The following podcast contains audio extracted from videos on the Harry Potter Theory YouTube channel.

Theirr-Hear-Chaird.

Hey everyone, welcome to another instalment of Harry Potter Theory.

Today we're discussing the Tri-Wizard Tournament.

The Tri-Wizard tournament was one of the deadliest competitions in the entire wizarding

world.

With a death toll that rivals the professional dueling arenas in Eastern Europe, the Tri-Wizard

tournament was actually pretty barbaric.

It's baffling why Hogwarts and its fellow schools kept it going for so many centuries.

But what made it so dangerous and how did it get started in the first place?

We'll answer those questions and more in today's video.

Origins. Nobody's quite sure when the first Tri-Wizard tournament came to be.

Just like most events from the early wizarding world, the first Tri-Wizard tournament's origins

are all but lost to time, but based on a little bit of information we still possess from

that era, we can build a rough picture of the earliest

tournaments.

Hogwarts, of course, was founded by Godrick Gryffindor and his three wizarding friends

in the latter half of the 11th century, and only about two centuries after that, the very

first Tri-Wizard tournament debuted.

The dates are a bit fuzzy, but sometime around

the year 1294, the three major wizarding schools of the region, the Dermstrang Institute

and the Bo-Bot-Bot-Hat-o Academy of Magic, came together and decided to pit their students

...