We know from DH that when you disarm someone you get that person's wand's loyalty and that wand will work for you, even tho it wont work as well as a wand that chose you. We also know from when Harry won The Elder Wand from Malfoy that you get the loyalty of every wand that is loyal to that person, not just the wand you got from disarming.

Now i am a little confused about how this transfer of ownership/loyalty works. Take when Lupin disarmed Harry and Hermione in PoA when they are in the Shrieking Shack with Sirius. After that fact Harry and Hermione's wands didn't work any worse for them and Lupin didn't seem to have won their loyalty. That could suggest that there is some consideration of intent involved. That if you don't really mean to defeat that person you dont get that person's wands loyalty.
Another possibility could be that Lupin won the wands loyalty's but since he gave them their wands back afterwards he tansferred it back somehow.

Later in that scene Harry, Hermione and Ron all disarm Snape. This time tho they certainly meant to defeat Snape and you could also say that there was more of a fight involved since Snape already defeated Lupin and had his wand pointed at Harry. Later in the books, we don't get any indication that Snape's wand works any worse for him after that ordeal.

Again in CoS Snape disarms Lockheart and you could see that there was real malice behind that curse and Snape certainly meant to defeat Lockheart but even after that we dont get any indication that Snape won the wands loyalty, and this time Snape doesn't give the wand back either like Lupin did. Here Lockheart gets his wand from a student.

I am curious about any thoughts about this topic. Is there something i have missed or is this topic not really explained in the books?

 

First off, it's not disarming someone to get their wands loyalty, it's defeating them.

Secondly, the "defeat someone to get wand loyalty" thing is unique to the Elder Wand. There is a kind of spectrum of "wand loyalty", and the Elder wand is at the very extreme end of it. The Elder wand is the ultimately disloyal wand, following only power, and thus even the slightest, most technical of defeats will switch its loyalty. This is not necessarily the case for other wands, some of which will be quite disloyal, some extremely loyal. It depends on the type of wand and the strength of the bond between the particular wand and its master.

Thirdly, it is only the Elder wand that can only recognise one master at a time. Other wands can recognise multiple masters.

 

Ahh, thank you for clearing that up for me. That has been bugging me for a little while now.

EDIT:
In DH Ollivander says this tho:

Doesn't that suggest that a wand will usually only recognise one master at a time, since he says the allegiance will change, not several? Or did you when you said

mean that it is just possible, not common?

 

The way I see it, the efficiency of a wand depends on its affinity with the wizard wielding it. Said affinity depends on several things:

• wands have different characters making them work better for certain types of wizards (as described in the Pottermore files about wands);
• a wand choosing you will always have better affinity than any other;
• spending time using a wand will make the affinity grow ("as the wand and the wizard learn from each other" is how Pottermore puts it IIRC);
• someone else's wand will have low affinity by default, but it can be increased by a) the owner voluntarily letting you using it (like Harry borrowing Hermione's wand in DH, or Ron's first wand from Charlie or Neville from his father) or b) forcing the wand to obey you by conquering it, i.e. defeating the owner.

I'm pretty sure that the difference in wand characters also mean they will react differently towards their owner's defeat. So the most loyal ones would not care if their owner gets defeated while the most elitist would have lower affinity as a result.

And then you have the Elder Wand, which is as Taure said: zero loyalty, works only for the strongest it knows, is average for the others.

 

The only way that JKR's haphazard plot device doesn't create massive plot holes is to make it so it only applies to the Elder Wand.

 

The problem with that stance though is that it was shown to also apply to Malfoy's regular wand. Harry started using that constantly after his own wand broke and it seemed to work better than the wand he borrowed from Hermione contract winning it from Malfoy. That probably has to do with the wand's characteristics as Goten Askim says.

 

Normal wands can share loyalty. They'll still work for their original owners just as well as they always have, but they'll also work fairly well for the new owner (though less so than their actual wand). Harry was able to use Draco's wand better than Hermione's because he'd won what loyalty it had to share.

 

Is there a source for the fact that wand's can have multiple owners? Several of you have been saying it and I was wondering where you got that information from.

 

Family wands can be passed down (Neville), and it's been mentioned in Pottermore somewhere. They rarely work as well as an individually picked one, but hey, they can work.

Normal wands don't easily change owners. You could say that owner = the one with the highest affinity/loyalty for the wand? In that case, only the Elder Wand changes owners after a single defeat. A wand that chooses you when you're still young... it would probably take something extraordinary for it to change owners. Getting defeated or disarmed or whatever honestly has little to no effect. Getting someone's wand doesn't mean that it's any less loyal to them - it's just you can probably use it better now.

The quick master switch of the Elder Wand is just for the Elder Wand.

I think that the wand system is rather charming.

 

The question would remain. Why could Harry so easily use Draco's wand.

 

Being defeated and losing your wand in a duel doesn't mean it's not going to work for you anymore. The finicky Elder Wand worked for Voldemort even though he wasn't its master.

I agree with Goten that it's more of a sliding scale of affinity and defeat and loyalty are only part of it. And even if you have a wand's loyalty, it might still not work very well for you (family wands).

I think this has basically been answered. Draco's wand might generally be suited to Harry (more than Hermione's), and by defeating Malfoy and regularly using it, he increased his connection to and prowess with this wand.

 

So what you are saying is that if Harry gave Draco his wand back it would work just as well for him as before Harry got it?
While I agree that what you guys have been saying sounds logical, isn't it contrary to what Ollivander said in my earlier quote? That a wand's allegiance generally will change? Or do you interpret that statement that the wand's allegiance will change as in accepting an additional 'master'?

 

I think the way Ollivander talks about wands in the Pottermore passage on wand woods is helpful in assisting one's general understanding of the nature of wands.

Emphasis mine.

I think the main takeaway from these notes is that there aren't many hard and fast rules to be said about wands in general, and that much depends on the individual wand's preferences/temperament, which is heavily dependent on the type of wood.

 

The wand wood lore is reminiscent of using horoscopes or Myers-Briggs to classify people. The result is vague but seems vaguely helpful on first glance.

There are obviously multiple kinds of wood suited for each wizard of a given temperament, so the selection criteria that Ollivander uses must be interesting. It makes me think that his whole 'mysterious and wise' persona he uses is partly designed to provoke young wizards/witches into showing their true colors so he can best match them with a wand.

 

I would like to point out. Its stated multiple times in the books wands are basically sentient living things and depending on what they are made of defines what their personality is and I am that a wand that better correlates to your personality will work better with you

 

I would draw the line before calling wands sentient living things. They're more an extension of the witch or wizard than a being of their own.

 

They are not just extensions of the wizards who own them, quite clearly.

 

Would the fact that wand's learn from the wizard using it, mean that a wand's 'personality' could change if a person with bad affinity with it just continued using it? Say if Harry for some reason kept using Hermione's wand for 20 years, and for some reason Hermione doesn't use it in that time. Would the wand's characteristics have then changed so it would work better for Harry and worse for Hermione?

And the other way around, since a wizard also learns from the wand. Would the wand change Harry's personality in that time?

 

If that comment was directed at my post above yours, my question comes from the quote of Ollivander from DH. About wands learning from the wizard and vice versa, the wizard learning from the wand. Ollivander says that directly in the quote.