Meanwhile, the second brother journeyed to his own home, where he lived alone. Here he took out the stone that had the power to recall the dead, and turned it thrice in his hand. To his amazement and his delight, the figure of the girl he had once hoped to marry, before her untimely death, appeared at once before him.

Yet she was sad and cold, separated from him as by a veil. Though she had returned to the mortal world, she did not truly belong there and suffered. Finally the second brother, driven mad with hopeless longing, killed himself so as truly to join her.

And so Death took the second brother for his own.

But though Death searched for the third brother for many years, he was never able to find him. It was only when he had attained a great age that the youngest brother finally took off the Cloak of Invisibility and gave it to his son. And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life.

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
on “The Tale of the Three Brothers”

This story made a profound impression on me as a boy. I heard it first from my mother, and it soon became the tale I requested more often than any other at bedtime. This frequently led to arguments with my younger brother, Aberforth, whose favorite story was “Grumble the Grubby Goat.”

The moral of “The Tale of the Three Brothers” could not be any clearer: Human efforts to evade or overcome death are always doomed to disappointment. The third brother in the story (“the humblest and also the wisest”) is the only one who understands that, having narrowly escaped Death once, the best he can hope for is to postpone their next meeting for as long as possible. This youngest brother knows that taunting Death — by engaging in violence, like the first brother, or by meddling in the shadowy art of necromancy,²⁰ like the second brother — means pitting oneself against a wily enemy who cannot lose.

The irony is that a curious legend has grown up around this story, which precisely contradicts the message of the original. This legend holds that the gifts Death gives the brothers — an unbeatable wand, a stone that can bring back the dead, and an Invisibility Cloak that endures forever — are genuine objects that exist in the real world. The legend goes further: If any person becomes the rightful owner of all three, then he or she will become “master of Death,” which has usually been understood to mean that they will be invulnerable, even immortal.

We may smile, a little sadly, at what this tells us about human nature. The kindest interpretation would be: “Hope springs eternal.”²¹ In spite of the fact that, according to Beedle, two of the three objects are highly dangerous, in spite of the clear message that Death comes for us all in the end, a tiny minority of the Wizarding community persists in believing that Beedle was sending them a coded message, which is the exact reverse of the one set down in ink, and that they alone are clever enough to understand it.