More Harry Potter Book 7 speculation (spoilers)

Cafe Society
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Several theories here. Please note this is a scattershot attempt, some of these theories are inconsistent with each other.

#1) The importance of socks in the books

J. K. Rowling has been trying to subtly indicate all along that Voldemort (notice how creepy and inhuman he looks) is not a real human! He is Dumbledore’s sock puppet. At the end, Harry Potter will vanquish Voldemort, and right before Voldemort draws his last breath, the serpentine mask will slip off, revealing the face of the kindly Dumbledore. Why??? screams Harry?
This whole charade was a plot to train Harry Potter to be the next headmaster of Hogwarts - each headmaster must go through an excruciating initiation, and Harry has passed with flying colours. Head bent in sorrow, Harry slowly makes his way to Dumbledore’s office, where Hermione (Hogwart’s newest teacher of Arithmancy) and Ron (youngest ever Minister of Magic, with Percy as his assistant) come to congratulate him.

2) Dumbledore, not really dead.

On the third day after the funeral (the students having already returned home), McGonagall heads slowly towards Dumbledore’s tomb to reverentially law down a box of Fizzing Whizbees. But heavens! What’s that she sees? A side of the tomb seems strangely translucent?!? A tall figure emerges. Blinded by the sunlight, McGonagall whispers “Is that you, Hagrid, the gamekeeper?” Then the mysterious figure waves a wand, her eyesight clears, and she recognizes Dumbledore! Dumbledore asks her to gather the remaining eleven teachers of Hogwarts (Snape having left the school) and commands them to keep on teaching at the school, and to help spread Dumbledore’s teachings (love is the most important thing, but if someone hurts your family, hunt him down and kill him, etc.) Then Dumbledore is taken away by Fawkes and disappears in the sky over the astronomy tower.

3) Harry Potter, househusband

At Bill and Fleur’s wedding, when everyone stands to deliver their toasts, Ginny also stands, and makes a surprise announcement: she and Harry are expecting a little Potter! Harry is the first to faint, but is brutally awakened by Mrs. Weasly kicking his butt all the way from the Burrow to the local Wiccan chapel where they have a pagan wedding, after which Arthur Weasley gets him a low-paying entry-level job at the Ministry. With the mortgage payments and the diaper changes and all, Harry has no time for hunting down You-Know-Who, who, upon finding himself ignored by his major adversary, withers away and dies, his life having lost all meaning.

OK, let’s go on to something more serious.

Snape, without a doubt, killed Dumbledore because he and Dumbledore had an agreement, Dumbledore’s “please, Snape” means “please do what we agreed on”, Snape not a “good guy” per se but a quadruple agent. As I have said a couple of times before, Dumbledore trusted Snape because Snape made an unbreakable vow to protect Harry Potter; Snape was in love with Lily Potter and turned away from Voldemort when Voldemort told him “this prophecy you told me about, obviously it means that I have to kill Harry Potter, and while I’m at it, I might as well do his folks too.” As Dumbledore says (Half-Blood Prince, chapter 25) “You have no idea of the remorse Professor Snape felt when he realized how Lord Voldemort had interpreted the prophecy, Harry. I believe it to be the greatest regret of his life and the reason that he returned —” Why would Snape regret this so much? Because he loved Lily. Q.E.D.

The prophecy says that either Voldermort or Harry must die, but not that one must kill the other. To kill Voldemort would require an Avada Kedavra curse. It is pretty obvious that J.K. Rowling is writing from a non-american mindset (in an American tale, the good guy would be mowing down evil-doers left and right and happily have doughnuts for breakfast afterwards): murder is a very serious business and not accomplished lightly (see Draco the wimp unable to kill Dumbledore.) Harry Potter was unable to even perform an acceptable Cruciatus curse on Bellatrix Lestrange after she had just killed his godfather! Avada Kedavra would be much more difficult. In the final confrontation, Wormtail will intervene between Voldemort and Harry and get killed by Voldemort, thus paying his debt to Harry; Voldemort will be standing over Harry, wand ready to get him; then Snape, a known Death-Eater who obviously has the right mindset to perform a killing curse, will zap Voldie from behind, and Voldemort’s last word will be “You?” in disbelief, realizing that he, the master of legilimency, has met his match in the occlumens Severus Snape.

We will have much to learn from Harry Potter’s visit to Godric’s Hollow. If J. K. Rowling has kept him away from his parent’s house for so long, it must be for an important reason.

Dumbledore has not finished imparting his wisdom to Harry. Dumbledore’s old pensieve will have many interesting tidbits. As mentioned in this thread, Harry will also use the pensieve to see what happened the night his parents died.

Lupin will get Greyback the werewolf; Neville Longbottom will avenge his parents by the capture of Bellatrix Lestrange.

Fish, your comment relating the four founder’s relics to the Tarot suits was clever. The four suits are: swords (Gryffindor), cups (Hufflepuff), wands (hence the significance behind the disappearance of Ollivander! good catch, that, I never would have put that together), and the fourth can be coins, disks, or pentacles. I am guessing that Slytherin’s locket, that was (unknowingly) found by members of the Order of the Phoenix during the housecleaning in book five, is shaped like a disk or has a pentacle on it.

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Let’s not forget Dumbledore at the end of Philosopher’s Stone: “I see Slytherin has won the house cup, NOT! Let me just flick my wand and change those scores a teensy weensy bit. So sorry, Gryffindor came in first after all!”

Dumbledore might be the cleverest wizard ever, but as headmaster, I dunno. Let’s face it, Grubbly-Plank is ten times better than Hagrid as a teacher. What does Dumbledore do all day anyway? Scarf down chocolate frogs and throw crackers to Fawkes?

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I’m not convinced it was a real spell. Dumbledore flew backward and out of the tower. As indicated on the website I posted above, every other instance of Avada Kedavra that resulted in someone’s death simply made them fall over dead, not fly backward.

I tend to think Snape’s still loyal to the good guys, in spite of his grudge against Harry.

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So, Rowena Ravenclaw’s relic might be her wand, then? Interesting. I’ve also seen that Tarot suit represented as staffs or staves (ie, walking sticks), although given that this is Harry Potter it probably will be a wand.

I’m pretty sure that Olivander is a Slytherin, just from the way he was talking while Harry was buying his wand. Still, I wonder if he was recruited (possibly by force) to help track down Ravenclaw’s wand, or to help identify the real wand from among one or more fakes.

As for the locket, I’ve noticed that Rowling has been careful to avoid using pentacles in her stories, no doubt because of the Satanic associations it has acquired. Still, if one is going to appear anywhere, Slytherin’s locket might be it.

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Diceman, I’ve also noticed that Ollivander is a somewhat ambiguous character. In his visit to the wand shop in Philosopher’s Stone, Harry’s reaction is that he’s not so sure that he likes Ollivander, who makes Harry uneasy - one of the signs of the bad guy in Harry Potter books (if Harry likes you, you’re not going to turn out to be a Death Eater). On the other hand, as Dumbledore reveals (I believe at the end of Goblet of Fire), when Harry Potter leaves Ollivander’s shop with a wand that’s a twin of Voldemort’s wand, Ollivander immediately sits down and writes a letter to Dumbledore with this interesting piece of information, so Ollivander was / is probably on the side of good.

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I don’t know about that. Harry was able to split Malfoy’s chest open, which would have killed him had the inventor of the curse (obviously a crack Snape developed for the Deviated Septum curse) been right there.

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ISTM that if Voldemort already made a Horcrux our of Rowena Ravenclaw’s wand, Ollivander’s assistance in picking it out of a lineup is going to turn up about thirty years too late to do Voldemort any good.

In fact, Ollivander’s ability to authenticate such a wand would seem to be most valuable to someone who wanted to identify the Horcrux to destroy it.

It also strikes me that when Rowling has dabbled in cartomancy, she hasn’t paid any attention at all to the Tarot (otherwise, one might expect Prof. Trelawney to be fiddling with a Tarot deck, rather than Bicycle[sup]TM[/sup] brand playing cards). Perhaps, then, the significance of the sword and the cup (grail) could be signs that her iconography is more closely related to the symbolism of Arthurian Romance. After all, we’ve already got an acknowledgement of the importance of Merlin.

Does anyone know of some iconic symbols from that tradition that might be represented in the Slytherin and Ravenclaw relics? I had always thought of the locket as bearing the image of a snake (serpent), although, I could be wildly mistaken.

Also, without any rational cause I can relate to you, when I think of the name Rowena Ravenclaw, I have an image in my mind of a flowering branch. Quite likely, there’s nothing in it at all.

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I always kinda wondered about that one. That spell seems pretty nasty, and yet Harry was able to cast it with no practice by doing nothing more than pointing his wand at Draco and speaking one word. If it’s that easy to do a spell that can kill its target, then what’s the point of having classes to learn how to do things like levitate or transfigure? Why not just get a book and memorize the incantations?

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Oh, yes. I wonder why the Slytherins stay in Hogwarts, and don’t break away to found their own school. The students from the other houses are very nasty to the Slytherins (as seen in the scene where Harry and Ron take the Polyjuice Potion and are looking for the Slytherin common room). The teachers and the headmaster not only don’t discourage this kind of behavior, but a lot of them do it too. That can’t be pleasant for the Slytherins to put up with day in and day out…

It’s even more amazing when you consider the leverage that Lucius Malfoy seems to have had at Hogwarts, and yet he never did or said anything about the blatant discrimination against his son’s House (and his old House).

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I figured it was actually a sort of a crack for the spell he used on Cedric’s bookbag in Book IV. He did get it from the margins of Snape’s book.

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Yes, pretty nasty for an untried spell. But keep in mind Harry had been mulling that one over for weeks, and that he was in a high-adrenaline, fight-or-flight situation. The type of situation that inspired Ron Weasley to perform Wingardium Leviosa with highly salutary results, back in Sorcerer’s Stone.

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Say what? “And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives”.

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This line has always bugged me. What definition of “live” is she using? Currently both are alive, so it can’t be the typical breathing, has a pulse definition. Unless Harry has been a zombie since Voldy killed them both when Harry was an infant :smiley:

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Well, yeah, I guess that’s what it says, so when I said that the prophecy doesn’t say that one of them must kill the other, I was wrong. (I could have sworn there was a loophole!?!)

But I am enamoured of my “Harry unable to commit murder, Snape saving his butt by killing Voldemort” theory, so I am going to revise it like this: doesn’t Dumbledore say that prophecies only have meaning if you agree to give them meaning, and that you can choose to ignore these forecasts? Voldemort believes in the prophecy and is intent on killing Harry. But Harry doesn’t have to believe in it. And even if he does intend on killing Voldemort (thus making the prophecy true for himself and Voldemort), since prophecies can be “overridden” by the actions of the people involved, this particular one will become invalidated by Harry’s inability to commit such a heinous crime. Voilà! Everything nice and neat and tidy.

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saoirse: 1) Harry Potter didn’t know what the Sectumsempra curse would do. I doubt he would (or could) have used it knowingly without some stronger motivation than just self-defense.) 2) In any case, Sectumsempra is not an Unforgivable curse, and presumably needs less “dark power” to activate. Even if Harry is capable of Sectumsempra, it doesn’t mean he can perform the Death curse. 3) I doubt Malfoy would have died from the Sectumsempra curse, wizards seem to suffer all kinds of terrible injuries that can be cured much more easily with potions and spells than they could be cured by Muggle medicine. Otherwise, with all these quidditch falls, bat-bogey hexes, venomous tentaculae, death-scream-producing mandragoras, etc. there would probably be a high casualty rate at Hogwarts.

winterhawk11: I agree, Ms. Rowling seems kind of hazy about the work involved in learning a spell. We don’t want to get bogged down in details, but I find it strange that Harry is able to master spells just be reading the name of the spell in the Half-Blood Prince’s old Potions book. As we see, some spells need to be accompanied by the proper wand motion, and I imagine that you would need to have some idea of what the spell does!

elfkin477: I think the prophecy means “neither will be able to ‘remain alive’ (past book seven) while the other survives.”

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Well, that’s rather vague, isn’t it? Shouldn’t the prophecy know when it’s going to go into effect? If not, why bother including it?

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elfkin477 - obviously the prophecy refers to some point in the future, right? If the prophecy means “neither can live while the other one survives - effective immediately”, and both Harry and Voldemort are alive right now, then does this mean that the prophecy is obviously wrong? Perhaps I don’t understand how you interpret that part of the prediction.

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I interpret it as meaning “neither can live with peace of mind while the other survives.” And because Voldemort acted the way he did, he will always have to beware of Harry, just as Harry will always have to beware of him.

Paying attention to oracles is always a good way to put yourself in hot water. If Voldemort had had any sense, he would have Avada Kedavra’d Snape the minute he mentioned hearing a prophecy.

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Aren’t there gaps is the prophesy? If so, I have a feeling they’ll be filled in book seven. Maybe that’s why the wording is so vague – so that the meaning can be plausibly changed with the inclusion of a few extra words.

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Possible. Wasn’t one of Snape’s big lessons in DADA the casting of silent spells? He says the words ‘Avada Kedavra’ as ordinary words, while casting a silent spell to do something else entirely.