Hey! I had a general question about wandlore which I could not find anywhere and I was wondering if you could enlighten me on the subject. The current Wizarding World wand quiz contains these two questions in it: one is about your eye color and the second one is about your birth day (an odd or an even number), I was wondering if those parameters really affect the wand that is chosen for you, and if so- How?
No idea about the eye colour, that may well just be random because they're doing a quiz cos they can't match you in real life to an actual magic wand because you know, no magic.
Birthday could actually in theory be used, because JKR used the Celtic Tree calendar for the wands of Harry, Hermione, Ron and (accidentally) Draco. But I don't know about odd or even number and would guess that that is again just because magic isn't real so when we play at it we've gotta find weird shorthands like quizzes.
I mean, personally I think that Ollivander measuring limb lengths etc. on customers is partially a distraction from him selecting wands and partially him seeing how they react and using that to gauge what wands to offer them - but also using it to get an idea of their present height and what height they may end up. If you give a short person a 15" wand that's 100% a wand indicating arrogance, but if you give someone of, say, Hagrid's height a 15" wand you're actually indicating low self-esteem. I imagine his chatter was also to gauge personality and thus what wands to suggest and from those early wands he narrowed his idea of the personality of an individual until he matched them.
Which means Harry was tricky in part because he's a bit of a complicated, messy, hard-to-match person but also because Ollivander was, intentionally or not, going off some assumptions about Harry that weren't true - which I've discussed before on this blog, analysing some of the wands Ollivander gave Harry - Ollivander's a very good wandmaker and good at matching people, but he's still a person and as flawed as anyone else.
Anyway, tl;dr: no I don't think that all of the quiz's questions necessarily matter and that some of them may be just to make it seem more substantial and personal (aspects of the physical self and the body one lives in, rather than the actual person one is, but when you're young that line can often seem hard to judge) because we don't have an Ollivander or magical wands.
