ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
on “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart”

As we have already seen, Beedle’s first two tales attracted criticism of their themes of generosity, tolerance, and love. “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart,” however, does not appear to have been modified or much criticized in the hundreds of years since it was first written; the story as I eventually read it in the original runes was almost exactly that which my mother had told me. That said, “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” is by far the most gruesome of Beedle’s offerings, and many parents do not share it with their children until they think they are old enough not to suffer nightmares.⁹

Why, then, the survival of this grisly tale? I would argue that “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” has survived intact through the centuries because it speaks to the dark depths in all of us. It addresses one of the greatest, and least acknowledged, temptations of magic: the quest for invulnerability.

Of course, such a quest is nothing more or less than a foolish fantasy. No man or woman alive, magical or not, has ever escaped some form of injury, whether physical, mental, or emotional. To hurt is as human as to breathe. Nevertheless, we wizards seem particularly prone to the idea that we can bend the nature of existence to our will. The young warlock¹⁰ in this story, for instance, decides that falling in love would adversely affect his comfort and security. He sees love as a humiliation, a weakness, a drain on a person’s emotional and material resources.

Of course, the centuries-old trade in love potions shows that our fictional wizard is hardly alone in seeking to control the unpredictable course of love. The search for a true love potion¹¹ continues to this day, but no such elixir has yet been created, and leading potioneers doubt that it is possible.

The hero in this tale, however, is not even interested in a simulacrum of love that he can create or destroy at will. He wants to remain forever uninfected by what he regards as a kind of sickness, and therefore performs a piece of Dark Magic that would not be possible outside of a storybook: He locks away his own heart.

The resemblance of this action to the creation of a Horcrux has been noted by many writers. Although Beedle’s hero is not seeking to avoid death, he is dividing what was clearly not meant to be divided — body and heart, rather than soul — and in doing so, he is falling foul of the first of Adalbert Waffling’s Fundamental Laws of Magic:

Tamper with the deepest mysteries — the source of life, the essence of self — only if prepared for consequences of the most extreme and dangerous kind.

And sure enough, in seeking to become superhuman this foolhardy young man renders himself inhuman. The heart he has locked away slowly shrivels and grows hair, symbolizing his own descent to beasthood. He is finally reduced to a violent animal who takes what he wants by force, and he dies in a futile attempt to regain what is now forever beyond his reach — a human heart.