Who Gave Harry Potter The Invisibility Cloak In The Sorcerer’s Stone?

Content warning: This article contains discussion of suicide.

There’s no shortage of mysterious magical items in the “Harry Potter” universe, but one of the most frequently wielded and used items by Harry Potter himself (played by Daniel Radcliffe in the film franchise) is the invisibility cloak , which – true to its name – allows Harry to disappear underneath whenever he needs to move discreetly around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (Harry, to be frank, does this all the time, which is probably why he gets held back and loses House points for Gryffindor quite regularly.) In the final book (and final two-part movie), “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, the Cloak comes in handy as Harry and his two best friends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) travel the wizarding world to find Voldemort’s (Ralph Fiennes). Horcruxes – magical items containing pieces of the Dark Lord’s very soul – and destroy them. So what’s the deal with the Cloak?

How the Cloak works has never been fully explained, but that’s not what’s important here. How did Harry get the cloak and what is its connection to his family lineage (and a famous children’s story)? What journey has this magical artifact been on before Harry was even born, and why does it end up with him when all is said and done? Let’s go.

Before Harry officially begins his studies at Hogwarts – and is sorted into Gryffindor with Ron and Hermione in the process – he collects a few essential items for his education, including a magic wand, a pet owl named Hedwig, and tons of textbooks magic and potion ingredients. . Like all his peers, he does not arrive for his first year at Hogwarts with a cape that makes you invisible, but during his first Christmas at the castle, he receives a mysterious package containing one accompanied by an enigmatic note: “Your father left this coat in my possession before his death. It is time for it to be returned to you. Use it well.

Harry does just that, using the cloak to wander around Hogwarts at night to try to discover the identity of Nicolas Flamel, a man briefly mentioned by Harry’s friend and Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid (the late Robbie Coltrane in the films) in relation to treasure. hidden in the depths of the school (which is, of course, the Sorcerer’s Stone — or the Philosopher’s Stone, depending on where you live). One night, during his wanderings, Harry discovers the Mirror of Erised and sees the reflections of his family there; when he is discovered there by the headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris in the first two films), Dumbledore advises him not to “dwell on dreams”. All of this is to say that Dumbledore and the Cloak are linked – and that Dumbledore was the one who left Harry the Cloak at Christmas. But why?

Dumbledore tells Harry, at the end of the first book and movie, that he put the cloak under the Christmas tree – and here’s why he had it in the first place. In the book version of “The Deathly Hallows”, Dumbledore – who dies in the previous installment, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”, but shows up to see Harry in a sort of liminal space after Harry allowed Voldemort to “kill”. ” him – explains in depth why he came into possession of the cloak, which belonged to Harry’s father, James Potter. (Michael Gambon plays Dumbledore in these films; Richard Harris died in 2002.)

“You have guessed, I know, why the cloak was in my possession the night your parents died,” Dumbledore tells Harry in the novel, explaining that he was inspired to search for the deathly hallows of legend after having heard about it for years:

“James had shown it to me a few days before. It explained a lot of his undetected wrongdoing at school! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, so I had long since given up on my dream of uniting the Hallows, but I couldn’t resist, I couldn’t help but take a closer look… It was a. cape like I don’t never seen, immensely old, perfect in every way… and then your father died, and I finally had two relics all to myself!

The other Hallow Dumbledore refers to the Elder Wand, which he won in a duel against Grindelwald years before.

In the novel “The Deathly Hallows” and the first half of the film adaptation, Harry, Ron and Hermione head to the house of Xenophilius Lovegood (Rhys Ifans) – editor of the offbeat publication The Quibbler and father of their Hogwarts classmate Luna (Evanna Lynch) – to learn more about the mysterious Deathly Hallows, at which point Xenophilius tells them that the truth lies in a children’s book left for Hermione in The Testament of Dumbledore. In “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”, there is a story called “The Tale of the Three Brothers” that Hermione reads aloud, where three brothers (duh) walk together one evening and, through their magical ability, build a bridge to cross a dangerous river. When Death, furious that they had thwarted him, appears before them, he grants each of them a wish.

The eldest brother asks for an unbeatable wand, the middle brother asks for a stone capable of bringing the dead back to life, and the youngest asks for a cape to protect him from death. Unfortunately for the first two brothers, their pride ends up defeating them; the eldest brother has his throat slit for the wand, and the middle brother commits suicide after conjuring the weak spirit of the woman he once loved using the stone. Meanwhile, the youngest brother remains invisible to Death for the rest of his life – and when he feels ready, he passes the mantle to his son and embraces Death.

When Hermione points out that many cloaks can make the wearer invisible, spells cast at this.” In this case, it is Exactly how Harry’s cloak works… which means he’s had one of the Hallows in his possession since he was 11.

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Wait, so how does James Potter factor into all of this? As Dumbledore explains to Harry as they hang out in the boundless void at the end of “The Deathly Hallows,” the three brothers in the tale were real – and their last name was Peverell. “That they met death on a lonely road… I think it is more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted and dangerous wizards who managed to create these powerful objects,” Dumbledore told Harry. “The story of them being the Deathly Hallows seems to me the kind of legend that could have arisen around such creations. The Cloak, as you now know, has traveled through the ages, from father to son, from mother to daughter, until The last living descendant of Ignotus, who was born, like Ignotus, in the village of Godric’s Hollow.

So there you have it: James Potter is descended from the Peverells, a fact Harry realizes much earlier in “The Deathly Hallows” when he and Hermione visit Godric’s Hollow at Christmas to see where his parents are buried. Ignotus happens to be the youngest of the brothers – with Antioch as the eldest and Cadmus as the middle child – and as the only one to live a naturally long life, he was the only brother to have descendants… including one is Harry.

So what does Harry do with the Invisibility Cloak during his time at Hogwarts? A lots of stuffIn fact! In “The Sorcerer’s Stone”, Harry uses it to visit the restricted section of the Hogwarts library, find the Mirror of Erised, smuggle an illegal baby dragon to the top of the Astronomy Tower in Hagrid’s name, and approach Fluffy , the three-headed character. dog guarding a trapdoor that leads to the Stone itself. In the third book and film, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”, Harry is not allowed to visit the village of Hogsmeade with his friends after his evil uncle and aunt refuse to sign a authorisation. the hamlet to go out with friends? (That’s right: the cloak.) In that same episode, Harry, Ron and Hermione use it to secretly enter the Shrieking Shack, discovering the truth about James’ former friends Peter Pettigrew and Sirius Black (Timothy Spall and Gary Oldman), and later sneak in a time turner to help Sirius escape execution.

I could go on and on, but the point is that Harry uses the Invisibility Cloak to sneak around, eavesdrop, and deceive people… and as far as a narrative device goes, it’s undeniably awesome if you consider considers it allowing Harry to learn information. which the reader also needs. (The books are told from Harry’s point of view, so with that in mind, the cloak is basically indispensable from a storytelling perspective.) If you want to watch Harry hide in the Invisibility Cloak on screen, movies are streamed on Peacock. NOW.