“I don’t need your help, you filthy mudblood”(Snape’s Worst Memory, in OotP) would seem to contradict that theory(not the mention the Snape loved Lily theory).
This point was addressed earlier. Somebody mentioned that this comment was made as Snape was being humiliated. If he really did love Lily, then it makes sense that he would lash out at her for being witness to his shame, instead of seeing how “cool” he was.
IMO, the big problem with the taking away the horcrux theory is that Harry enters the mind of Voldemort FAR more in Book 5, after his first encounter with the Evil One. You would have expected such things to have ended when Voldemort takes the horcrux back.
What rilchiam and Rhiannon8404 said. Besides, Ron’s vision was that he was wearing the Head Boy’s badge (and the Quidditch Cup) and shaking hands with Dumbledore. Not gonna happen.
If we can leave behind the Severus [heart] Lily motif, for a moment, I’d like to return to a point that I don’t feel has been adequately addressed: Snape’s ultimate alignment/loyalty.
When Filius Flitwick went to summon Snape and notified him that there was trouble afoot, why did Snape Stun him? Are we to postulate that Snape and Dumbledore had a standing arrangement that Snape was not to allow his actions to be observed by Death Eaters and Voldemort’s enemies at the same time? I don’t have my book at hand right now; can someone look up whether Flitwick reported mentioning Death Eaters to Snape?
I’m looking at Snape as Voldemort’s man, through and through right now. Stopping the Cruciatus curse that Harry got hit by could just as easily be Snape getting out while the getting was good, as any desire to preserve Harry’s ability to be the instrument of Voldemort’s destruction.
And on a lighter note, I’ve decided to believe that Mrs. Norris cannot see through the Invisibility Cloak (I’m rereading GOF this week). If she could, she’s plenty nasty enough to extend her claws and leap onto it, with predictable results. That she never does suggests that she is either unable to penetrate the enchantment, or she’s really stupid for a Kneazle.
Few reasons. One could be so that any Death Eater hanging around wouldn’t notice the Snape had given Flitwick the pass. Second could be so Flitwick doesn’t get injured in any ongoing scuffle. I mean, it would be easier to kill him, and a better result would have happened in the eyes of a true Death Eater.
I’ve long thought that Mrs. Norris is some sort of relative of Filch’s who’s stuck in that form somehow - there were comments throughout the first book, I think, about how much alike they look.
But since it hasn’t come up in a while, I wonder if Rowling has forgotten it.
hmm, harry was able to read snapes handwriting
I also remember thinking while I was reading the scene where Dumbledore lays into the Dursleys, that Petunia seemed like she was a little ashamed of the way she had treated Harry. If that’s so, I think that she will redeem the family in the end in some way.
It’s a fairly well-known phenomenon that pets can look remarkably like their owner, implying that there are certain shared characteristics in their personality. I think this is all JKR was trying to imply in the first book, so that the reader would understand that Mrs. Norris was just an extension of Filch.
While I agree that Mrs. Norris probably cannot see through the invisibility cloak, I have no doubt that she can smell and hear the person under the cloak. She always seems confused when she runs into Harry under the cloak, and it seems like the same kind of confusion that my cats seem to feel when can hear a mouse scurrying through a wall.
Something that is not all that clear to me in this book, though, is the fact that they determine the book is at least 50 years old, but they still seem to conclude that the notes in the book were written by Snape. Since Snape was in the same class as Harry’s parents, he must have been a student no more than 20 or so years ago.
I believe that the notes in the book were written by Snape’s mother, rather than by Snape himself, but that Snape inherited his mother’s book–and her recipes–when he started at Hogwarts. Since they were a poor family, it makes sense that he would use an old copy of the book, rather than buying a new one. This would also explain why James knew the Levicorpus spell that was apparently invented by the person who wrote the notes in the book. If the spell was already 25-30 years old, many people would have known about it by the time James, Sirius, et al. were at Hogwarts, to the point that it would have fallen into vogue the same way that games like Dots and clapping games are passed from generation to generation in our own schools.
The Half-Blood Prince could still refer to Snape, though. I know that my own daughter has written her name in books that I used and passed onto her, and if Snape’s mother simply had Prince written in the book, he could simply have tacked “Half-Blood” in front of that rather than bother to scratch it out.
Well, Flitwick is the Charms professor; he’s a sensitive little gnomelike guy (although according to JKR, just a human) but he might have been formidable in a fight, able to enchant objects and cast shield charms, and could have been a formidable foe for Snape, if not his primary one.
Interesting theory about Petunia.
Well, I’m joining late but I’ve read the whole thread, hooray! Some good ideas here. I’ll say up front that I have only read each book once and the early ones years ago, so I may be forgetting some details in my ideas, but here are my thoughts:
First, do we know for sure that Voldemort has all seven horcruxes made already? Presumably we think he was going to make the 7th one when he killed baby Harry, but as we know he failed (at least in the traditional sense of making a horcrux, and I am skeptical of the idea that Harry himself is one.) So V is now a vapor or weak spirit or whatever for a while. When does he make his final horcrux then, assuming baby Harry is not an accidental horcrux? Dumbledore guesses it is when he later kills a muggle, right? But this is just speculation, even D admits it. My theory is that he is still intending to make a seventh horcrux, he has not done it yet. He still wants to do it by killing Harry. He wants to stick to his original idea of 7 horcruxes but he is determined that Harry’s death lead to the final one. We already know he likes to make horcruxes out of special or significant murders, and to me it would make sense to save the 7th horcrux, and presumably the one that would give him unknown powers, for the boy who has played a huge role in his destiny. That is why the others are instructed not to kill Harry, but to let Voldemort do it. That also partly explains what his bigger goal is, in making a horcrux out of a murder so significant as Harry’s and having it be his 7th, he would get some kind of new power or immortality. Otherwise something big happened when he made his 7th horcrux and we don’t know what that is yet.
I also think the horcruxes are not ‘used up’ like nine lives on a cat, they are just fragments of soul. I don’t buy the theory that Voldemort was ever thinking of getting them back or reversing them, the idea of a horcrux seems so horrible and unspeakable that I don’t think it is a matter of dividing the soul to see what happens, then saying oopsie, I want that piece back now. Once the soul is split, that’s it. The traps are laid to guard them but not with the idea that Voldie would undergo them himself to get them back.
I also think Harry will be the DADA teacher next year.
I think Dumbledore is dead and gone, as much as I hate to admit it. I am also wondering what he was experiencing when he drank the potion, I think he is reliving a memory, but I am not sure whose.
Lake of corpses creeped me the hell out. I am among those who wonder how Harry is going to be able to find so many horcruxes and destroy them all when Dumbledore had so much trouble with them.
I think Snape will ultimately die to save Harry. I am not sure about Draco, he may die but I am unsure which way he will go.
Am I the only one who dislikes Luna? She just irritates me for some reason. Not in a ‘she’s evil and I hate her’ sense, just annoying, kind of the same way I feel about the house elves. I really hope Harry does not end up with her, he was made for Ginny.
I think the horcrux is the locket in the Black house, not the potion. The potion was just cursed and hurt Dumbledore. Like others have pointed out, Voldie liked to make horcruxes out of significant objects and a big point was made about his collection habits. Making a horcrux out of a potion does not fit with that.
All in all, a good read. Not my favorite though, I still liked book five the best and maybe four after that, then this one. I liked angsty Harry :). I was much more touched at the end of book 5 than this one for some reason, Dumbledore’s death was more shocking to me and I was angry about it more than sad. At the end of the last book I was all-out crying, this one I got a little teary but it just didn’t get me like the last one.
I need to re-read all these before the final one!
I don’t buy any arguments that SSSSSnape and Lily were friends of any kind until someone comes up with a direct quote from the text to justify it. We know very little of Snape’s time and that comes only through what is revealed in book 6.
Taking out Occham’s razor, I think it is far more likely that he was the Lucius Malfoy of his class and so James and Lilly would have despided him. As a Slythereen the Gryffendors would have had every reason to at least have had wanted to have had as much fun at his expense as possible and there was quite a bit of evidence that James, et. al. were involved in games such as suspending people from their ankles etc.
Unfortunately, it may even be that they went to far with snape and that this is part of the reason he got into the really dark magics in the first place, because he was angered at the taunting and one-upmanship of the others. Else why would he have such ghastly spells in his book?
This by itself is a good question and worth examining.
Why did he have such nasty spells in his potions book and why was it not amongst his other books? You would think that he would use a simple spell to locate and find it if it had been lost, as it does have truly dangerous spells in it for students to happen to find.
If it were a horcrux the book could have added the nasty spells itself, in which case we could expect Harry to destroy it in the future. Did the book itself encourage Harry to hide it in the whatchamacallit room of necessity?
That would mean that a part of Voldemort did appear in book 6 after all.
Another point.
If the locket was not a horcrux, and Harry as Dumbloedore’s man was helpless to do nothing but watch him die, Dumbledore may have been able to turn the power of the darkness of his own murder combined with Harry’s love for him into the unusual act of splitting his soul so that the fake horcrux became a true horcrux for Dumbledore holding part or all of his soul.
Next possibility. Short of murder is the possibility that in the incident in which his hand was destroyed, a horcrux could also have been created for Dumbledore.
One has to wonder now that he is dead why his painting was asleep. We could assume that it was because he was so newly dead, yet, yet, his animal was a phoenix. That’s a really tricky thing. I suspect that something tricky will come out of that fake horcrux yet. The whole Dumbledore’s body going up in Phoenix like flames before the casket formed around him as I read it the second time was a bit too much like the end of Star Trek I, (III?) where Spock’s casket is sent flying down to the Genesis planet while the genesis wave that is turning lifelessness into life has not really cooled down yet.
More thoughts later.
Oh, and like Ginny is really going to let Harry run around fighting V all alone.
Please. CF. Lois Lane, Sarah Jane, Agent 99, Batgirl. That is presuming V doen’t snag her at the wedding. After all both Snapers and Draco know about the Ginny Harry snogging, so there is no point in breaking up now is there? Who’s going to know about it, all it does is rob her of protection, or so she ought to argue.
Anyone capable of dating 6 guys just to get Harry jealous enough to kiss her in public is a force to be reconed with.
12 pages? 12 pages in this thread? Sheesh. I need to point out the version of the book I read has 607 pages… (Canuck printing, which is supposedly identical to the UK printing)
Anywho, horcruxes. Places to stash your soul so being killed doesn’t kill you are pretty common in mythology and horror movies. It doesn’t mean one gets used up when you should have died, it just means you don’t die because the bit of you that needs to be killed is somewhere safe. There’s no reason to make more than one unless you’re a paranoid psychopath-- or you know of some reason to make 7 of 'em…
It’s important to remember that James Potter was a grade A asshole, as were the rest of his Marauders. Target numero uno was Severus Snape, so you can hardly blame old Snape for disliking Harry on sight, since he looks just like his dad.
However I don’t know if Snape is really on Voldemort’s side or not, and Rowling has left herself plenty of openings to have him go either way. Snape is known as being the best at Occlumency there is, so he could fool Voldemort’s Legilimency and be working for good. It all depends on what Dumbledore’s death means.
We all know that Lily’s sacrifice protected Harry from the Avada Kedavra spell, and that Dumbledore used some major mojo to keep Harry safe as long as he is a child, and as long as he spends part of each year at home. It’s my theory that Dumbledore used the opportunity of his death to whip up another one-shot protection spell for Harry – and that will be revealed when Voldemort has Harry on the ropes and lets loose another death spell.
Does that mean Snape is a good guy? Probably. Dumbledore knew what Malfoy was up to, and he knew that Snape was Unbreakably Vowed to do the job instead. And despite Gaspode’s objections, I think it’s not a stretch to figure that once Malfoy and the Death Eaters had gained access to Hogwart’s (as evidenced by the appearance of the Death Mark visible from Hogsmeade) Dumbledore knew that Snape would soon be in the thick of things, so he could have prepared his self-sacrificial spell.
The upshot is that we won’t know about Snape until he dies during the climax and Harry defeats Voldemort.
Oh c’mon. You know he’s going to succeed. 
And the final chapter? It’s not Harry teaching at Hogwarts during year 7. It’s Harry teaching his first Defense of the Dark Arts class. It could be his retirement party, but I think Rowling will leave us with something suggesting life goes on, instead of something showing us Harry had a good life after all.
The Half-Blood Prince does refer to Snape. Chasing Snape and Malfoy across the grounds to the gates, Harry tries to use Sectumsempra and Levicorpus against Snape. Snape blocks him, saying (paraphrased) “No! You dare to use my own spells against me, the Half-Blood Prince? The spells I created, and your miserable father turned against me?”
So Snape has claimed both the title, and the credit for creating the spells. IIRC, the handwriting of the margin notes was the same as that of the ex libris declaration. The book may have originally belonged to Elaine Prince, but the writing was pretty clearly done by Severus. I’ve no idea why he might have ever given up physical custody of the book itself. Probably so gleeful at being made DADA teacher that it slipped his mind when he was packing into his new classroom.
I just finished my first read, and need to go back and re-read the book, but here are some thoughts:
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If Harry has become a Horcrux, it’s unintentional. After all, the whole point of a Horcrux is to make the wizard immortal. What good is a Horcrux that is mortal, doomed to die?
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Dumbledore’s death was at least planned, if not staged, and Harry was there as a witness. In fact, I think this was planned as far back as the beginning of the book, when Dumbledore told Harry to keep his invisibility cloak close at all times.
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Snape had no issues with making an unbreakable oath with Narcissa, because Dumbledore had already shared the plans for his death with Snape. Snape is, after all, a powerful legimens (sp?), and surely knew what Narcissa had in mind.
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Something didn’t feel right in the scene with Harry and Dumbledore in the cave. It felt staged as well; Dumbledore seemed too familiar with the cave’s defenses. Any possibility Dumbledore had been attempted to recover the locket before? Perhaps damaging his hand in the potion?
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Quidditch scoring isn’t that bizzarre, if you think of it as a sport with multiple goals, kind of like the Tour de France. There is the individual game win (kind of like the Tour’s stage win). Then there’s the overall points classification for the season (kind of like the Tour’s General Classification, or Maillot Jaune). I think World Cup skiing works the same way.
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Somebody asked in what real sport do the athletes have vastly different levels of equipment, as they have vastly different levels of brooms in Quidditch. Polo would be one example. Water Polo would not.
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Finally, I don’t think Harry got Snape’s old potions book by mistake. Snapes is not that sloppy.
When I first read the first book, I never would have considered that they would have grown in complexity to the point that my first instinct upon finishing the book would be to re-read it. How wonderful…
Well I was thinking that he just left the book there in the classroom. Probably hadn’t used it in a loooong while. He thought he had it in his office, but it was actually in the classroom.
But does the Tour have one stage which is worth 15 times more than any other one? Its not the individual game and the overall points which is the problem. It’s the scoring relating to the snitch, ie, how unbalanced it is to have it be such an overpowering move (to catch the snitch).
I’m not so sure about that. If it acted as if it were Voldemort (or a piece thereof), wouldn’t Dumbledore destroy it or something? If it is a horcrux, Harry’s going to have a hard time figuring it out.
Actually, that sounds perfect… Harry has to destroy one of the artifacts most ancient and central to Hogwarts to overthrow Voldie, thus changing the school forever; how will the students be Sorted now?
IMHO Dumbledore trusts Snape because Snape took the same unbreakable vow with Harry as he did Draco.
There is nothing inherent in the characteristics of the Houses that necessitates the kind of Sorting-by-personality-potential that has become the norm. In fact, it could be argued that deliberately placing students in Houses where they will be most likely to find their “soul mates,” for want of a better term, without getting to know students in other Houses, makes it less likely that the school will band together when the need arises.
Better to post in this thread then start a new one, methinks.
I just finished it tonight, borrowed it yesterday off a friend. I couldn’t stop reading it…
I was crying earlier when I read about Dumbledore’s death. It *wasn’t * a shock, I think she foreshadowed it pretty heavily in the beginning of the book, but the manner in which he died was a shock.
I also am pretty sure Snape isn’t really a bad guy. Nothing is ever the way it appears in her books - but she never hides it more than one layer deep, either.
I really liked this one, to me it flowed the best of all of them. Perhaps when i re-read I might be disappointed, but for now…I liked how many times Harry learned to keep his mouth shut and bite back comments that sprang to mind.
I didn’t mind the romances, they were entertaining and I always find it sweet to read about these kids growing up.
Other thoughts…I thought Cho would have a slightly bigger role, and I think Ginny and harry were a long time coming and were cute together, although the
ending was necesary. Three people chasing after Voldemort are enough.
Wish the movies weren’t so far behind!