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Does personified Death really exist in Harry Potter?


I went through the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, yesterday and a question popped in my mind: Does Death, the supposed creator of the Deathly Hallows, really exist in the Harry Potter universe? Dumbledore thought otherwise and I am with the same school of thought. By the way who created the deathly Hallows actually?


Update:


1) Why were the brothers so sure that the hooded figure was death(couldn't it be a more powerful wizard playing with them)


2) Couldn't, Beedle and the brothers create this story?



Answer



There is no proof whatsoever that Death exists in Harry Potter as a character.





  1. The only time Death is mentioned is in a folk fable, collected with OTHER made-up fables into a fiction book called "Tales of Beedles the Bard".


    To assume that Death existed in Potterverse merely because of that is equivalent to assuming Snow White or Seven Dwarves existed in our universe based on reading Brothers Grimm book.


    Or, for a Potter in-universe example, look at Lockhart's books.


    Granted, there's no proof Death doesn't exist; but Occam's Razor says that option should be rejected in favor of a more rational one.




  2. The artifacts which are attributed to be "made" by death are not a good proof either:





    • Albus Dumbledore, the most noted, wise and learned wizard in-Universe, explicitly states that this is unlikely.



      “So it’s true?” asked Harry. “All of it? The Peverell brothers—”
      “—were the three brothers of the tale,” said Dumbledore, nodding.
      “Oh yes, I think so. Whether they met Death on a lonely road . . . I think it more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted, dangerous wizards who succeeded in creating those powerful objects. The story of them being Death’s own Hallows seems to me the sort of legend that might have sprung up around such creations.





    • The artifacts themselves can clearly be explained as "feasible" according to in-universe rules:





      • Invisibility cloak: it's not really "more perfect" than other cloaks. Yes, it doesn't get damaged with time - but neither do many other magical objects, like Hogwarts itself. Yes, it conceals other people aside from the owner, but it's not really THAT much of a "magical" leap from hiding only the owner.


        It doesn't have any other differences from "normal" invisibility cloaks, and there's zero in-universe evidence that it hides the owner from "Death" (the only reason Harry survived wasn't the cloak - which he wasn't wearing anyway - it was the fact that Voldemort took Harry's blood into his body).




      • The Elder Wand isn't shown to exhibit any supernatural abilities outside the fable. The only known time its owner dueled using the wand where the wand mattered, the owner LOST (Gellert Grindewald vs Dumbledore).



        What must strike any intelligent witch or wizard on studying the so-called history of the Elder Wand is that every man who claims to have owned it has insisted that it is “unbeatable”, when the known facts of its passage through many owners’ hands demonstrate that not only has it been beaten hundreds of times, but that it also attracts trouble as Grumble the Grubby Goat attracted flies. (Albus Dumbledore's comments in his copy of Tales of Beadle the Bard)




        The only "special" ability of the wand was to repair Harry Potter's wand that Olliewander pronounced unfixable. Hardly something worth assuming that the object was made by Death.




      • "Resurrection" stone. Its effects are similar to Priori Incantatum, and thus again don't require any supernatural "Death" magic as explanation.









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