A short time later Harry Potter handed his wand over to an armored goblin guard who frisked him with all manner of interesting-looking probes,
Huh. With all the “the goblins aren’t allowed to have wands” stuff, I wouldn’t expect that this is how they’d have done it. It is true that all in all, the goblins couldn’t do all that much of practical value with the borrowed wands of those in Gringotts meetings, but still… It means that the prohibition on goblins using wands is far from absolute.
You have to spend time practicing with a wand in order to effectively use one. This is like handing your laptop to someone who’s literally never used a computer or even a keyboard before — they aren’t going to guess your password and read your email; they’ll have a hard enough time knowing what parts do something.
Canon contradicts you: In book four, the house-elf Winky was able to conjure the dark mark with the use of a wand despite presumably never having wielded one before.
I believe this is a misreading; Winky was there, but the Dark Mark was cast by Barry Crouch Jr. From the climax of Book 4, towards the end of Chapter 35:
I wanted to attack them for their disloyalty to my master. My father had left the
tent; he had gone to free the Muggles. Winky was afraid to see me so angry. She
used her own brand of magic to bind me to her. She pulled me from the tent,
pulled me into the forest, away from the Death Eaters. I tried to hold her back. I
wanted to return to the campsite. I wanted to show those Death Eaters what loyalty
to the Dark Lord meant, and to punish them for their lack of it. I used the stolen
wand to cast the Dark Mark into the sky.
This still shows us that people found it plausible that Winky cast a spell using a wand. (Of course, these were far from disinterested people, plus people are stupider in canon.)
While this is true, Winky is not a representative case for magical creatures in general, since house elves are powerful magic-users in their own right (though admittedly their magic doesn’t appear spell-based).
The prohibition is on using (and owning, I think), not holding wands. You can put wands in your Gringotts vault, ask an House Elf to bring you your wand, … but goblins or elves aren’t allowed to use wands. If they try to do it was a borrowed wand, I doubt it would go unnoticed for long. There is “priori incantatem” to check how a wand was last used for, and there may be global spells like the Trace that will warn the ministry if a magical creature uses wands.
Huh. With all the “the goblins aren’t allowed to have wands” stuff, I wouldn’t expect that this is how they’d have done it. It is true that all in all, the goblins couldn’t do all that much of practical value with the borrowed wands of those in Gringotts meetings, but still… It means that the prohibition on goblins using wands is far from absolute.
You have to spend time practicing with a wand in order to effectively use one. This is like handing your laptop to someone who’s literally never used a computer or even a keyboard before — they aren’t going to guess your password and read your email; they’ll have a hard enough time knowing what parts do something.
Canon contradicts you: In book four, the house-elf Winky was able to conjure the dark mark with the use of a wand despite presumably never having wielded one before.
I believe this is a misreading; Winky was there, but the Dark Mark was cast by Barry Crouch Jr. From the climax of Book 4, towards the end of Chapter 35:
You are entirely correct. I mis-remembered the events of book four.
This still shows us that people found it plausible that Winky cast a spell using a wand. (Of course, these were far from disinterested people, plus people are stupider in canon.)
I don’t even want to come up with a list of things the general population thought plausible at various points in canon; it would be too depressing.
Wasn’t it the invisible Barty Crouch who did the conjuration?
While this is true, Winky is not a representative case for magical creatures in general, since house elves are powerful magic-users in their own right (though admittedly their magic doesn’t appear spell-based).
The prohibition is on using (and owning, I think), not holding wands. You can put wands in your Gringotts vault, ask an House Elf to bring you your wand, … but goblins or elves aren’t allowed to use wands. If they try to do it was a borrowed wand, I doubt it would go unnoticed for long. There is “priori incantatem” to check how a wand was last used for, and there may be global spells like the Trace that will warn the ministry if a magical creature uses wands.
Nevermind.