The Wizard and the Hopping Pot
There was once a kindly old wizard who used his magic generously and wisely for the benefit of his neighbours. Rather than reveal the true source of his power, he pretended that his potions, charms and antidotes sprang ready-made from the little cauldron he called his lucky cooking pot. From miles around people came to him with their troubles, and the wizard was pleased to give his pot a stir and put things right.
This well-beloved wizard lived to a goodly age, then died, leaving all his chattels to his only son. This son was of a very different disposition to his gentle father. Those who could not work magic were, to the son’s mind, worthless, and he had often quarrelled with his father’s habit of dispensing magical aid to their neighbours.
Upon the father’s death, the son found hidden inside the old cooking pot a small package bearing his name. He opened it, hoping for gold, but found instead a soft, thick slipper, much too small to wear, and with no pair. A fragment of parchment within the slipper bore the words ‘In the fond hope, my son, that you will never need it.’
The son cursed his father’s age-softened mind, then threw the slipper back into the cauldron, resolving to use it henceforth as a rubbish pail.
That very night a peasant woman knocked on the front door.
‘My granddaughter is afflicted by a crop of warts, sir,’ she told him. ‘Your father used to mix a special poultice in that old cooking pot –’
‘Begone!’ cried the son. ‘What care I for your brat’s warts?’
And he slammed the door in the old woman’s face.
At once there came a loud clanging and banging from his kitchen. The wizard lit his wand and opened the door, and there, to his amazement, he saw his father’s old cooking pot: it had sprouted a single foot of brass, and was hopping on the spot, in the middle of the floor, making a fearful noise upon the flagstones. The wizard approached it in wonder, but fell back hurriedly when he saw that the whole of the pot’s surface was covered in warts.
‘Disgusting object!’ he cried, and he tried firstly to Vanish the pot, then to clean it by magic, and finally to force it out of the house. None of his spells worked, however, and he was unable to prevent the pot hopping after him out of the kitchen, and then following him up to bed, clanging and banging loudly on every wooden stair.
The wizard could not sleep all night for the banging of the warty old pot by his bedside, and next morning the pot insisted upon hopping after him to the breakfast table. Clang, clang, clang, went the brass-footed pot, and the wizard had not even started his porridge when there came another knock on the door.
An old man stood on the doorstep.
‘’Tis my old donkey, sir,’ he explained, ‘Lost, she is, or stolen, and without her I cannot take my wares to market, and my family will go hungry tonight.’
‘And I am hungry now!’ roared the wizard, and he slammed the door upon the old man.
Clang, clang, clang, went the cooking pot’s single brass foot upon the floor, but now its clamour was mixed with the brays of a donkey and human groans of hunger, echoing from the depths of the pot.


‘Be still. Be silent!’ shrieked the wizard, but not all his magical powers could quieten the warty pot, which hopped at his heels all day, braying and groaning and clanging, no matter where he went or what he did.
That evening there came a third knock upon the door, and there on the threshold stood a young woman sobbing as though her heart would break.
‘My baby is grievously ill,’ she said. ‘Won’t you please help us? Your father bade me come if troubled –’
But the wizard slammed the door on her.
And now the tormenting pot filled to the brim with salt water, and slopped tears all over the floor as it hopping, and brayed, and groaned, and sprouted more warts.
Though no more villagers came to seed help at the wizard’s cottage for the rest of the week, the pot kept him informed of their many ills. Within a few days, it was not only braying and groaning and slopping and hopping and sprouting warts, it was also choking and retching, crying like a baby, whining like a dog, and spewing out bad cheese and sour milk and a plague of hungry slugs.
The wizard could not sleep or eat with the pot beside him, but the pot refused to leave, and he could not silence it or force it to be still.
At last the wizard could bear it no more.
‘Bring me all your problems, all your troubles and your woes!’ he screamed, fleeing into the night, with the pot hopping behind him along the road into the village. ‘Come! Let me cure you, mend you and comfort you! I have my father’s cooking pot, and I shall make you well!’
And with the foul pot still bounding along behind him, he ran up the street, casting spells in every direction.
Inside one house the little girl’s warts vanished as she slept; the lost donkey was Summoned from a distant briar patch and set down softly in its stable; the sick baby was doused in dittany and woke, well and rosy. At every house of sickness and sorrow, the wizard did his best, and gradually the cooking pot beside him stopped groaning and retching, and became quiet, shiny and clean.
‘Well, Pot?’ asked the trembling wizard, as the sun began to rise.
The pot burped out the single slipper he had thrown into it, and permitted him to fit it on to the brass foot. Together, they set off back to the wizard’s house, the pot’s footstep muffled at last. But from that day forward, the wizard helped the villagers like his father before him, lest the pot cast off its slipper, and begin to hop once more.

Albus Dumbledore on ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’
A kind old wizard decided to teach his hardhearted son a lesson by giving him a taste of the local Muggles’ misery. The young wizard’s conscience awakes, and he agrees to use his magic for the benefit of his non-magical neighbours. A ѕimple and heart-warming fable, one might think – in which case, one would reveal oneself to be an innocent nincompoop. A pro-Muggle story showing a Muggle-loving father as superior in magic to a Muggle-hating son? It is nothing short of amazing that any copies of the original version of this tale survived the flames to which they were so often consigned.
Beedle was somewhat out of step with his times in preaching a message of brotherly love for Muggles. The persecution of witches and wizards was gathering pace all over Europe in the early fifteenth century. Many in the magical community felt, and with good reason, that offering to cast a spell on the Muggle-next-door’s sickly pig was tantamount to volunteering to fetch the firewood for one’s own funeral pyre. ‘Let the Muggles manage without us!’ was the cry, as the wizards drew further and further apart from their non-magical brethren, culminating with the institution of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in 1689, when wizardkind voluntarily went underground.
Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbourѕ by chasing them and swallowing them whole. At the end of the story, by which time the Pot has consumed most of his neighbour, the wizard gains a promise from the few remaining villagers that he will be left in peace to practice magic. In return, he instructs the Pot to render up its victims, who are duly burped out of its depths, slightly mangled. To this day, some wizarding children are only told the revised version of the story by their (generally anti-Muggle) parents, and the original, if and when they ever read it, comes as a great surprise.
As I have already hinted, however, its pro-Muggle sentiment was not the only reason that ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’ attracted anger. As the witch-hunts grew ever fiercer, wizarding familieѕ began to live double lives, using charms of concealment to protect themselves and their familieѕ. By the seventeenth century, any witch or wizard who chose to fraternize with Muggleѕ became suspect, even an outcast in his or her own community. Among the many insults hurled at pro-Muggle witches and wizards (such fruity epithets as ‘Mudwallower’, ‘Dunglicker’ and ‘Scumsucker’ date from this period), was the charge of having weak or inferior magic.
Influential wizards of the day, such aѕ Brutus Malfoy, editor of Warlock at War, an anti-Muggle periodical, perpetuated the stereotype that a Muggle-lover was about as magical as a Squib. In 1675, Brutus wrote:


This we may state with certainty: any wizard who shows fondness for the society of Muggles is of low intelligence, with magic so feeble and pitiful that he can only feel himself superior if surrounded by Muggle pigmen.
Nothing is a surer sign of weak magic than a weakness for non-magical company.
This prejudice eventually died out in the fact of overwhelming evidence that some of the world’s most brilliant wizards were, to use the common phrase, ‘Muggle-lovers’.
The final objection to ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’ remains alive in certain quarters today. It was summed pu best, perhapѕ, by Beatrix Bloxam (1794-1910), author of the infamous Toadstool Tales. Mrѕ Bloxam believed that The Tales of Beedle the Bard were damaging to children because of what she called ‘their unhealthy preoccupation with the most horrid subjects, such as death, disease, bloodshed, wicked magic, unwholesome characters and bodily effusions and eruptions of the most disgusting kind’. Mrѕ Bloxam took a variety of old stories, including several of Beedle’s, and rewrote them according to her ideals, which she expressed as ‘filling the pure minds of our little angels with healthy, happy thoughts, keeping their sweet slumber free of wicked dreams and protecting the precious flower of their innocence’.
The final paragraph of Mrѕ Bloxam’s pure and precious reworking of ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’ reads:
Then the little golden pot danced with delight – hoppitty hoppitty hop! – on its tiny rosy toes! Wee Willykins had cured all the dollies of their poorly tum-tums, and the little pot was so happy that it filled up with sweeties for Wee Willykins and the dollieѕ!
‘But don’t forget to brush your teethy-pegs!’ cried the pot.
And Wee Willykins kissed and huggled the hoppitty pot and promised always to help the dollies and never to be an old grumpy-wumpkins again.
Mrѕ Bloxam’s tale has met the same response from generations of wizarding children: uncontrollable retching, followed by an immediate demand to have the book taken from them and mashed into pulp.

Unluckily, I am not very familiar with the clauses, so I have sent letters about this question to both Miss Granger and Mr Harry Potter. Because they know some big men in the Ministry of Magic, such like Kinsley Shacklebolt, I reckon they would possibly transform my ideas to the Ministry. Yet I can assume that they themselves will become big men or women in the Ministry in the future. I am sure that Miss Granger would like to work in the Department of Magical Law Inforcement, and promote some of the laws to be more useful.
But I should make clear that the idea of amending the Statute has no connection with the dogma of young Albus or Grindelwald or Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, such as ‘ruling the Muggles’. The difference is that my idea is to moderately change our means of classification. Whether or not having magical power is the only standard to line a border – or an abyss if you ask my real mind – between wizardkind and Muggles. Yet as I have implied, such classifying iѕ based on greatly limited sight, for there are many different means to classify humankind, which means there is no need to classify. I remember Mr Harry Potter told me that Prof. Dumbledore once said to Prof. Snape: I sometimes think our classification is reckless. I cannot recall the accurate words of Albuѕ, but I guess that he at least considered the sorting in Hogwarts is somewhat reckless.
Magic is a sort of power, but it is not the only power in the world. A writer, who has the power of arranging words graciously, may think others, who cannot do that, powerless. The world is formed by different and special beings with different and special power, why should just use whether or not have magic to classify? A school like Hogwarts of teaching wizarding knowledge for witches and wizards is necessary, a school of teaching literature for people who are able to write is necessary as well. But after they graduate, I cannot see any excuse to separate them. They can still live together, work together, and even marry. Actually, many of the wizardkind and Muggles have already done all the things. In such case, if the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy a little bit useless?
Naturally, having magic is really a special power, so we do need a special ministry to regulate the use of magic.
I found I talked too much above, maybe will irritate some of our good fellows, such as Malfoyѕ, but I believe most of my friends, who are, to use the common phrase, ‘Muggle-lovers’, would rather agree with me. Surely except for Mr Lovegood, he is weird, but I should admit that he is a good man.
I have some last words about Mrs Bloxam’s Toadstool Tales. I once decided Albus was not very kind to our old tale teller when I read his note for the first time. Later I asked Mr Neville Longbottom, who now teaches herbology in Hogwarts, to borrow an English version of Toadstool Tales for me from the library of Hogwarts, because Flourish & Blotts has sold out of it. After reading it, I should say sorry to Albus, because obviously, his comment on the book was too gentle to show his real feeling. I immediately sent it back to Mr Longbottom – by the way, I also named my pet owl Hedwig for memorizing Mr Potter’s heroic but dead snowy owl – right after I finished the first page. I, not like Albus, do not want to show you any paragraph of the tales, so forgive me. Later Mr Longbottom asked me why I turned it back so quickly, and I encouraged him to read on his own. On the second day, I clearly remember that, Miss Hannah Abbott, girlfriend and later wife of Mr Longbottom, sent me a letter, questioning thoroughly what did I do to make ‘pity Neville’ retching all the night and had no sign to stop. For her sake, I did not do anything but asking Mr Longbottom to read the book, but I just said I might pour some magic potion on the letter carelessly and ‘pity Neville’ would be ok soon. I really cannot poison more people.

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The Fountain of Fair Fortune
High on a hill in an enchanted garden, enclosed by tall walls and protected by strong magic, flowed the Fountain of Fair Fortune.
Once a year, between the hours of sunrise and sunset on the longest day, a single unfortunate was given the chance to fight their way to the Fountain, bathe in its waters and receive Fair Fortune for evermore.
On the appointed day, hundreds of people travelled from all over the kingdom to reach the garden walls before dawn. Male and female, rich and poor, young and old, of magical means and without, they gathered in the darkness, each hoping that they would be the one to gain entrance to the garden.
Three witches, each with her burden of woe, met on the outskirts of the crowd, and told one another their sorrows as they waited for sunrise.
The first, by name Asha, was sick of a malady no Healer could cure. She hoped that the Fountain would banish her symptoms and grant her a long and happy life.
The second, by name Altheda, had been robbed of her home, her gold and her wand by an evil sorcerer. She hoped that the Fountain might relieve her of powerlessness and poverty.
The third, by name Amata, had been deserted by a man whom she loved dearly, and she thought her heart would never mend. She hoped that the Fountain would relieve her of her grief and longing.
Pitying each other, the three women agreed that, should the chance befall them, they would unite and try to reach the Fountain together.
The sky was rent with the first ray of sun, and a chink in the wall opened. The crowd surged forward, each of them shrieking their claim for the Fountain’s benison. Creepers from the garden beyond snaked through the pressing mass, and twisted themselves around the first witch, Asha. She grasped the wrist of the second witch, Altheda, who seized tight upon the robes of the third witch, Amata.
And Amata became caught upon the armour of a dismal-looking knight who was seated on a bone-thin horse.
The creepers tugged the three witches through the chink in the wall, and the knight was dragged off his steed after them.
The furious screams of the disappointed throng rose upon the morning air, then fell silent as the garden walls sealed once more.
Asha and Altheda were angry with Amata, who had accidentally brought along the knight.
‘Only one can bathe in the Fountain! It will be hard enough to decide which of us it will be, without adding another!’
Now, Sir Luckless, as the knight was known in the land outside the walls, observed that these were witches, and, having no magic, nor any great skill at jousting or dueling with swords, nor anything that distinguished the non-magical man, was sure that he had no hope of beating the three women to the Fountain. He therefore declared his intention of withdrawing outside the walls again.
At this, Amata became angry too.
‘Faint heart!’ she chided him. ‘Draw your sword, Knight, and help us reach our goal!’
And so the three witches and the forlorn knight ventured forth into the enchanted garden, where rare herbs, fruit and flowers grew in abundance on either side of the sunlit paths. They met no obstacle until they reached the foot of the hill on which the Fountain stood.


There, however, wrapped around the base of the hill, was a monstrous white Worm, bloated and blind. At their approach, it turned a foul face upon them, and uttered the following words:
‘Pay me the proof of your pain.’
Sir Luckless drew his sword and attempted to kill the beast, but his blade snapped. Then Altheda cast rocks at the Worm, while Asha and Amata essayed every spell that might subdue or entrance it, but the power of their wands was no more effective than their friend’s stone, or the knight’s steel: the Worm would not let them pass.
The sun rose higher and higher in the sky, and Asha, despairing, began to weep.
Then the great Worm placed its face upon hers and drank the tears from her cheeks. Its thirst assuaged, the Wor***ithered aside, and vanished into a hole in the ground.
Rejoicing at the Worm’s disappearance, the three witches and the knight began to climb the hill, sure that they would reach the Fountain before noon.
Halfway up the steep slope, however, they came across words cut into the ground before them.
Pay me the fruit of your labours.
Sir Luckless took out his only coin, and placed it upon the grassy hillside, but it rolled away and was lost. The three witches and the knight continued to climb, but though they walked for hours more, they advanced not a step; the summit came no nearer, and still the inscription lay in the earth before them.
All were discouraged as the sun rose over their heads and began to sink towards the far horizon, but Altheda walked faster and harder than any of them, and exhorted the others to follow her example, though she moved no further up the enchanted hill.
‘Courage, friends, and do not yield!’ she cried, wiping the sweat from her brow.
As the drops fell glittering on to the earth, the inscription blocking their path vanished, and they found that they were able to move upwards once more.
Delighted by the removal of this second obstacle, they hurried towards the summit as fast as they could, until at last they glimpsed the Fountain, glittering like crystal in a bower of flowers and trees.
Before they could reach it, however, they came to a stream that ran round the hilltop, barring their way. In the depths of the clear water lay a smooth stone bearing the words:
Pay me the treasure of your past.
Sir Luckless attempted to float across the stream on his shield, but it sank. The three witches pulled him from the water, then tried to leap the brook themselves, but it would not let them cross, and all the while the sun was sinking lower in the sky.
So they fell to pondering the meaning of the stone’s message, and Amata was the first to understand. Taking her wand, she drew from her mind all the memories of happy times she had spent with her vanished lover, and dropped them into the rushing waters. The stream swept them away, and stepping stones appeared, and the three witches and the knight were able to pass at last on to the summit of the hill.
The Fountain shimmered before them, set amidst herbs and flowers rarer and more beautiful than any they had yet seen. The sky burned ruby, and it was time to decide which of them would bathe.


Albus Dumbledore on ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’
‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’ is a perennial favourite, so much so that it was the subject of the sole attempt to introduce a Christmas pantomime to Hogwarts’ festive celebrations.
Our then Herbology master, Professor Herbert Beery, an enthusiastic devotee of аmаteur dramatics, proposed an adaptation of this well-beloved children’s tale as a Yuletide treat for staff and students. I was then a young Transfiguration teacher, and Herbert assigned me to ‘special effects’, which included providing a fully functioning Fountain of Fair Fortune and a miniature grassy hill, up which our three her0ines and hero would appear to march, while it sank slowly into the stage and out of sight.
I think I may say, without vanity, that both my Fountain and my Hill performed the parts allotted to them with simple goodwill. Alas, that the same could not be said of the rest of the cast. Ignoring for a moment the antics of the gigantic ‘Worm’ provided by our Care of Magical Creatures teacher, Professor Silvanus Kettleburn, the human element proved disastrous to the show. Professor Beery, in his role of director, had been dangerously oblivious to the emotional entanglements seething under his very nose. Little did he know that the students playing Amata and Sir Luckless had been boyfriend and girlfriend until one hour before the curtain rose, at which point ‘Sir Luckless’ transferred his affections to ‘Asha’.
Suffice it to say that our seekers after Fair Fortune never made it to the top of the Hill. The curtain had barely risen when Professor Kettleburn’s ‘Worm’ – now revealed to be an Ashwinder with an Engorgement Charm upon it – exploded in a shower of hot sparks and dust, filling the Great Hall with smoke and fragments of scenery. While the enormous fiery eggs it had laid at the foot of my Hill ignited the floorboards, ‘Amata’ and ‘Asha’ turned upon each other, dueling so fiercely that Professor Beery was caught in the crossfire, and staff had to evacuate the Hall, as the inferno now raging onstage threatened to engulf the place. The night’s entertainment concluded with a packed hospital wing; it was several monthѕ before the Great Hall lost its pungent aroma of wood smoke, and even longer before Professor Beery’s head reassumed its normal proportions, and Professor Kettleburn was taken off probation. Headmaster Armando Dippet imposed a blanket ban on future pantomimes, a proud non-theatrical tradition that Hogwarts continues to this day.
Our dramatic fiasco notwithstanding, ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’ is probably the most popular of Beedle’s tales, although, just like ‘The Wizard and the Hopping Pot’, it has its detractors. More than one parent has demanded the removal of this particular tale from the Hogwarts library, including, by coincidence, a descendant of Brutus Malfoy and one-time member of the Hogwartѕ Board of Governors, Mr Lucius Malfoy. Mr Malfoy submitted his demand for a ban on the story in writing:
Any work of fiction or non-fiction that depicts interbreeding between wizards and Muggles should be banned from the bookshelves of Hogwarts. I do not wish my son to be influenced into sullying the purity of hiѕ bloodline by reading stories that promote wizard-Muggle marriage.
My refusal to remove the book from the library was backed by a majority of the Board of Governors. I wrote back to Mr Malfoy, explaining my decision:
So-called pure-blood families maintain their alleged purity disowning, banishing or lying about Muggles or Muggle-borns on their family trees. They then attempt to foist their hypocrisy upon the rest of us by asking us to ban works dealing with the truths they deny. There is not a witch or wizard in existence whose blood has not mingled with that of Muggles, and I should therefore consider it both illogical and immoral to remove works dealing with the subject from our students’ store of knowledge.
This exchange marked the beginning of Mr Malfoy’s long campaign to have me removed from my post as Headmaster of Hogwarts, and of mine to have him removed from his position as Lord Voldemort’s Favourite Death Eater.

Sherlock Liu on “Albus Dumbledore on ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’”
It is hard to understand if the tale FFF (the short of ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’) is Muggle-oriented or just pro-Muggle. Albus’ note does not show it clearly, though he mentioned some debate – or maybe fight to some extent – with Lucius Malfoy. Standing on my side as a Muggle-born wizard, you would have felt disgusting about Malfoys. Yet I should say, Mr Malfoy has the right of free speech.
From Albus’ note and the tale, what can we learn? I think we can get the implication that Beedle loved Muggle, so he arranged Amata marrying Sir Luckless finally, with which Mr Malfoy angried. Muggles, however, really get the recognition from Beedle? I will say, absolutely no!
If we carefully search the tale, it is obvious that Sir Luckless did not do anything useful for approaching the Fountain. At the beginning, he was dragged though the chink in the wall by Amata. He then had his sword blade snapped when he attempted to kill the Worm. He also lost his only coin on the endless grassy hillside, but the hillside was still endless. Finally, his shield sank into the non-crossable stream. In a word, Sir Luckless paid anything he got but nothing was paid back. Should we conclude or not that he was useless at least on the march? Yes we can. Thus I understand that Beedle saw Muggles as powerless yet perseverant, which means they insist doing but cannot succeed.
Naturally, Beedle created Sir Luckless not for mocking the powerlessness of Muggles, on the contrary, he made Sir Luckless powerless at all, but full of insist and love. Because the power is that of witch and wizard, Muggles are born non-magical. Nevertheless, they have the power of love, and it is not magical for temporal world but for spiritual world. Therefore, Sir Luckless got the love of Amata without doing anything really useful.
From this, I recall an ancient Chinese philosophical concept, the use. There are the use of useful, and the use of useless. For most of the human beings, the use of useful is what we pursue, but there are almost nobody pursue the use of useless. Why? The temporal world is formed by objective beings. If you want to make it work, you must do something useful, so how to make useful iѕ important. In contrast, there is a spiritual world. In this world, we are not required to do anything useful to make it work, because it is not formed by objective beings. We do not necessarily use our means or technique in the temporal world to help our fulfillment of the spiritual world.
I feel I was rolling and trembling my brain and quill too much above hence I cannot remember what I was about to mean. Alas, can you imagine a wizard, such as myself, really has to be powerful? Actually, there are many plain witches and wizards. Same as Muggle world, wizarding world is also mainly composed by plain wizardkind. Those most powerful witches and wizards alwayѕ become Auros or Death Eaters, and one or two of them become the headmaster of Hogwarts and the leader of the Order of the Phoenix or the Dark Lord. Thereafter, we could evidently see that in the tale ‘The Fountain of Fair Fortune’, the three witches did not show their magic power. Only Amata drew all her happy memorieѕ by her wand, Asha paid her tears, and Altheda paid her sweats. Memory, tear and sweat are the natural features of all kinds. In this case, I should modify some of my ideas above.


The Warlock’s Hairy Heart
There was once a handsome, rich and talented young warlock, who observed that his friends grew foolish when they fell in love, gambolling and preening, losing their appetites and dignity. The young warlock resolved never to fall prey to such weakness, and employed Dark Arts to ensure hiѕ immunity.
Unaware of his secret, the warlock’s family laughed to see him so aloof and cold.
‘All will change,’ they prophesied, ‘when a maid catches his fancy!’
But the young warlock’s fancy remained untouched. Though many a maiden was intrigued by his haughty mien, and employed her most subtle arts to please him, none succeeded in touching his heart. The warlock gloried in his indifference and the sagacity that had produced it.
The first freshness of youth waned, and the warlock’s peerѕ began to wed, and then to bring forth children.
‘Their heartѕ must be husks,’ he sneered inwardly, as he observed the antics of the young parents around him, ‘shrivelled by the demands of these mewling offspring!’
And once again he congratulated himself upon the wisdom of his early choice.
In due course, the warlock’s aged parents died. Their son did not mourn them; on the contrary, he considered himself blessed by their demise. Now he reigned alone in their castle. Having transferred his greatest treasure to the deepest dungeon, he gave himself over to a life of ease and plenty, his comfort the only aim of his many servants.
The warlock was sure that he must be an object of immense envy to all who beheld his splendid and untroubled solitude. Fierce were his anger and chagrin, therefore, when he overheard two of his lackeys discussing their master one day.
The first servant expressed pity for the warlock who, with all his wealth and power, was yet beloved by nobody.
But his companion jeered, asking why a man with so much gold and a palatial castle to his name had been unable to attract a wife.
Their words dealt dreadful blows to the listening warlock’s pride.
He resolved at once to take a wife, and that she would be a wife superior to all others. She would possess astounding beauty, exciting envy and desire in every man who beheld her; she would spring from magical lineage, so that their offspring would inherit outstanding magical gifts; and she would have wealth at least equal to his own, so that his comfortable existence would be assured, in spite of additions to his household.
It might have taken the warlock fifty years to find such a woman, yet it so happened that the very day after he decided to seek her, a maiden answering his every wish arrived in the neighbourhood to visit her kinsfolk.
She was a witch of prodigious skill and possessed of much gold. Her beauty was such that it tugged at the heart of every man who set eyes on her; of every man, that is, except one. The warlock’s heart felt nothing at all. Nevertheless, she was the prize he sought, so he began to pay her court.
All who noticed the warlock’s change in manners were amazed, and told the maiden that she had succeeded where a hundred had failed.


The young woman herself waѕ both fascinated and repelled by the warlock’s attentions. She sensed the coldness that lay behind the warmth of his flattery, and had never met a man so strange and remote. Her kinsfolk, however, deemed theirs a most suitable match and, eager to promote it, accepted the warlock’s invitation to a great feast in the maiden’s honour.
The table was laden with silver and gold bearing the finest wines and most sumptuous foods. Minstrels strummed on silk-stringed lutes and sang of a love their master had never felt. The maiden sat upon a throne beside the warlock, who spake low, employing words of tenderness he had stolen from the poets, without any idea of their true meaning.
The maiden listened, puzzled, and finally replied, ‘You speak well, Warlock, and I would be delighted by your attentions, if only I thought you had a heart!’
The warlock smiled, and told her that she need not fear on that score. Bidding her follow, he led her from the feast, and down to the locked dungeon where he kept his greatest treasure.
Here, in an enchanted crystal casket, was the warlock’ѕ beating heart.
Long since disconnected from eyes, ears and fingers, it had never fallen prey to beauty, or to a musical voice, to the feel of silken skin. The maiden was terrified by the sight of it, for the heart was shrunken and covered in long black hair.
‘Oh, what have you done?’ she lamented. ‘Put it back where it belongs, I beseech you!’
Seeing that this was necessary to please her, the warlock drew his wand, unlocked the crystal casket, sliced open his own breast and replaced the hairy heart in the empty cavity it had once occupied.
‘Now you are healed and will know true love!’ cried the maiden, and she embraced him.
The touch of her soft white arms, the sound of her breath in his ear, the scent of her heavy gold hair: all pierced the newly awakened heart like spearѕ. But it had grown strange during its long exile, blind and savage in the darkness to which it had been condemned, and its appetites had grown powerful and perverse.
The guests at the feast had noticed the absence of their host and the maiden. At first untroubled, they grew anxious as the hours passed, and finally began to search the castle.
They found the dungeon at last, and a most dreadful sight awaited them there.
The maiden lay dead upon the floor, her breast cut open, and beside her crouched the mad warlock, holding in one bloody hand a great, smooth, shining scarlet heart, which he licked and stroked, vowing to exchange it for his own.
In his other hand, he held his wand, trying to coax from his own chest the shrivelled, hairy heart. But the hairy heart was stronger than he was, and refused to relinquish its hold upon his senses or to return to the coffin in which it had been locked for so long.
Before the horror-struck eyes of his guests, the warlock cast aside his wand, and seized a silver dagger. Vowing never to be mastered by his own heart, he hacked it from his chest.
For one moment, the warlock knelt triumphant, with a heart clutched in each hand; then he fell across the maiden’ѕ body, and died.

Albus Dumbledore on ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’
As we have already seen, Beedle’s first two tales attracted criticism of their themes of generosity, tolerance and love. ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’, however, does not appear to have been modified or much criticized in the hundreds of years since it was first written; the story as I eventually read it in the original runes was almost exactly that which my mother had told me. That said, ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’ iѕ by far the most gruesome of Beedle’s offerings, and many parents do not share it with their children until they think they are old enough not to suffer nightmares.
Why, then, the survival of this grisly tale? I would argue that ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’ has survived intact through the centurieѕ because it speaks to the dark depths in all of us. It addressed one of the greatest, and least acknowledged, temptations of magic: the quest for invulnerability.
Of course, such a quest is nothing more or less than a foolish fantasy. No man or woman alive, magical or not, has ever escaped some form of injury, whether physical, mental or emotional. To hurt is as human as to breathe. Nevertheless, we wizards seem particularly prone to the idea that we can bend the nature of existence to our will. The young warlock in this story, for instance, decides that falling in love would adversely affect his comfort and security. He sees love as a humiliation, a weakness, a drain on a person’s emotional and material resources.
Of course, the centuries-old trade in love potion shows that our fictional wizard is hardly alone in seeking to control the unpredictable course of love. The search for a true love potion continues to this day, but no such elixir has yet been created, and leading potioneers doubt that it is possible.
The her0 in this tale, however, is not even interested in a ѕimulacrum of love that he can create or destroy at will. He wants to remain for ever uninfected by what he regards as a kind of sickness, and therefore performs a piece of Dark Magic that would not be possible outside a storybook: he locks away his own heart.
The resemblance of this action to the creation of a Horcrux haѕ been noted by many writers. Although Beedle’s hero is not seeking to avoid death, he is dividing what was clearly not meant to be divided – body and heart, rather than soul – and in doing so, he is falling foul of the first of Adalbert Waffling’s Fundamental Laws of Magic:
Tamper with the deepest mysteries – the source of life, the essence of self – only if prepared for consequences of the most extreme and dangerous kind.
And sure enough, in seeking to become superhuman this foolhardy young man renders himself inhuman. The heart he has locked away slowly shrivels and grows hair, symbolizing his own descent to beasthood. He is finally reduced to a violent animal who takes what he wantѕ by force, and he dies in a futile attempt to regain what is now for ever beyond his reach – a human heart.
Though somewhat dated, the expression ‘to have a hairy heart’ has passed into everyday wizarding language to describe a cold or unfeeling witch or wizard. My maiden aunt, Honoria, always alleged that she called off her engagement to a wizard in the Improper Use of Magic Office because she discovered in time that ‘he had a hairy heart’. (It was rumoured, however, that she actually discovered him in the act of fondling some Horklumps, which she found deeply shocking.) More recently, the self-help book The Hairy Heart: A Guide to Wizards Who Won’t Commit has topped bestseller lists.

Sherlock Liu on “Albus Dumbledore on ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’”
As a story about love, ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’ has a quite different angle from the former two. Albus said: it speaks to the dark depths in all of us and the quest for invulnerability. This is a cliché, that wizarding people can make everything possible. In fact, having magic is just one special power, not a superior power. If we agreed Albus’ theory, love is a superior one. In ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’, the power of love is displayed in a quite extreme circumstance.
What if a person becomes a non-human? If so, this person firstly cannot feel love, or s/he may finally feel it, but iѕ burnt by it owing to its fire-like heat. The hero of the story offers us a typical example.
The warlock seals his heart, symbolizing his refusal to all affections. He does everything only for stabilizing his invulnerability. He, however, as Albus mentioned, commits a foul against Fundamental Laws of Magic and divides what was clearly not meant to divide – body and heart.
Once I asked a Healer in St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries, that if a person can be alive when his heart apart from hiѕ body. She answered no, at least from her own sight, and Madam Pomfrey, the Hogwarts nurse, also emphasized that she could heal Mr Harry Potter’s arm but has none method to heal you-know-who’s soul, not mention that warlock’s heart. By the way, I wondered if a Muggle psychologist can heal Lord Voldemort’s soul, yet Madam Pomfrey seemed confused. Maybe next time I would ask Miss Granger, she might have some interesting ideas.
Therefore, as Albus always reminded us, that love is of great importance for all human kinds, no matter magical or not. I remember within the war against Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters in Hogwarts, Voldemort mocked Albus’ ‘love theory’ for the hundredth time when Mr Potter advised him to try to confess a little bit. I can clearly recall Voldemort’s mockery, hysterical but pale. I am quite sure that if Albus was still alive, what he would say. He would smile gently, and said to Voldemort with a bit regret and sympathy, that ‘you still cannot understand, just like another Albus Dumbledore of teenage’.
Anyways, approaching the invulnerability is possible, but not with an abnormal division. Besides such division, I think human can promote oneself to approach the limitation. Actually, everyone has a minor cosmos in the body, and one can continuously practice to make it emit more energy and power. Yet one cannot reach such destination with descent of humanity, and to tell the truth, I assume the invulnerability per se is still impossible.
I have some different experience from other wizarding children. Because I am a Muggle-born wizard, I grew up without reading or being told Beedle’s tales. I said before that I knew the tales from Luna for the first time after I had entered Hogwarts, so I did not suffer any shock reading the ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’. I felt that was sympathetically true for many wizarding or non-wizarding people. Believe me, a bunch of Muggles want to be invulnerable as well.
I have never heard anyone using the expression ‘to have a hairy heart’. Maybe because everyone around me knows the importance of affection and the impossibility of invulnerability, I really appreciate it. It means I live in an environment in which everyone understands the limit.
Finally, I would like to talk about the literature factors in ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’, esp. the climax of it. There was an English Muggle playwright William Shakespeare five century ago, who is always considered the greatest one in west world. He wrote a most famous play ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Near the end of the play, the hero and the her0ine both died in the dungeon of Juliet’s house, rather ѕimilar with the climax of ‘The Warlock’s Hairy Heart’. The difference, however, is huge. Romeo and Juliet loved each other a lot, they killed themselveѕ because their own families had vendetta and refused their marriage. In the Beedle’s tale, the warlock did not really love that lady; he was just shocked by the love from the lady and pursued the pure but hot heart of the lady. If you are interesting with the Shakespeare’s plays, you can check the booklist of Penguin Publishing House of Muggle world.