An old man stood on the doorstep.
“’Tis my old donkey, sir,” he explained. “Lost, she is, or stolen, and without her I cannot take my wares to market, and my family will go hungry tonight.”
“And I am hungry now!” roared the wizard, and he slammed the door upon the old man.
Clang, clang, clang, went the cooking pot’s single brass foot upon the floor, but now its clamour was mixed with the brays of a donkey and human groans of hunger, echoing from the depths of the pot.
“Be still. Be silent!” shrieked the wizard, but not all his magical powers could quieten the warty pot, which hopped at his heels all day, braying and groaning and clanging, no matter where he went or what he did.
That evening there came a third knock upon the door, and there on the threshold stood a young woman sobbing as though her heart would break.
“My baby is grievously ill,” she said. “Won’t you please help us? Your father bade me come if troubled –”
But the wizard slammed the door on her.
And now the tormenting pot filled to the brim with salt water, and slopped tears all over the floor as it hopped, and brayed, and groaned, and sprouted more warts.
Though no more villagers came to seek help at the wizard’s cottage for the rest of the week, the pot kept him informed of their many ills. Within a few days, it was not only braying and groaning and slopping and hopping and sprouting warts, it was also choking and retching, crying like a baby, whining like a dog, and spewing out bad cheese and sour milk and a plague of hungry slugs.
The wizard could not sleep or eat with the pot beside him, but the pot refused to leave, and he could not silence it or force it to be still.
At last the wizard could bear it no more.
“Bring me all your problems, all your troubles and your woes!” he screamed, fleeing into the night, with the pot hopping behind him along the road into the village. “Come! Let me cure you, mend you and comfort you! I have my father’s cooking pot, and I shall make you well!”
And with the foul pot still bounding along behind him, he ran up the street, casting spells in every direction.
Inside one house the little girl’s warts vanished as she slept; the lost donkey was Summoned from a distant briar patch and set down softly in its stable; the sick baby was doused in dittany and woke, well and rosy. At every house of sickness and sorrow, the wizard did his best, and gradually the cooking pot beside him stopped groaning and retching, and became quiet, shiny and clean.
“Well, Pot?” asked the trembling wizard, as the sun began to rise.
The pot burped out the single slipper he had thrown into it, and permitted him to fit it on to the brass foot. Together, they set off back to the wizard’s house, the pot’s footstep muffled at last. But from that day forward, the wizard helped the villagers like his father before him, lest the pot cast off its slipper, and begin to hop once more.
Albus Dumbledore on "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot"
A kind old wizard decides to teach his hardhearted son a lesson by giving him a taste of the local Muggles’ misery. The young wizard’s conscience awakes, and he agrees to use his magic for the benefit of his non-magical neighbours. A simple and heart-warming fable, one might think – in which case, one would reveal oneself to be an innocent nincompoop. A pro-Muggle story showing a Muggle-loving father as superior in magic to a Muggle-hating son? It is nothing short of amazing that any copies of the original version of this tale survived the flames to which they were so often consigned.
Beedle was somewhat out of step with his times in preaching a message of brotherly love for Muggles. The persecution of witches and wizards was gathering pace all over Europe in the early fifteenth century. Many in the magical community felt, and with good reason, that offering to cast a spell on the Muggle-next-door’s sickly pig was tantamount to volunteering to fetch the firewood for one’s own funeral pyre.1 “Let the Muggles manage without us!” was the cry, as the wizards drew further and further apart from their non-magical brethren, culminating with the institution of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in 1689, when wizardkind voluntarily went underground.
Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard’s cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole. At the end of the story, by which time the Pot has consumed most of his neighbours, the wizard gains a promise from the few remaining villagers that he will be left in peace to practise magic. In return, he instructs the Pot to render up its victims, who are duly burped out of its depths, slightly mangled. To this day, some wizarding children are only told the revised version of the story by their (generally anti-Muggle) parents, and the original, if and when they ever read it, comes as a great surprise.
As I have already hinted, however, its pro-Muggle sentiment was not the only reason that “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” attracted anger. As the witch-hunts grew ever fiercer, wizarding families began to live double lives, using charms of concealment to protect themselves and their families. By the seventeenth century, any witch or wizard who chose to fraternise with Muggles became suspect, even an outcast in his or her own community. Among the many insults hurled at pro-Muggle witches and wizards (such fruity epithets as “Mudwallower”, “Dunglicker” and “Scumsucker” date from this period), was the charge of having weak or inferior magic.
Influential wizards of the day, such as Brutus Malfoy, editor of Warlock at War, an anti-Muggle periodical, perpetuated the stereotype that a Muggle-lover was about as magical as a Squib.2 In 1675, Brutus wrote:
This we may state with certainty: any wizard who shows fondness for the society of Muggles is of low intelligence, with magic so feeble and pitiful that he can only feel himself superior if surrounded by Muggle pigmen.
Nothing is a surer sign of weak magic than a weakness for non-magical company.
This prejudice eventually died out in the face of overwhelming evidence that some of the world’s most brilliant wizards3 were, to use the common phrase, “Muggle-lovers”.
The final objection to “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” remains alive in certain quarters today. It was summed up best, perhaps, by Beatrix Bloxam (1794-1910), author of the infamous Toadstool Tales. Mrs Bloxam believed that The Tales of Beedle the Bard were damaging to children because of what she called “their unhealthy preoccupation with the most horrid subjects, such as death, disease, bloodshed, wicked magic, unwholesome characters and bodily effusions and eruptions of the most disgusting kind”. Mrs Bloxam took a variety of old stories, including several of Beedle’s, and rewrote them according to her ideals, which she expressed as “filling the pure minds of our little angels with healthy, happy thoughts, keeping their sweet slumber free of wicked dreams and protecting the precious flower of their innocence”.
The final paragraph of Mrs Bloxam’s pure and precious reworking of “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” reads: