Sirius' and Lily's wands (Was: getting wands back )

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 90904

Carol:
[I've wondered]how Sirius got his wand back. (He used Snape's in PoA.)

Eleri:
I've wondered this too... I'm suspecting that once he was cleared in 
Dumbldores mind, that Dumbledore could have had a word with Mr. 
Ollivander, and arranged a late-night trip to the store for a new 
wand. <snip>

bboy_mn:
<snip>
In PoA and CoS, Sirius is on the run and living on his own, and I'm
pretty sure in both cases, he didn't have a wand. Now that he is
living in his ancestral home, he has a wand again. So, I find it very
easy to make a connection between being home and having a wand. I
speculate, as I so often do, that he is using a wand he found at home;
his brother's, mother's, father's etc.... Probably not a prefect
match, but using the wand of a family member (or 3) would give a
better match than a random wand.

Carol:
Good suggestion. There's also another possibility. In SS/PS,
Ollivander remembers Harry's mother coming to his shop to buy her
*first* wand--a "nice wand for charm work" that was not as powerful as
James's, which was "excellent for transfiguration" (Am. ed. 82).
Maybe Sirius also had more than one wand. He may have found that the
one that chose him at age eleven was not strong enough for the
advanced kind of transgiguration he was attempting at age fourteen or
fifteen. If so, he could have found his own old wand at home and used
it in place of the one that was taken from him and presumably
destroyed when he was sent to Azkaban.

But the description of Lily's wand brings up another point. If she
bought a "first" wand, doesn't that imply a second wand as well? The
description of the first wand strongly suggests that she *did* have an
aptitude for charm work, and the swishy little willow wand was perfect
for her as an eleven-year-old Muggle-born just discovering this gift, 
but Ollivander states quite directly that it wasn't as powerful as
James's. (He, being a pureblood, would already know about magic and
would know what to do with a wand. The wand sensed the talent for
transfiguration taht would lead him to become an animagus, even if
James himself wasn't already aware of it.) At some point, Lily appears
to have outgrown this wand, presumably because it wasn't sufficiently
powerful, and to have bought another one more suitable to the level of
magic she could perform at that point. Maybe she needed a more
powerful wand to fight against Voldemort. Or maybe, just maybe, she
wanted to put a defensive charm on her little son. 

At any rate, just as Ollivander's remark that James's wand was
"excellent for transfiguration" foreshadows his ability to transform
into an animagus. It would be strange indeed if "nice wand for charm
work" didn't foreshadow an equally impressive gift for charms in Lily.

Carol