Who gave Harry Potter the Invisibility Cloak in Sorcerer's Stone?

Content Warning: This article contains a discussion of suicide.

There's no shortage of mysterious magical objects in the Harry Potter universe, but one of Harry Potter's (played by Daniel Radcliffe in the film franchise) most frequently used item is the Invisibility Cloak, which is real. its name – allows Harry to disappear under it whenever he needs to move discreetly around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (Harry honestly does this all the time, which is probably why he gets detained and loses House points for Gryffindor quite regularly.) In the final book (and final two-part film), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the cloak comes in handy when Harry and his two best friends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) are traveling through town. wizarding world to find and destroy Voldemort's (Ralph Fiennes) Horcruxes—magical objects that contain pieces of the Dark Lord's soul. So what's the deal with the Settlement?

It's never fully explained how the Cloak works, but that's beside the point. How did Harry get the cloak and how does it relate to his family line (and the famous children's story)? What journey did this magical artifact take before Harry was even born, and why does it end up with him when all is said and done? Let's dive in.

Before Harry officially begins his studies at Hogwarts and is placed in Gryffindor with Ron and Hermione, he picks up the items he needs, including his wand, a pet owl named Hedwig, and lots of magical textbooks and potions ingredients. . Like all his peers, he doesn't arrive at Hogwarts wearing an invisibility cloak for his first year, but on his first Christmas at the castle, he receives a mysterious package containing a single and mysterious note: “Your father left this cloak to me before he died, it's time to give it back to you.

Harry does just that, using the cloak to wander around Hogwarts at night to try and discover the identity of Nicholas Flamel, a man who Harry's friend and Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid (the late Robbie Coltrane in the movies) mentioned fleetingly in connection with the treasure. hidden in the depths of the school (which is, of course Sorcerer's Stone or Philosopher's Stone depending on where you live). While wandering one night, Harry discovers the Mirror of Erised and sees the reflections of his family inside; when he is discovered there by Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris in the first two films), Dumbledore advises him “not to dwell on your dreams”. All of this means that Dumbledore and the Cloak are connected – and Dumbledore is the one who left Harry the Cloak at Christmas. But why?

At the end of the first book and movie, Dumbledore tells Harry that he put the cloak under the Christmas tree and this is why he had it. In the Deathly Hallows version, Dumbledore, who dies in the previous installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but appears to see Harry in some sort of confined space after Harry allows Voldemort to “kill him”. He dives deep into why the cloak that belonged to Harry's father, James Potter, came into his possession. (Michael Gambon plays Dumbledore in these films; Richard Harris died in 2002.)

“I know you guessed why the cloak was in my possession the night your parents died,” Dumbledore tells Harry in the novel, explaining that he was inspired to seek out the legendary Deathly Hallows after hearing about them for years:

“James had shown it to me just 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, to check it out. I had long ago given up on my dream of uniting the Saints, but I couldn't resisted, couldn't help but look closer… It was a cloak like I'd never seen, extremely old, perfect in every way… and then your father died and I finally had two saints, all to yourself!

The other Hollow Dumbledore echoes is the Elder Wandwhich he won in a duel against Grindelwald several years ago.

In the novel “Deathly Hallows” and the first half of the film adaptation, Harry, Ron and Hermione go to the house of Xenophil Lovegood (Rhys Ifans), the editor of the quirky publication The Quibbler and the father of their Hogwarts classmate Luna. Evanna Lynch) – to learn about the mysterious Deathly Hallowsat which point Xenophilius tells them that the truth lies in a children's book left to Hermione by Dumbledore's will. In The Tales of Beale the Beard, there is a story called “The Tale of the Three Brothers” that Hermione reads aloud, where the three brothers (duh) are walking together one evening and use their magical powers to build a bridge to cross a dangerous river. When Death appears in front of them, angry that they disturbed him, he makes a wish for each of them.

The eldest brother asks for an incomparable wand, the middle one for a stone that can revive the dead, and the youngest for a cloak to protect him from death. Unfortunately for the first two brothers, their arrogance eventually shows; the older brother has his throat slit with a wand, and the middle one takes his own life after using a stone to conjure the weak spirit of a woman he once loved. Meanwhile, the younger brother remains invisible to Death until he reaches the end of his life – and when he feels ready, he hands his son the Cloak and embraces Death.

When Hermione points out that many cloaks can make the wearer invisible, Xenophilius fires back, “We're talking about a cloak that really and truly makes the wearer completely invisible and lasts forever, providing permanent and impenetrable concealment no matter what spells are thrown at it. ” As it happens, it is exactly like that how does harry's cloak work … it means he has owned one of the saints since he was 11 years old.

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Wait, how does James Potter factor into all of this? As Dumbledore explains to Harry when they hang out in the endless void at the end of Deathly Hallows, the three brothers from the fairy tale. was real – and their surname was Peverell. “Did they meet Death on a lonely road… I think it's more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted, dangerous wizards who managed to create these powerful objects,” Dumbledore tells Harry. “The story of them being the Deathly Hallows itself seems to me the kind of legend that might have arisen around such works. The cloak, as you now know, traveled through the ages, from father to son, from mother to daughter, all the way to Ignotus the last living descendant who, like Ignot, was born in the village of Godric's Hollow.

So there you have it: James Potter is descended from the Peverells, something Harry realizes much earlier in The Deathly Hallows as he and Hermione visit Godric's Hollow at Christmastime to see where his parents are buried. Ignotus is 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 with offspring… of which Harry is one.

So what does Harry do with the Invisibility Cloak at Hogwarts? A a lot of thingsin fact! Only in “The Sorcerer's Stone” does Harry use it to visit the restricted section of Hogwarts' library, find the Mirror of Erised, bring an illegal baby dragon to the top of the Astronomy Tower on Hagrid's behalf, and approach Pooh, the Three-Headed. the dog guards the trapdoor that leads to the Stone itself. In the third book and movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry is not allowed to visit the village of Hogsmeade with his friends after his evil aunt and uncle refuse to sign a permission slip – guess how he sneaks into the village to hang out with his friends? (That's right: the cloak.) In the same episode, Harry, Ron, and Hermione use it to sneak into the Shrieking Shack, discover the truth about James' former friends Peter Pettigrew and Sirius Black (Timothy Spall and Gary Oldman), and later sneak around with the 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 and eavesdrop and fool people… and as far as a narrative device goes, it's undeniably brilliant when you consider that it allows 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 essentially indispensable from a storytelling perspective.) If you want to watch Harry slay onscreen in the invisibility cloak, the movies are streaming on Peacock. now.