Harry Potter
and the
Sorcerer's Stone

Wands

When Harry gets his wand from Ollivander, Ollivander tells him: "No two Ollivander wands are the same, just as no two unicorns, dragons or phoenixes are quite the same. And of course, you will never get such good results with another wizard's wand." However, during the course of the series, there are many times when someone borrows someone else's wand — and they always seem to get perfectly good results. Except when borrowing Ron's broken wand in the Chamber of Secrets, of course!

I've wondered why no wizards carry a backup wand, with all the Expelliarmuses that are always flying around. Especially Mad-Eye Moody — I'd expect him to have about half a dozen tucked away as spares. Dumbledore could certainly have found a spare useful in book 6!

The Sorting Hat

It seems as if attendance at Hogwarts is planned out well in advance, and there are some rules involved. Each new class consists of exactly 40 students, and 10 — 5 girls and 5 boys — are assigned to each house.

The sorting hat has the job of sorting the 40 students into houses, but has to be sure to assign 5 boys and 5 girls to each house. It doesn't get to first check out each of the 40 students and then decide — no, it sees the students alphabetically and must assign each one as it sees him/her. This naturally raises some questions.

If the hat has already assigned 5 boys to, say, Slytherin, what does it do when a 6th boy that seems clearly best fitting in Slytherin comes up? The hat would have to assign him to one of the other houses. This never seems to come up. Why not?

The answer must either be that someone (either the hat or someone in the Hogwarts faculty) has already chosen the students carefully to match the houses, and the hat only has to make the predetermined choice known to everyone.

The hat seemed to dither over whether Harry should become a Gryffindor or a Slytherin. But if it had assigned him to Slytherin, it would have had to assign one of the boys who otherwise went to Slytherin to Gryffindor.

Harry's Glasses

Harry wears glasses. At the beginning, the glasses are held together by tape. The glasses are eventually repaired through magic.

While it's not unreasonable that Harry might be nearsighted, there's something that's NOT reasonable about this. Harry is often in the hospital, having heavy-duty work done such as having all the bones in his arm regrown. Why doesn't Madame Pomfrey take a few seconds to cure Harry's nearsigntedness. Seems like a piece of cake compared to the other things she's been able to cure.