Hey everyone,
Welcome to another installment of Harry Potter Theory. In today’s video, I’m going to
be discussing the fabled Deathly Hallows. More specifically, Im going to be discussing
what happened to each of the 3 hallows after the Battle of Hogwarts.
The 3 deathly hallows are of course fabled magical artefacts which pertain to the tale
of the three Peverell brothers - Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus.
The plot surrounds the three wizard brothers and their ability to cheat death for a short
period of time. After conquering death, a personification of death, under the guise
of congratulating them, awards them with 3 gifts: The elder wand, the resurrection stone,
and the invisibility cloak. Long story short, each brother chose one of the gifts that death
had presented them. Ignotus (the youngest) chose the invisibility cloak, Cadmus (the
middle brother) chose the resurrection stone, and Antioch (the eldest) chose the elder wand.
From the tale of the three brothers:
“There were once three brothers who were traveling along a lonely, winding road at
twilight. In time, the brothers reached a river too deep to wade through and too dangerous
to swim across. However, these brothers were learned in the magical arts, and so they simply
waved their wands and made a bridge appear across the treacherous water. They were halfway
across it when they found their path blocked by a hooded figure.”
“And Death spoke to them. He was angry that he had been cheated out of three new victims,
for travelers usually drowned in the river. But Death was cunning. He pretended to congratulate
the three brothers upon their magic and said that each had earned a prize for having been
clever enough to evade him.”
These objects are instrumental in the Harry Potter story. The invisibility cloak allowed
Harry to escape trouble on numerous occasions, the resurrection stone allowed Harry to communicate
with ‘shades’ of lost loved ones, and the elder wand is well-the elder wand- one
of the leading plot drivers of the Harry Potter story. Provided that each of these artefacts
is immensely powerful, you might now be wondering - what came of them after the battle of hogwarts?
What happened to them after they had played their part in the story?
First- the elder wand. The fate of the elder wand varies depending on what you’re going
by- book or film. In the film, Harry simply snaps the wand in an effort to make sure that
its powers could never be used for evil again. However, this decision was quite unpopular
with fans- and is entirely inconsistent with the events of the book. In the book, Harry
tells Dumbledore’s portrait that he’s going to lay the wand to rest in Dumbledore’s
tomb:
“I’m putting the Elder Wand,” he told Dumbledore, who was watching him with enormous
affection and admiration, “back where it came from. It can stay there. If I die a natural
death like Ignotus, its power will be broken, won’t it? The previous master will never
have been defeated. That’ll be the end of it.”
And that covers the elder wand- if we go by existing canon then it appears that the wand
simply stayed there.
Now for the stone. The last we saw of the stone was in the forbidden forest when Harry
uses it to produce images of his mother, father, and others. While the stone was previously
thought to bring back the dead, in reality it only brings back a ‘shade’ of these
people. It has been expressed that the shades produced are ‘less substantial than living
bodies, but much more than ghosts’.
In a rather anticlimactic fashion, Harry simply drops the stone in the forest- and it’s
whereabouts are still unknown to this day.
“The Resurrection Stone slipped from between his numb fingers, and out of the corner of
his eyes he saw his parents, Sirius, and Lupin vanish as he stepped forward into the firelight.”
The thing is- Harry had no interest in keeping the stone anymore, and to a passerby, it would
just be another rock on the forest floor. In fact, according to an interview with J.K.
Rowling, the Stone eventually got stepped on by a centaur- being further buried into
the ground.
So that’s the wand and the stone spoken for- but what of the cloak?
As for the cloak- well, it simply remained in Harry’s possession. Harry never felt
that the existence of the cloak posed much of a threat- so he didn’t feel compelled
to destroy or hide it. In fact, the cloak was a Potter family heirloom, and he likely
passed it on to his son after he died.
And that’s it for this video! Did you guys know what had happened to the Hallows? Let
me know in the comment section below.
Until next time
My father will hear about this!