More thoughts on the Elder Wand subplot - Owner?

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 187386

Eggplant:
> > By the way, what was Dumbledore's original plan? How exactly did he intend Snape to become the new master of that wand?
>
> bboyminn:
> 
> That's just it though, I don't think Dumbledore expected anyone to become the Master of the Elder Wand. I think he intended to die undefeated, and therefore the last and final Master of the Elder Wand.
> 
> Now, somewhere in the books, someone speculated that Dumbledore intended Snape to be the Master, but, while that seems a reasonable assumption by the character, it seems logically unsound from the view of the reader. Snape didn't defeat Dumbledore, he carried out Dumbledore's order, and acted with Dumbledore's conscent. No defeat, no new Master.
> 
> So, it is possible that Dumbledore wanted Snape to have the wand, but to not be its Master. He wanted the wand to have no Master after his death.
> 
> Steve/bboyminn
>
Carol responds:
It was Voldemort who assumed that DD wanted Snape to become master of the wand, but both DD's actions and Harry's suggest that he was wrong. Clearly, both of them think that the only way to end the bloody cycle of violence is by making it impossible for the wand to take a new master. As things were, the cycle of violence *didn't* end since LV thought that by killing Snape (and later, Draco, as he thought), he could make himself the master of the wand.

The problem is, if everything else occurred as it does in DH (Harry's wand attacking Voldemort on its own, LV torturing Ollivander for more information, Harry coincidentally and conveniently dropping the photo of young Gellert Grindelwald at Godric's Hollow, LV would have broken into the tomb in any case--and finding that it wasn't there, he would surely have suspected that Snape, its new master, had taken it. And then what? The only way for that to work would be for Snape to hand over the powerless wand to Voldemort and explain that Dumbledore had done something to it to rob it of its powers--or to say, using Occlumency, that he didn't know what had become of it and that perhaps it had been burned.

Anyway, the wand still works perfectly well for Voldemort even though he's not its master--as well as the powerful wand that chose him and performed all that "great and terrible magic" that Ollivander mentioned (and he didn't even know about the Horcruxes). *We* know that it also created an army of Inferi, the protections on the cave, and all those Dark Marks on the arms of his DEs. So if the Elder Wand works that well for someone who's not its master, it's still a dangerous instrument. The only way to end its power and prevent people like LV from thinking they can master it is to, first, hide it and make people forget about it (except for eccentrics like Xeno Lovegood who want it as a Hallow), and, second, to die undefeated, so that it loses its powers altogether. Either that or the power that made people kill to possess it would destroyed--and surely, the original owner and maker had placed no such curse on it since by so doing he'd be dooming himself.

I guess that the only way we'll ever find out what DD expected to happen with the wand is by asking JKR. Maybe she'll explain it in an interview or the encyclopedia (if she ever writes it). 

Carol, who can't believe that she's still posting on a topic that she hates!