A history of magic
Five ways Newt Scamander’s return in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald weaves into the world of Harry Potter
Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them sent J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World saga into a whole new era, and Newt Scamander’s adventure is about to continue in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald, a sequel taking in both new horizons and familiar areas of Harry Potter mythology. Here’s what you need to know.
1 _ Newt’s importance is secured
The Crimes Of Grindelwald picks up in 1927, the year after Newt and Tina Goldstein captured Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald in New York. In the meantime, our hero has finally published his book based on his travels, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them — the definitive Magizoology tome that Harry Potter studies at Hogwarts over 60 years later. When Grindelwald escapes from prison, Newt is given a mission that sends him to Paris — while Tina, her sister Queenie, and Muggle baker Jacob Kowalski are drawn back into the fray.
2 _ dumbledore’s back
Decades before the flowing grey beard, the half-moon spectacles and his tenure as Harry Potter’s Hogwarts headmaster, Albus Dumbledore was a professor who counted Newt Scamander among his pupils. Jude Law steps into Michael Gambon’s shoes to take on the wizard icon, who becomes a vital friend and mentor to young Hufflepuff Newt. Due to his complicated relationship with Grindelwald — friends, then enemies after the death of Dumbledore’s sister — Dumbledore sends the adult Newt on the wizard-supremacist’s trail instead of going himself.
3 _ a deathly hallow returns
In the fight against Voldemort, Harry comes to possess ultra-powerful magical artifacts the Deathly Hallows — the Elder Wand, Resurrection Stone and Cloak Of Invisibility — supposedly created by Death, and symbolised by an overlapping circle, triangle and vertical line. Grindelwald is obsessed with the Hallows myth, appropriating the symbol as his own. In Fantastic Beasts he gives his Hallows necklace to Credence Barebone, a vulnerable and dangerous Obscurial, while disguised as Auror Percival Graves. Dumbledore eventually
wins the Elder Wand from Grindelwald in their fateful 1945 duel.
4 _ THE LESTRANGE FAMILY REAPPEARS
For Harry Potter fans, the surname Lestrange means one thing: Helena Bonham Carter’s cackling, curly-haired Death Eater Bellatrix — cousin and murderer of Harry Potter’s beloved godfather, Sirius Black. The first Fantastic Beasts teased a more sympathetic member of the Lestrange clan in Leta, a Slytherin ancestor of Bellatrix’s eventual husband Rodolphus Lestrange. Leta is Newt’s old friend from Hogwarts, whose photo remains in his magical case — and with unresolved issues between them, expect sparks to fly when she turns up in The Crimes Of Grindelwald.
5 _ WE REVISIT HOGWARTS
Pack your trunk, grab your owl, and sort a last-minute trolley dash down Diagon Alley, because the arrival of a young Dumbledore also means a return to that school of witchcraft and wizardry — yes, we’re going back to Hogwarts. As well as visiting the Scottish castle in the ‘present day’ of 1927, The Crimes Of Grindelwald’s Comic-con teaser revealed flashbacks of Dumbledore teaching a young Newt the same Boggart-in-thewardrobe lesson that Harry Potter receives from Professor Lupin in The Prisoner Of Azkaban.