Hey guys welcome back so today I wanna talk about the curse on Dumbledores hand, how it
affected him, its properties and most importantly why he couldn’t just remove or cut off his
hand that contained the curse.
Have any of you guys ever watched the walking dead?
The person gets bitten by a walker on the arm, or leg or hand and in order to stop the
spread of the infection which ultimately kills them and turns them into a walker, that limb
is then cut off and it really works if done in time.
Ok I know Dumbledore’s situation is different because it’s a magical curse but it still
has similar properties to an infection.
The person is able to be kept alive if it can be eradicated from their body or kept
at bay with the right treatment.
So Dumbledore retrieves the Gaunt family signet ring from the old shack and immediately recognises
it’s the resurrection stone.
He cant contain his excitement at finally coming across something he truly believed
in but thought was lost to time.
The underlying issue with dumbledore was that he battled a lot of demons in relation to
the death of his younger sister Arianna, whose death he blames himself for.
To be able to talk to her once more, to tell her how sorry he was, to listen to what she
has to say, to possibly get some clarity on what happened the day she died, to have some
clarity on a situation that has haunted him for the majority of his life.
It’s a situation he never thought he’d be in.
He forgets to even examine the ring for dark magic and most importantly he forgets the
stone’s instructions to turn it thrice in hand in order to connect with those one has
lost.
I places it on his finger and immediately activates the curse, thats actually the most
frustrating part, the stone itself couldn’t be turned into a horcrux, it was the supporting
gold ring it was attached to that was the actual horcrux.
Dumbledore states that he just forgot due to his excitement which is a pretty stupid
way to condemn yourself to death.
So the curse rapidly starts to spread and Severus Snape manages to contain it to his
hand but gives dumbledore a year to live as the curse will eventually begin to take over
the rest of his body before ultimately killing him.
So if the curse is contained to the hand, why cant he just cut it off.
Take an axe or a cleaver and whack it off…well it’s not exactly that simple.
There’s the obvious reason that it would leave him disabled without his hand.
I’m not entirely sure if there was a limb replacement spell that wasn’t created from
dark magic like worm tails silver hand, which strangled him after he hesitated.
I think it would have caused a panic in the magical world if one of the greatest wizards
of the age had to amputate his hand as a result of Voldemorts power.
It would cause a complete frenzy in the media and throughout the magical community to think
that Dumbledore was placed in such a vulnerable state.
They were scared enough as it is from voldemort.
I can also imagine the daily profit having an absolute field day over the great Albus
Dumbledore losing a hand due to Voldemort.
The last thing anyone wants is a public panic that the only person capable of protecting
them is hanging together as best he can.
Then the curse from the ring was quite unanticipated you could say, and Dumbledore had no experience
of ever dealing with a curse like it.
He’d never seen anything like it.
In my opinion, no curse existed like that until Voldemort created it.
It was devastating, like he sat there and wrote down what way, every way, he wanted
this curse to affect it’s victim.
Dumbledore unfortunately was the first person to experience it.
In fact, it was extremely difficult for Snape to even confine it to one hand.
It’s my guess, the curse was able to transfer itself further up the arm of the person or
to a different body part at a slower rate than normal, slower than originally intended
so if Dumbledore had his hand cut off, parts of the curse would have already travelled
to the rest of his body and therefore would’ve still manifested after he had his hand removed.
Basically Voldemort did too good of a job and made the curse fail safe.
I also think it’s incredibly clever to use voldemort’s curse against him by having
snape kill Dumbledore, like they took a negative situation and turned it in to positive beneficial
one which would aid in the hopeful downfall of the dark lord.
There’s also no way of knowing how the curse would truly react to having the infected limb
cut off.
I mentioned earlier that I thought the curse already had travelled to around Dumbledores
body so losing the limb would make no difference but there could also be a fail safe that would
see the curse multiply at an aggressive uncontrollable rate and actually kill the host there and
then.
There’s just no telling what it could do as theres never been magic like it before.
This was original Voldemort dark magic.
Even Dumbledore’s own comments on the curse show how powerful it was when he says "The
ring, Harry.
Marvolo's ring.
And a terrible curse there was upon it too.
Had it not been — forgive me the lack of seemly modesty — for my own prodigious skill,
and for Professor Snape's timely action when I returned to Hogwarts, desperately injured,
I might not have lived to tell the tale.
However, a withered hand does not seem an unreasonable exchange for a seventh of Voldemort's
soul.
The ring is no longer a Horcrux."
That was Dumbledore’s quick thinking and prodigious skill as he describes it.
By destroying the ring itself, he not only destroyed the horcrux but also the dark magic
that was sustaining the curse, ensuring it lost its source power and that it could never
harm another individual.
However the downside was that enough of the magic had already entered his body which of
course put him in the position that we’re currently discussing.
The curse placed Dumbledore into a state of mind that he’d never been in before, the
mindset of accepting he was going to die.
Instead of wollowing in self pity of his impending death, Dumbledore thought of the best way
to use it to his advantage instead of actually looking for a way to save himself.
Dumbledore knew that Harry needed to be subject to a killing curse cast by Voldemort but contrary
to belief, he didn’t know if the killing curse would kill harry and destroy the horcrux
inside him or just destroy the horcrux on its own, therefore he wanted to make sure
harry had the best chance of surviving.
To achieve this though, he would have to deceive Voldemort into believing that he was the true
master of the wand, when that was never the case.
Furthermore, if Harry had any hope of winning the wand’s allegiance as Dumbledore planned,
the wand would first have to pass to a third party.
To bring this together, Dumbledore needed only arrange for his murder to be carried
out by someone other than Draco.
Unfortunately; this would one day be a death sentence for whoever actually took on the
responsibility.
Whoever killed Dumbledore would be assumed to be the Elder Wand’s true master when
Voldemort finally realised its allegiance was owed to another, who would not then hesitate
to kill even the closest of his followers.
He freely allowed Draco to disarm him, knowing the wand would swap its allegiance to Draco
from that moment.
At the same time, as it would be Snape that actually killed him, Voldemort would be tricked
into thinking Snape was the wand’s master.
Ultimately, this allows Harry a realistic chance of one day winning the wand’s trust
from Draco, while Voldemort would be hoodwinked into believing he could kill Snape and face
Harry as the wand’s master.
The end result is that when Voldemort and Harry do finally face each other, the elder
wand would resist Voldemort’s attempt to cast a killing curse on Harry, allowing Harry
to survive and the piece of Voldemort’s soul trapped inside Harry to be destroyed.
Ultimately, putting on the ring and thus ensuring his own death was the way Dumbledore helped
one of the purest souls in the story, Severus Snape, to contemplate assisting his own death
in order to protect Harry.
It is one of the most fundamental acts of empathy and courage in the entire series,
eclipsed perhaps only by Lily’s and Severus’ sacrifices for Harry.
If cutting off his hand would have stopped the curse from killing him, I believe Dumbledore
either would simply not have done it, or more likely have found another way to take on the
responsibility for his own death as there was something poetic about the way he went
out.
It's amazing that Dumbledore was able to live as long as he did with the curse, and likely
took the better part of his magical talent to slow it as much as he did.
So everyone that’s my video on why dumbledore didnt cut off his cursed hand and chose to
die instead.
I think, well I’m pretty sure I touched down on every single aspect of the situation
but as always if theres something you think I’ve not mentioned then please do in the
comment section below.
Thanks for watching, i’ll see you soon.