How Did Dumbledore Get The Elder Wand? A Harry Potter Timeline Explained

The wizarding world of "Harry Potter" is filled to the brim with powerful and fascinating magical objects, but in the final book and film — "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" — audiences are introduced to three of the most legendary magical items of all time. The titular Deathly Hallows, which many wizards believe don't even exist, is a triad of magical objects: an "unbeatable" wand known as the Elder Wand, a stone with the power to bring back the dead (albeit in a ghostly form) called the Resurrection Stone, and an Invisibility Cloak whose power to hide the wearer never fades. 

Without getting too much into the weeds here, this all traces back to an ancient wizarding family: the Peverells. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) comes into possession of the Cloak when he's just eleven years old — his father James was a descendant of the family's youngest son Ignotus — and the Resurrection Stone originally belonged to the middle son Cadmus, who passed it on to his own descendants (specifically, the Gaunt clan, whose daughter Merope gave birth to the future Dark Lord himself, Tom Riddle). So what about the wand? According to deep wizarding lore, it belonged to the eldest Peverell brother Antioch, and all of this traces back to a tale told to young wizards that can be found in a popular magical children's book. So how did the wand end up in the possession of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry's headmaster Albus Dumbledore (played by Richard Harris and Michael Gambon after the former actor passed away in 2002), and what's its history in the wizarding world? 

The Elder Wand's history is muddled — and bloody — but if we're using "The Tale of the Three Brothers" from "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" as canon, then here's how it all began. Legend has it that as three brothers tried to cross a dangerous river, they used magic to overcome the obstacle, infuriating Death himself ... though the magical specter did offer each man a "prize" after they best him. The story is clearly meant to illustrate that the Cloak is the "correct" prize; Antioch asks for an unbeatable wand and gets himself murdered by another wizard (using a knife, not a wand) after he brags about it in a pub, and Cadmus takes his own life after using the Resurrection Stone to conjure up a pale imitation of the dead girl he loves. Ignotus, the third brother, asks for the Cloak so that he may hide from Death until he's ready to leave on his own terms, so the manner in which we learn about the Elder Wand pretty clearly illustrates that it's an immensely dangerous object that'll probably get you killed.

If we put aside the whole idea that Death, in some form, created these three magical objects, we can perhaps presume the wand, made of elder wood with a Thestral hair core, was created by Antioch himself. In any case, as Rhys Ifans' Xenophilius Lovegood says in the book and film "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the wand left a "bloody trail" throughout history and belonged to famous wizards like Emeric the Evil, Godelot (who wrote a book seen in the series called "Magick Moste Evile"), and a few others. Eventually, it finds its way to Albus Dumbledore — but that's a complicated story in its own right.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org

Here's one thing we do know for sure about the Elder Wand: at a certain point in wizarding history, it was possessed by the famous wandmaker Gregorovitch, who gets name-dropped in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (he made the wand of Stanislav Yanevski's famous Quidditch player and Triwizard Tournament champion for Durmstrang, Viktor Krum). Unfortunately for quite literally everybody, a young thief named Gellert Grindelwald steals the wand from Gregorovitch and goes on to become the pre-eminent dark wizard of his time (basically, Grindelwald walked so that Voldemort, played in his final form by Ralph Fiennes, could run).

Grindelwald and a young Dumbledore were friends — and lovers, apparently — but after Grindelwald's heel turn into full darkness, Dumbledore challenges him to a duel in 1945, famously defeating Grindewald and, as a result, taking control of the Elder Wand. (As we're repeatedly told throughout the "Harry Potter" series, the wand "chooses" the wizard, and it'll shift allegiances accordingly if one wizard wins a duel against another.) The great thing here is that Dumbledore wasn't much of a fighter — he only challenged Grindelwald to the duel to, you know, save the wizarding world from certain tyranny and horrors — so once the Elder Wand passed to him, it knew peace for a little while. Unfortunately, when Dumbledore dies in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," everything goes awry again ... and the wand is stolen from Dumbledore's tomb.

At the midpoint of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" — and the end of the first "Deathly Hallows" film, which split the sprawling story into two parts — Voldemort infiltrates Dumbledore's tomb and steals the Elder Wand outright, becoming its master as he sets out to kill Harry Potter once and for all. Unfortunately for Voldemort, stealing the wand from Dumbledore's tomb did absolutely nothing; the wand already had a living master.

Upon finding that the wand doesn't work very well for him — or not as well as he'd hoped and assumed — Voldemort turns his attention to the man he regards as his most loyal servant, former Hogwarts professor and current headmaster Severus Snape (the late, great Alan Rickman). Because Snape was the one to kill Dumbledore in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," Voldemort incorrectly assumes that the wand "belongs" to Snape, so he has to kill Snape in order to truly possess it. He does kill Snape, but as Harry tells him at the end of the book, he's fatally wrong. Snape and Dumbledore arranged the latter's "murder" — the former headmaster was sickened by a curse and was going to die anyway — so Dumbledore was never truly defeated by the Potions master and double agent. Dumbledore was, however, disarmed by Slytherin student and Harry's nemesis Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) before Snape arrived on the scene. Draco remained the true master of the Elder Wand for a while until, during a battle at Malfoy Manor in "Deathly Hallows," Harry disarmed him ... and when Voldemort casts a Killing Curse from the wand that doesn't belong to him at Harry, it rebounds, killing the evil wizard once and for all.

When all is said and done and Voldemort is defeated, Harry is left as the true master of the Elder Wand and, in fact, the possessor of all three Deathly Hallows. (He uses the stone jsut before Voldemort "kills" him for the first time, which, unbeknownst to Voldemort, only destroys the Horcrux living within Harry; the Cloak still belongs to him outright.) Harry makes two completely different decisions in the book and the film, and to be honest, the one in the book makes a lot more sense. During "Deathly Hallows," Harry's original wand, made of holly and phoenix feather, gets broken during a fight; in the novel, he uses the Elder Wand to quickly repair his own wand and places the super-powerful weapon back into Dumbledore's tomb, assuming (correctly) that its power will die if Harry dies a natural death. (This was, according to Dumbledore's talking portrait in the book, always his own intention.)

In the movie, Daniel Radcliffe's Harry impulsively snaps the wand in half and tosses it into a gorge, which also gets the job done — but because we don't see him repair his own wand, it's definitely an emptier ending than the one in the book. In any case, after Harry and Voldemort's final battle — where the latter falls forever — the Elder Wand's "bloody trail" ends.

The "Harry Potter" movies are streaming on Peacock now.