The eldest brother’s pursuit of power and death

The eldest brother’s pursuit of power and death is the first of the three brothers’ gifts from Death to turn against its recipient: armed with the Elder Wand, he wins a duel and boasts of being invincible, only to be murdered for the wand he believed made him untouchable.

The Gift and Its Promise

After the brothers evade Death by making a bridge across a dangerous river, Death offers each a prize. The combative eldest brother asks for a wand more powerful than any other, one that will always win its owner’s duels—a fitting weapon, in his view, for a wizard who has conquered Death. Death makes the wand from a branch of an elder tree on the riverbank and gives it to him.

The request turns the brothers’ narrow escape into a contest over what can be claimed from death. The eldest brother chooses not safety or concealment but supremacy over other wizards. The wand’s promise is absolute: it is meant to make its owner victorious in duels, and the eldest brother treats that power as proof of invulnerability.

Victory and Boast

The eldest brother travels for a week or more before reaching a distant village, where he seeks out a fellow wizard with whom he has a quarrel. With the Elder Wand as his weapon, he cannot fail to win the ensuing duel; he leaves his enemy dead on the floor.

He then goes to an inn and boasts loudly about the powerful wand he has taken from Death and its supposed ability to make him invincible. The scene links his triumph to the danger that follows: having used the wand to kill an adversary, he makes its power—and his possession of it—known to others.

Theft and Death

That night, while the eldest brother lies wine-sodden on his bed, another wizard creeps up on him. The intruder takes the wand and, for good measure, slits the eldest brother’s throat. The weapon that secured his victory does not protect him from an attack made outside the duel he had expected to win.

The tale closes his part in the brothers’ encounter with a blunt reversal: Death takes the first brother for his own. His strength in a formal contest and his claim to invincibility prove no defense against betrayal and murder. The Elder Wand survives him, while the eldest brother’s pursuit of power ends in the very death he believed he had outwitted.