugstore, one pair of glasses will probably help any number of people bring the fine print into focus. Another pair will work better for a different lot of people. You do not have to postulate exaggerated issues of wand “mastery” as a major issue for all of them.

I suspect that you can pass a wand on by physically handing it to whomever you want to give it to. Ron had no trouble with Charlie’s old wand in his first year, despite the fact that it was already in really bad condition when he got it. Under Rowling’s rules, Harry physically took Malfoy's wand from Malfoy's hand, there was no magic involved, but the wand settled down and cooperated with him quite smoothly. It had evidently felt itself be passed from one legitimate master's hand to the next. Which makes no sense whatsoever, and was only introduced to pull a cheap trick at the climax of the book.

If we recalibrate the premise so that the Elder Wand is the special one, and normal wands really do act upon subtle laws, which upon the whole are too subtle to present much of a problem to most people under most circumstances, the whole issue of the true mastery of ordinary wands just goes away and becomes a non-issue. As it probably ought to be.

But the thing that fouls us up here, and is the detail which really renders the whole premise into balognium is that now suddenly we are supposed to understand that wands not only choose their wizards, they seem to recognize other wands. And I don’t think that is a part of the solution.

This is a case where having a beta would have probably been helpful.

What Rowling may not have intended, or has inadvertantly obscured the significance of, is the fact that she had originally made such an investment out of making so much of the fact that Harry and Tom’s wands were inherently brothers, which would very reasonably have been “aware” of one another. Now such a fluke simply does not really seem to matter all that much, since all wands seem to know each other and to have a private pecking order in which relationship scarely counts.

Because the way it reads now, and as Harry explains it (and since when is Harry an expert at wandlore?) in the final confrontation, what matters is that the Elder wand came up against the same wand which had disarmed it from a previous owner, and it recognized it.

Or, in other words, it wasn’t that the Elder Wand recognized Harry, it recognized the hawthorn wand. Not the wand’s holder, the wand itself.

Which does not fit anything that we had ever been told to that point. Compounding the problem by expecting us to now believe that no wand that has ever lost a duel against another wand will ever again act against any holder of that wand. And that just makes no sense whatsoever.

And the final wrapup of the climax is not the place that one ought to be introducing some kind of new and hoopy magic. This is pulling a rabbit out of your hat. It’s flashy all right. But the audience knows that it is rigged, and it’s totally bogus.

It’s balognium. Unquestionably. And it didn’t need to be.

****

Which, so long as we are on the subject, brings up the question of Harry Potter and his Amazing Auto-Wand.

Just what the hell was that about?

Actually, I think I am going to come back to the issue of the Amazing Auto-Wand later, since it is rather closely connected to a couple of the other bits of balognium — or near-balognium — that we are also having to field. And it would make sense to take a closer look at them first.

****

These are, of course, the Deathly Hallows themselves.

I really do not believe that the Deathly Hallows as a package deal of three significant artifacts was a part of the original plan.