Summary: Chapter Eighteen: The Life and Lies of Albus
Dumbledore
Harry is desolate at the loss of his wand, and frightened.
Harry’s and Voldemort’s wands both had cores made from the same
source—tail feathers from Albus Dumbledore’s pet phoenix, Fawkes.
In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry had
been saved by the fact that his wand shared a core with Voldemort’s,
because Voldemort’s curse did not work properly with Harry’s wand
defending against it. Harry is sure that his wand, not his own magic,
had somehow been responsible for his successfully evading Voldemort
in the flight from the Dursleys’ house to the Tonkses’. Now that
his wand is ruined, Harry feels unprotected.
Harry is filled with anger toward Dumbledore, who failed
to tell him what he needed to know to complete his quest, and who
left him no clue how to find the sword. By simply trying to figure
out the meaning of Dumbledore’s bequest, Harry has now lost his
wand and given Voldemort an important clue to whatever it is Voldemort’s
looking for.
Hermione brings Harry Rita Skeeter’s book, The
Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, having seen it in Bathilda’s
house and picked it up. In his anger at Dumbledore, Harry looks
forward with relish to the prospect of reading about his dead friend’s
dirty secrets—without even having to ask Dumbledore’s permission.
Harry flips through the book, looking at the pictures,
and discovers that the young man who stole the wand from Gregorovitch—the man
Voldemort is now searching for—is Gellert Grindelwald. This fact
is astounding to Harry and Hermione, because Grindelwald is the
Dark wizard whom Dumbledore defeated in a duel decades earlier,
yet in the photographs in the book, the teenage Grindelwald and
Dumbledore seem to be the best of friends.
Harry and Hermione look for an explanation in the text
of the book, and we see the excerpt they read. In it, Rita Skeeter
claims that after his graduation from Hogwarts, Dumbledore was called
home by news of his mother’s death, and that he went home to ensure
his sister’s continued imprisonment. Bathilda Bagshot was at the
time the only resident of Godric’s Hollow on speaking terms with
Dumbledore’s mother, and that same summer that Dumbledore returned home,
Bathilda was visited by her great-nephew, Gellert Grindelwald, a
brilliant student of the Dark Arts at the Durmstrang Institute,
who had recently been expelled for his illicit experiments. At Godric’s
Hollow, Grindelwald and Dumbledore quickly struck up a close friendship.
Skeeter’s book reproduces a letter from Dumbledore to
Grindelwald from this period, in which Dumbledore expresses the
view that wizards should dominate and control Muggles for the Muggles’ own
good—views that would have been anathema to the older Dumbledore,
contradicting everything that he stood for. The book goes on to
note that Dumbledore and Grindelwald parted ways two months later,
not because Dumbledore had a change of heart, but because of Ariana’s
sudden death. According to Bathilda, Dumbledore and his brother
Aberforth got into a fistfight over her coffin, with Aberforth breaking
Dumbledore’s nose and blaming him for Ariana’s death. Grindelwald
quickly departed Godric’s Hollow to begin his terrifying career
on the Continent, and Dumbledore did not intervene to stop him for
a full five years. Rita Skeeter speculates about the role that either
man might have played in killing Ariana, and at the meaning of the
hitherto unknown bond between the two wizards.
