At that, the King fell to his knees too, and told the stump that he would issue a proclamation at once, protecting all the witches and wizards of the kingdom, and allowing them to practice their magic in peace.

“Very good,” said the stump, “but you have not yet made amends to Babbitty!”

“Anything, anything at all!” cried the foolish King, wringing his hands before the stump.

“You will erect a statue of Babbitty upon me, in memory of your poor washerwoman, and to remind you forever of your own foolishness!” said the stump.

The King agreed to it at once, and promised to engage the foremost sculptor in the land, and have the statue made of pure gold. Then the shamed King and all the noblemen and -women returned to the palace, leaving the tree stump cackling behind them.

When the grounds were deserted once more, there wriggled from a hole between the roots of the tree stump a stout and whiskery old rabbit with a wand clamped between her teeth. Babbitty hopped out of the grounds and far away, and ever after a golden statue of the washerwoman stood upon the tree stump, and no witch or wizard was ever persecuted in the kingdom again.

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
on “Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump”

The story of “Babbitty Rabbitty and Her Cackling Stump” is, in many ways, the most “real” of Beedle’s tales, in that the magic described in the story conforms, almost entirely, to known magical laws.

It was through this story that many of us first discovered that magic could not bring back the dead — and a great disappointment and shock it was, convinced as we had been, as young children, that our parents would be able to awaken our dead rats and cats with one wave of their wands. Though some six centuries have elapsed since Beedle wrote this tale, and while we have devised innumerable ways of maintaining the illusion of our loved ones’ continuing presence,¹⁴ wizards still have not found a way of reuniting body and soul once death has occurred. As the eminent Wizarding philosopher Bertrand de Pensées-Profondes writes in his celebrated work A Study into the Possibility of Reversing the Actual and Metaphysical Effects of Natural Death, with Particular Regard to the Reintegration of Essence and Matter:

“Give it up. It's never going to happen.”

The tale of Babbitty Rabbitty does, however, give us one of the earliest literary mentions of an Animagus, for Babbitty the washerwoman is possessed of the rare magical ability to transform into an animal at will.

Animagi make up a small fraction of the Wizarding population. Achieving perfect, spontaneous human-to-animal transformation requires much study and practice, and many witches and wizards consider that their time might be better employed in other ways. Certainly the application of such a talent is limited unless one has a great need of disguise or concealment. It is for this reason that the Ministry of Magic has insisted upon a register of Animagi, for there can be no doubt that this kind of magic is of greatest use to those engaged in surreptitious, covert, or even criminal activity.¹⁵