The wand in Ollivander's shop

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 165666

Dantzel wrote:
>
> In all the time that I have spent lurking on this website
(occasionally making comments and fully expecting them to be shot
down) I haven't seen any comments on the wand in Ollivander's shop in
Book One. <snip> 
> 
> I don't have the book in front of me to describe it, but Harry
notices it as soon as he walks into the shop, and it is never
mentioned again. What if that was the wand of one of the Four
Founders? Or the wand of someone else significant? 
> 
> For a time I thought it might be Voldemort's, but I dismissed that
idea as probably not likely (about two weeks ago lol).
> 
> Does anyone else agree? Do you disagree?
> 
> Dantzel, who considers the wand to perhaps be a Horcrux and can't
stop thinking about the stupid topic.
>

Carol responds:

I wouldn't call it a "stupid topic." A number of people have
speculated that the single wand on a faded purple cushion in
Ollivander's window could be Ravenclaw's wand and quite possibly the
Ravenclaw Horcrux. (Just do a site search with Ollivander, wand,
cushion, window as your search terms and you'll find quite a few posts
on the topic.)

Just why the Ravenclaw Horcrux would be so visible and easily
accessible, I don't know, given the protections on the ring Horcrux
and the (fake) locket Horcrux, both of which were magically concealed
as well as protected by either a curse or a poisoned potion and Inferi
(and maybe a curse as well), but still, it's possible. (An alternate
theory is that the Ravenclaw Horcrux is the tiara in the Room of
Requirement.)

Support for the wand theory comes mainly from the apparent
correspondence between the Founder's objects (Hufflepuff's cup and
Gryffindor's sword, which, of course, escaped becoming a Horcrux) and
the tarot deck: cup, pentacle, sword, and staff, the last of which is
interpreted by advocates of the theory to be equivalent to wand.
Slytherin's locket somehow becomes equivalent to a pentacle (or coin
or disk). Supposedly, cups are associated with water, swords with air
or fire, wands or staffs with air or fire, and pentacles with earth.
The problem with these associations, besides forcing a locket to equal
a pentacle, is that the cup belongs to Hufflepuff, which JKR has said
is associated with earth and the "pentacle"/locket to Slytherin, which
JKR has said is associated with water. (If, however, swords are
associated with fire, the Gryffindor element, and wands/staffs with
air, the Ravenclaw element, those two would fit.)

People have even argued, based on similar thinking, that the four
Horcruxes are the Deathly Hallows, reading "Hallows" as corresponding
to the Irish Hallows of Tuatha de Danaan: sword, spear, cup or
cauldron, and stone. (I personally don't like the theory, preferring
to think that evil objects can't be hallows. I prefer the idea that
the Hogwarts Hallows are burial grounds or catacombs of some sort
related to the Four Founders, or at least, three of the four.) Tarot
experts please have at me since my sole source of information on these
matters is the Internet.

Supposing that the wand is the Ravenclaw Horcrux and Ollivander knows
about or suspects the existence of Horcruxes ("He-Who-Must-Not-Be-
Named has done great things--terrible, but great"), he could have gone
into hiding along with the wand, or Dumbledore could have warned him
that he was in danger and that Voldemort was after the wand. At any
rate, the fact that the shop is empty and there were no signs of a
struggle suggests that he went into in hiding voluntarily, taking the
wands with him, rather than being kidnapped. (IIRC, Harry sees
thousands of wand boxes in SS/PS. That's a lot of wands to hide.
Ollivander must have Vanished them and then Summoned them to his
hiding place. Or that seems reasonable to me.)

As someone pointed out upthread, many of the Death Eaters would want
new wands. I've always wondered where the DEs in the MoM, at least the
ten or so who had escaped from Azkaban, got the wands they were using.
Surely, their own wands had been confiscated and destroyed (as Sirius
Black's apparently was) when they were arrested. The MoM was even
ready to destroy Harry's wand when he was about to be expelled from
Hogwarts for violating the Statute of Secrecy and the Restriction of
Underage Sorcery (or whatever it's called). I would think that the
crimes Antonin Dolohov and the others are known to have committed
would be much stronger grounds for destroying their old wands.

Carol, half-expecting to see Ollivander, wand boxes and all, in 12
Grimmaauld Place when Harry returns there