Time-Turner

Time-turner
Date of invention	Before September 1993
Purpose	Time-travelling
Owner(s)	Ministry of Magic Hermione Granger
Book information
First appearance	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Last appearance	Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

A time-turner is a wizarding device used for time-travelling. It first appears in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

About

A time-turner is a tiny, sparkling hourglass attached to a very fine, long gold chain. Everyone who wants to time-travel has to be inside the chain. The number of times they turn the hourglass is how many hours they want to travel back in time. Their surrounding dissolves into a blur of colours and shapes when they are travelling, and they feel like they are flying backwards. They land in the location that they were in at that time, just seconds before their past-self arrives.

Time-travellers have to abide by natural and very important wizarding laws. They cannot be seen or change what happened in the past. Being seen will cause horrible things to happen like killing their past or future self. They have to hide right away before their past-self arrives. If anyone wants to use a time-turner, they have to get special permission from the Ministry of Magic, pleading why they can be trusted.

History

Hermione Granger wanted to take every subject at Hogwarts in her third year, but she wouldn't have time to attend every lesson. Professor McGonagall wrote letters to get her a time-turner, arguing she was a very trustworthy and intelligent student who wouldn't use it for anything but her studies. She was successful, and Hermione was given her time-turner on her first day of her third year. She promised she would never tell anyone she had it.

Hermione's friends were confused by her timetable because she had lessons at the same time. She kept disappearing when she was heading towards lessons, then suddenly appearing when her lesson was about to start. She started struggling with her school work, falling behind on the workload and forgetting to go to lessons because she was losing track of time. At Easter, she decided to give up Divination. She later also gave up Muggle Studies after finding both subjects useless and needing time for a normal schedule.

In June, Hermione used the time-turner to take her and Harry Potter three hours back in time to save Sirius Black and Buckbeak. Harry was very confused and struggled to understand that he can't change anything in the past. He had to be held back to stop him intervening. Harry learned time was self-fulfilling when he found out he had saved himself, Sirius and Hermione earlier that night by using a Patronus Charm to drive the Dementors away. Knowing he had already produced it earlier gave him the confidence to do it in the future.

Harry and Hermione had to be back in the Hospital Wing by the time they had time-travelled at. Dumbledore needed to ensure they weren't suspected of helping Sirius escape so he needed to lock her and Harry in the Hospital Wing. They had a very short window before people like Cornelius Fudge and Severus Snape will have learned Sirius escaped and go back to the Hospital Wing. They got back in time right before Fudge did. Snape suspected they had been involved but he didn't have any evidence.

Hermione gave her time-turner back at the end of year after dropping two subjects. Ron was disappointed she didn't tell anyone she had one earlier in the year.

Trivia

• Time-travel is a concept which always causes plot-holes in a story. There are three theories of time-travel which provide their own problems. A writer will typically employ only one of three to avoid huge contradictory issues in their story. Harry experienced the self-fulfilling theory which obeys the Novikov self-consistency principle, which states "nothing can be changed because anything a traveller does merely produces the circumstances they had noted before travelling", and "any time travel into the past was always part of history, and so the course of events is not changed".
  • The use of a time-turner was for a trivial task in the Harry Potter book series which didn't have any effect on time itself. However, laws and consequences do still exist. If the past and future-self cross each other, it has an effect on their mental state but without time itself changing. The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can.