So while we can’t trace back the wand to one specific time or place, there are at least a few instances that helped more than others to bring wands and staffs into our modern pop culture.

In the Western literary canon, the first mention of a wand or staff is in Homer’s The Odyssey when Circe is depicted as wielding a wand when she turns Odysseus’s men into a herd of swine. J.R.R. Tolkien also depicted Gandalf and his wizards as having magical staffs, which might have come from the influence of reading The Poetic Edda, which is a Norse collection of anonymous poems that depict dramatic (and usually magical) myths. In one poem, a messenger named Skirnir uses a wand to threaten to put a woman under a form of mind control spell.

In terms of Celtic Anglo-Saxon tradition, medieval lore and magic were collected into grimoires, which became popular among the literate elite by the High Middle Ages. One popular grimoire, The Key of Solomon, circulated widely in the Renaissance and gave explicit instructions on how to craft a magic wand, similar to the type we see in movies today.-bethbrunmeier / March 28, 2017