I know–I was postulating that maybe LV also knew that James had something from Hogwarts (I have no idea what)–and wanted that.
OR–wait a minute. Perhaps LV wanted to kill Harry, but THEN take a souvenier from the Potter’s to use as a horcrux. That would be “special” to him, no? (my god, I almost said precious!).
I bet LV made a horcrux from something in or near the Potter’s house and then killed Harry-or tried to.
Am I making sense?
Don’t answer that…
Obviously Voldie has not read the Evil Overlord list. #85:
I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. “Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse.” Instead it will be more along the lines of “Push the button.”
DD
Lord Voldemort didn’t intend to make Harry a Horcrux, I’m 99% certain of that. This probably means there was soemthing nearby that he intended to make into a horcrux and he probably failed to do so.
Harry may be the last horcrux, but then again he might not be. Whether he is or isn’t, Voldemort didn’t intend him to be one and he didn’t know Harry was a horcrux (if he is) until very recently, perhaps not even now. Certainly he didn’t know during Goblet of Fire or Order of the Phoenix, the earliest I’d put his realization (if he made that realization) is somewhere in the middle of HBP.
I wonder if perhaps Harry is Horcrux-like rather than simply a horcrux. LV didn’t do the magic to create a horcrux because he was killed before he could. Nevertheless, perhaps something happened that embedded a bit of his soul in Harry, it wouldn’t be a horcrux, but it would be similar.
First, I’m assuming anyone reading this far is caught up in the books and movies and there’s no need for spoiler tags.
As noted above, if Harry is the horcrux, it was unintended. However, note that Voldemort doesn’t necessarily follow Dumbledore’s good advice: the snake Nagini is presumed to be one of the six.
If Harry is a horcrux, it would explain why no one else is allowed to kill him. Voldemort doesn’t want Harry killed: it has to be Voldemort who does the killing, and in a special way (to extract the horcrux and replace it elsewhere.)
On t’other hand, if Harry is a horcrux, why did Voldemort try to kill him at the climax of GoF? Wouldn’t that kill part of Voldemort?
I think it would be heartless and cruel of Rowling to kill off Harry at the end of the books. It would basically trash everything that’s gone before: the light-heartedness, the whimsey, etc. Elements of darkness and death can be involved along the way, but if the whole series turns out to be a tragedy (even with the noble sacrifice etc etc.), she would be destroying everything she wrote before, and pretty much giving the finger to her readers. Of course, given the fortune that she’s made, she may not care about “artistic integrity.”
Jumping back in quickly: Sampiro, where’d you find this out? Any more info?
Yeah, I keep hearing this too, but i’ve never seen it on an official site - linky link?
Wikipedia gives this page, a transcript of a BBC Newsnight interview with Rowling in which she said:
I’ve seen some mentions in this thread of Snape, [spoiler]which seemed to not categorize him as “definitely a bad guy after all.”
I think there must be some rationale for Snape killing Dumbledore. But I don’t know what it is.[/spoiler]
What are the theories on the table about this?
-FrL-
I doubt very much that Voldemort knows that Harry is a Horcrux any more than he knows that Dubmledore destroyed the ring or that the locket was stolen. I can’t cite chapter and verse on this, but there is a passage in HBP where Dumbledore discusses whether or not Voldemort can sense his Horcruxes or what happens to them. If someone can acll that up, that should give us more details on this matter.
Spoilers for HBP,
Every book introduces some gizmo that turns out to be crucial: the Philosopher’s Stone, the phoenix in book II, the time-turner, port-keys in GoF, etc. Clearly in HBP we were introduced to horcruxen, but we were also introduced to the Unbreakable Vow. The theory I’m going with (and I seem to recall it being popular in the HBP thread) is that Snape is under an Unbreakable Vow to Dumbledore - otherwise, the introduction of Unbreakable Vows seems very strange.
Of course, this opens a larger plot hole: why on earth would the Ministry not put all of the ‘Imperiused’ Death-Eaters under UVs not to work for Voldemort again?
I’m not going to box this, because i’m pretty sure everyone knows by now.
How could Snape be a good guy?
Well, firstly, we still don’t know why Dumbledore trusts him as much as he does. He did come and admit that it was he who heard the prophecy, but that still isn’t a totally fantastic reason.
If Snape hadn’t killed Dumbledore, he would have died. The Unbreakable Vow required him to watch over Draco, protect Draco, and fulfil Draco’s task if he could not. While we don’t know that the task in question was killing Dumbledore (it may just have been to get the Death Eaters into Hogwarts) there’s a lot of evidence for it being so. So Dumbledore may have wanted Snape to kill him so that Snape would not die.
Snape could be, in Dumbledore’s view, more important than him. Really, the only important people are Harry and Voldemort, because they can kill each other and may not be killed by anyone else. While Dumbledore is a powerful and wise person, he may have thought that having a spy in the enemy camp who (now) will likely be elevated to a second-in-command position would be more useful than him being alive.
Snape met with Dumbledore and told him that he was having second thought about doing some task for Dumbledore - possibly that of killing Dumbledore if he had asked him to?
JKR is evil, and springs surprises like this all the time. However, she may realise we’d think this, and so Snape may be bad…or she might know we think this, and make him good…or she might know we know what she knows…etc.
And there’s always the third popular option - Snape is only out for himself. He joins whichever side he thinks will win, but takes any oppurtunity to get ahead himself.
er, uh… an unbreakable vow to Dumbledore to do what? Specifically, how does the vow explain his killing Dumbledore? (Apologies for density.) Are you saying Snape actually is a bad guy, but that there is an unbreakable vow on him that til now has forced him to “act like” a good guy? Why was he able to kill Dumbledore then?
Sorry, I should probably have expanded a bit more. Many of the extended reasons are addressed in Revenant Threshold’s list, particularly number 1.
More spoilers for HBP:
If Snape swore a UV to Dumbledore (say to be loyal to Dumbledore), it explains why AD is willing to go to the mat for him in the post-Voldemort trials, still have him in the OotP, etc; otherwise we have to assume that AD is trusting to the point of naivete. While that’s also possible, it seems to me less likely for someone who’s already fought and defeated one Really Evil Wizard.
It also explains the overheard conversation -between Snape and AD about not SS not being sure about finishing a task.
There are MANY reasons to think that, at the very least, we don’t know the whole story on Snape.
The key one, to my mind, is that we STILL don’t know why Dumbledore trusts Snape. There is a point in HBP in which Harry demands to know why Dumbledore trusts him. The book says that Dumbledore pauses as if considering whether to say something… and then simply repeats that he trusts Snape completely. If Dumbledore has some truly good reason, then I very much doubt that we will both find out about it in the next book AND that it will turn out to be wrong.
The other elements at work here are:
The EVIDENCE for the Snape-is-good theory is pretty lacking. But it’s also VERY clear that there are a LOT of missing pieces to the story of Dumbledore’s actions that final year, why he trusts Snape, etc.
And thematically… I really think there is very little chance of Snape actually being evil. He’s on Dumbledore’s side, and we have a lot more to learn about him and his motivations. I can’t back it up, but I feel pretty strongly that Severus did not want to kill Dumbledore… but that Dumbledore has some reason for having him not only take the Vow, but carry through with it.
It’s very obvious in the earlier books, but the series is written in the manner of detective stories rather than adventures: one person is set up as the villain, only for it to be later shown that the villain is someone else entirely.
Here’s my “Why Dumbledore was right to trust Snape” theory(formulated before HBP and thus before we knew that Snape had told the prophecy to Dumbledore):
Put simply, I think that when Voldemort blasted himself with his own curse at the height of the first war he’d just fallen into a trap Dumbledore had planted for him via Snape. I think that after hearing the Prophecy, Dumbledore and Snape plotted to tell Voldemort only the first part of the prophecy on purpose, knowing from the second portion that Voldemort would attack either Neville or Harry and transfer powers to the boy. Dumbledore says in OotP that if Voldemort had known the entire prophecy, he would have known that there was risk in attacking either boy. It seems to me that it’s far too convienient that Voldemort was told the portions of the prophecy that allowed him to identify the boys, but nothing that would warn him of danger.
After ensuring that Voldemort would attack either the Longbottoms or the Potters, Dumbledore made sure that they were vulnerable. That’s why Frank Longbottom, an auror, was captured by Bellatrix Lestrange. Ostensibly, Dumbledore offered to be the Potters’ Secret Keeper, but if he worded the offer in the right way and suggested that James’ boyhood friends weren’t to be trusted, then I think that James would have insisted on using one of his friends(which, we hear in PoA, is exactly what James did). My theory is that Dumbledore suspected that Sirius was the traitor(his brother was a Death Eater, after all) so he cast suspicion on Lupin(probably through Sirius and Wormtail), hoping that Sirius would be the Secret Keeper.
This is why Dumbledore was so reluctant to reveal his reasons for trusting Snape – Harry was in a rage thinking that it had been Snape who had set Voldemort at his parents, when really it was Dumbledore who sacrificed them. If he had told the truth, Harry might never have trusted Dumbledore again.
My quote box messed up so, Rysto, this is what you said:
I don’t mean to nitpick, but Bellatrix and company went after the Longbottoms after the fall of Voldemort, not before. They were torturning Neville’s parents in order to find out the location of their missing Dark Lord. That’s why they earned the title of “the only truly Loyal Death Eaters.” Voldemort had fallen, but they didn’t pull the “Oh, I was under the imperius curse” excuse.
Also, it’s not made clear that the Death Eaters were even aware of the circumstances surrounding the Prophecy. It might be that Voldemort decided to tell the Death Eaters, “there’s a phrophecy of the one who could destroy me…it’s the Potter child.” He’s really not much for sharing with his minions.
And I’m still not convinced about Snape either way. I’m leaning more for his being on Dumbeldore’s side than on Voldemort’s, simply because I can’t see how Harry could defeat Voldemort without someone on the inside of Voldemort’s camp.
Additional question: what was the potion that Dumbledore drank? And who made it? It’s either going to be Voldemort himself, or Snape. Well, or Lily.
Hang on…aren’t we supposed to find out a huge secret about Lily in the next books? Uhoh. Please tell me I haven’t just stumbled on something here…
Yes, I know. I didn’t say that Bellatrix had been dispatched because of the prophecy, I said that Bellatrix was able to get at a trained auror because Dumbledore had tried to set it up so that Voldemort could get to either the Potters or the Longbottoms.
Fair enough. I just belive their choice of Crucio-ing the Longbottoms doesn’t have to do with the Prophecy. Not that you asked of course. 