Recently someone started a thread on wand making and the prosses of it's creation. It came, for me, at a perfect time because it was my favorite subject and appeared just about at the same time as when I got back on the forums. Still, it got me thinking about wand materials.

I have thought about it for a while, and I think (based on the recent information) we can except that all wood types can be used in wand creation, some are just harder then others to find the magic wood required for wand making.

I also believe, and I'm wondering what you think on this subject, that any magical creature can be made into a wand. We have evidence of troll whiskers, river monster spines, and Vela hair. So it certainly seems like anything is possible.

What I would like to know is what everyone else thought the personalities of woods, the ones not explored by olivander in pottermore, and cores might be. I'll give my own few interpretations and ideas, but I would love to know what magic cores and woods might mean in the magical personality portion.

 

Only tangentially related, but I think the fact that people didn't just submit their own hair or blood or whatever for wand-crafting supports my in-manuscript theory that wizards are not inherently magical (or only very weakly magical) creatures

It could also support the hypothesis that wizards are just as superstitious as Muggles and consider it horribly bad luck at best and foul Dark magic at worst to use a wand powered by your own hair, but where's the fun in that?

 

I think that yes, inherently wizards areny vary magical creatures. And if they did use their hair, I doubt it would be much more powerful then a Kneesle whisker or Fauchus stalk.

I mean a troll whisker, which is vary obviously more magical in both the inherent magic it needs just to survive at that size and it's own magical powers, is still a pretty damn clunky wand and I think it was described s being pretty damn trash in compression to a modern wand.

 

The "human-core wand = the foulest of Dark Arts" hypothesis has its merits.

I'm of the opinion that magic as we think of it in HP isn't derived from some fundamental phenomenon (say, mana) which operates on a singular set of magical laws. The magic shown within in the series is often capricious and temperamental, which leads me to think that it's more of a blanket term for the entire spectrum of supernatural happenings that typically adhere to self-contained rules.

Wizardkind is a special case in itself, because we're exposed to a variety of disciplines in witchcraft that are framed in isolation as often as they are used in conjunction with each other, i.e Transfiguration vs. Charms and the separate laws for both.

Wizards have demonstrated the ability to metamorph into other species, fly, teleport, etc. Muggles cannot use magic to do this. So while a wizard's nose hair doesn't stand on edge with the spark of magic, said wizard is still as magical as any dragon. We don't know exactly where the hocus pocus comes from, or even if it comes from anywhere, but it almost always stems from a wizard's actions, thoughts and/or feelings.

But what does all of that have to do with wands?

A wand on its own does nothing; without the skill and will of the caster, it's just a wooden shaft with some sparkly/grisly stuff inside. Not inert, but inanimate, and only semi-sentient under even the most extreme coincidences.

Now almost all of the cores we know are listed under the Beast Division of magical creatures, save one: Veela hair. Even centaurs, who only identify as Beasts so as to distance themselves from hags, are left well alone (though that probably has more to do with their bows, lol).

We've all heard Ollivander's reasoning for refusing to work with it as a wand material. He considers it a temperatmental ingredient, and enough to never use it. Bear in mind that Pottermore also claims that phoenix-feather cores are the rarest of the Supreme Cores, and that phoenixes are notoriously independent creatures.

Could it be that the more sentient the donor, the harder it is to construct and subsequently master a wand? If so, why would it be immoral to use human material?

The concept of 'mastering a wand' in itself is an interesting one. When you cast a spell with one, it's made quite clear that your commands must be precise, spoken or otherwise. Yet Harry's issues with the blackthorn wand in DH implied that there was some semi-conscious attempt at coercion to get said wand to meet him even a quarter of the way.

The coercion of sentient beings is dark stuff in general, let alone the wizarding world, and as far as we can tell, wizards are as sentient as you can get in the wider magical community. Even if a wizard were to siphon their own blood (and, funnily enough, we haven't encountered a blood core yet), it could be argued that they're technically committing the symbolic or ritual act of depriving a (piece of a) human being of its agency in the quest for power.

I could be just freestyling, though. I'm almost certainly freestyling.