If you've always wanted to know more about this legendary Harry Potter character, here's
your chance. Get comfortable, because we're explaining Dumbledore's long backstory, amazing
talents, and complicated timeline throughout the beloved series.
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was born in 1881 to Percival and Kendra Dumbledore.
The family resided in Godric's Hollow, the ancestral home of Godric Gryffindor, where
the Potter family would later live and die as well. Considered to be one of the greatest
and most powerful wizards in history, Dumbledore was known for his distinctive long white beard,
half-moon glasses, and whimsical attitude. When fans first meet him, he's cracking jokes
about auspicious scars and offering up lemon drop candies like a kindly grandfather.
"Ah. Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. I was most unfortunate in my youth to come across
a vomit flavored one."
Throughout Harry's relationship with the man who would become both his professor and mentor,
Dumbledore can often be inscrutable, funny, and intentionally vague.
However, Harry's relationship with the elderly wizard is cut unexpectedly short at the end
of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, when Dumbledore is killed at the hands of
Severus Snape. Harry watches, helpless, as one of his only parental figures falls to
his death in June of 1997. And though there's more at play here than he realizes, Harry
can't help but be horrified in the moment.
At the time of his death, Dumbledore was a whopping 116 years old. For the most part,
he seemed to be in great health throughout the series, even at such an advanced age.
And, had he not sought to use the Resurrection Stone, which a young Tom Riddle had cursed
after transforming it into one of his seven Horcruxes, it's easy to surmise that Dumbledore
could have gone on to live quite a bit longer.
Before he ascended to his future glory, Dumbledore was one of many new 11-year-old arrivals at
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Like other first year students, he participated
in the school's time honored Sorting ceremony, which, with the help of an enchanted Sorting
Hat, students are placed into one of four different factions: Gryffindor, Slytherin,
Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw. Typically, brave students are placed in Gryffindor; cunning
kids end up in Slytherin; hard workers head to Hufflepuff; and the smartest find their
home in Ravenclaw. Though Dumbledore certainly possesses traits from every house, it's no
surprise that he would wind up in Gryffindor, though it is possible he was a serious Ravenclaw
contender.
However, the most controversial element of Dumbledore's youth is undoubtedly his close
personal friendship with Gellert Grindelwald. That particular story isn't revealed until
Deathly Hallows, when, following Dumbledore's death, a tell-all book about his life is published
by toxic reporter Rita Skeeter. Though she does take some liberties when it comes to
Dumbledore, the truth is he really was friends with Grindelwald. It was a fact that would
cast a rare negative light on the wizard's life and legacy.
In the wake of Dumbledore's passing, much is written about the venerated wizard, including
a touching personal obituary penned by his Hogwarts classmate and longtime friend Elphias
Doge for the wizarding newspaper The Daily Prophet. In it, he notes that he planned to
travel the world alongside Dumbledore after their graduation, but the death of Dumbledore's
mother halted those plans.
Alongside his brother Aberforth, Dumbledore was left to care for their younger sister
Ariana. As a child, Ariana had suffered an attack at the hands of some boys who lived
near Godric's Hollow. It left her with the inability to control her magic, which would
then manifest as random and often dangerous outbursts. When their father attacked the
boys in retaliation, he was sent away to Azkaban, and their mother was left to manage Ariana
alone. Eventually, Kendra became the victim of her daughter's misplaced magic, and Albus
and Aberforth were put in charge of a sweet yet inadvertently dangerous girl.
The family's choice to keep Ariana hidden led to nasty rumors, with many believing that
Ariana was a Squib, a child with no magical abilities born to a family of wizards, and
that the proud Dumbledores were too ashamed of her to allow her out in public.
The less famous Dumbledore brother, Aberforth, resented his brother, and as he tells Harry
in The Deathly Hallows, he always considered Albus to be high and mighty about his considerable
intellect and talent.
"My brother sacrificed many things, Mr. Potter, on his journey to find power."
As Ariana's main caretaker, Aberforth watched as his brother made extravagant plans that
had nothing to do with his family, but it was Albus' friendship with Grindelwald that
created the biggest rift between the siblings.
When Grindelwald moved to Godric's Hollow as a teenager to live with his aunt Bathilda
Bagshot, author of the famous A History of Magic and friend to Harry Potter's
parents before their deaths in 1981, he and Dumbledore struck up a fast friendship, plotting
ways to make the wizarding world better. But when Aberforth butted heads with Grindelwald,
the latter cast the Cruciatus Curse, an Unforgivable Curse that causes unbelievable pain, on the
former. As they dueled, Ariana got in the middle of the fight, only to be killed by
a stray spell.
In the aftermath of Ariana's tragic death, Dumbledore's need for power wholly abated.
As he later told Harry, he didn't think he should be trusted in such a way after his
friendship with Grindelwald ruined his family. Turning down repeated offers to take the ultimate
seat of power and become Minister for Magic, Dumbledore turned instead to his true love:
teaching.
As one of the most intelligent and learned wizards in history, it makes sense that Dumbledore
would want to share his wisdom with young witches and wizards, and he returned to teach
both Defense Against the Dark Arts and Transfiguration throughout his early tenure at Hogwarts. As
the Transfiguration teacher, Dumbledore encountered a curious young boy named Tom Riddle, whom
he immediately recognized as a talented yet foreboding presence.
Of course, that student would grow up to become none other than Lord Voldemort, Dumbledore's
greatest adversary outside of Grindelwald.
"Did you know, sir? Then?"
"Did I know I'd just met the most dangerous dark wizard of all time? No."
Before he fully became Voldemort, many who knew Tom Riddle saw him as a bright, kind,
and thoughtful student who was simply desperate to prove himself. Dumbledore, however, knew
Riddle was capable of great cruelty and vindictiveness from an early age, and was always wary of
the young wizard.
Immediately after Riddle graduated, he applied for the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts
professor but was turned down, and when he tried a second time, Dumbledore rebuffed him
yet again.
Riddle was already well on his way to becoming Lord Voldemort. By the time he asked Dumbledore
for a job, he'd already created at least one, if not more, of his soul-carrying Horcruxes,
which can only be crafted by committing the ultimate sin: taking another's life. Tom told
Dumbledore that he wanted to pass his storied knowledge onto Hogwarts students, but it was
obvious that Dumbledore had some idea of the kind of magic the future Dark Lord would wind
up teaching, and he refused.
In that moment, Dumbledore sealed the fate of the entire position: as he later pointed
out to Harry, Voldemort jinxed the post, and no Defense Against the Dark Arts professor
ever stayed for more than one year after that fateful meeting.
Dumbledore's teenage friendship with Grindelwald turned out to be a little more than he had
bargained for initially. The two became involved in a secret relationship, though J.K. Rowling
has explained that Dumbledore's strong feelings may not have been fully reciprocated when
she announced, after the books ended, that Dumbledore was actually gay.
The great tragedy of Dumbledore's sexuality is that, as far as Rowling has revealed so
far, he seemingly never got the chance to live his truth and express himself in any
sort of healthy relationship. Though he and Grindelwald carried on a very physical affair,
Dumbledore was eventually forced to face the man he loved and defeat him once and for all.
"You are the only wizard who is his equal. I need you to fight him."
In the 1940s, Dumbledore dueled Grindelwald in an epic battle, ending a decades-long wizarding
war and taking down a man who turned out to be the penultimate face of evil, second only
to Voldemort. In the wake of Grindelwald's defeat, Dumbledore ascended to the position
of headmaster at Hogwarts. Rowling later explained:
"He lost his moral compass completely when he fell in love and I think subsequently became
very mistrustful of his own judgement in those matters so became quite asexual. He led a
celibate and a bookish life."
Aberforth may have been angry at his brother, believing that he never truly cared about
what happened to his mother and sister or about the rift between the two siblings, but
that couldn't have been further from the truth. Beyond eschewing an important Ministry of
Magic job and flying relatively under the radar, Dumbledore lived with momentous regrets
about his loved ones.
"Regret is my constant companion. Do not let it become yours."
During Sorcerer's Stone, when Harry discovers the Mirror of Erised, a magical object that
shows its user their deepest desire, he asks Dumbledore what the elder wizard sees in the
mirror, and Dumbledore responds that he sees "socks," a gift he always wants for Christmas.
Harry gets the feeling that Dumbledore may not have been telling the truth. Later, when
the two are trying to procure one of Voldemort's Horcruxes from a secret cave, Dumbledore drinks
a potion to unearth the horrible magical item and screams for Harry to hurt him rather than
"them." As Harry later tells Aberforth, it was clear
that Dumbledore was a haunted man, and the "them" he was crying out for was his lost
family.
Despite the fact that he pathologically avoided gaining too much power, Dumbledore did allow
himself to buy into a single myth and take control of one of the most magically powerful
artifacts of all time. In the final installment of the series, Harry, Ron, and Hermione learn
about the eponymous Deathly Hallows, a legendary trio of items made up of the Invisibility
Cloak, the Resurrection Stone, and the Elder Wand. Harry has owned the Invisibility Cloak
all along, but the Resurrection Stone and the Elder Wand belonged to another, specifically,
to Dumbledore.
In order to try and bring his family back, Dumbledore tried to break into a cursed ring
of Voldemort's to retrieve the Stone and wound up afflicted with a fatal curse, but he maintained
possession of the Elder Wand after his duel with Grindelwald. Since he knew that Voldemort
would stop at nothing to get the world's most powerful wand, he arranged his own death at
Snape's hands, finessing the ownership of the wand until it would fall to Draco Malfoy,
a young boy tasked to kill Dumbledore by Voldemort himself. In the end, Harry ends up the master
of the wand, but it's still a pretty incredible feat on Dumbledore's part to not only hide
the wand from evil for so long, but to ensure that it would never truly work for Voldemort's
purposes.
Throughout the series, Dumbledore is the wisest and sagest character of all, advising everybody
on everything from deep and powerful magic to matters of the heart. Beyond his kindness
and generosity, the wizard was also imbued with particular magical skill, and his list
of accomplishments and talents seems never-ending.
"That is one of my more brilliant ideas. And between you and me, that is saying something."
A skilled Occlumens and Legilimens, Dumbledore had the ability to both see into others' minds
and block others from seeing into his own. He could conjure everlasting Gubraithian fire
and make himself invisible without a magical cloak, and he was a master at all magical
duels, fighting everyone from Grindelwald to Voldemort.
Dumbledore was also an accomplished alchemist who helped create the Sorcerer's Stone with
Nicolas Flamel, which can turn any item to gold and promises eternal life. He discovered
all 12 uses for dragon's blood, and, on top of all of it, he spoke multiple languages,
including Mermish, though it's never known how or why he learned it.
Finally, and most importantly of all, his knowledge of and belief in the power of love
as it pertains to magic and protection was unparalleled. In fact, it was just that knowledge
and belief that eventually helped Harry topple Voldemort.
"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living. And above all, all those who live without
love."
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite
stuff are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss
a single one.