A Red Hen Publication

Ok, I came across this piece rather by accident as I followed an external link at the bottom of the Wikipedia article on the Deathly Hallows. I don't usually follow these links, but for some reason this one captured my interest. I'm going to copy and paste the article I found on Red Hen regarding Harry Potter and the much anticipated book seventh. This piece also references all of the other books and theorises, guesses and second guesses, discusses and argues and also includes some quite caustic and sarcastic comments. I found it to be excellent. Be warned, it's a long read 🙂

Endgame.

A chess reference.

Well is it?

Does the adventure of Harry Potter and the Dark Lord read as a viable chess analogy?

I don’t see a lot of evidence for it. As the series has progressed, we even seem to be getting less and less attention drawn to games of wizard's chess going on in the background.

And yet, we’ve all realized by now that once something occurs in this series, it seems to be exponentially more likely to recur than not. And we were given a major chess moment back in year 1.

So do I expect another game of live chess?

Well, no. I don't. I think that we might get some more chess references, and possibly some chess imagery, and we quite probably could get some overt chess strategy or tactics, but whatever game it is that we’re playing, it doesn’t really seem to be chess. But, then, I do not play chess, I might not recognize a parallel even if it is right under my nose.

Although I do think it might not hurt for us to direct a bit of attention back to the chess game we did get.

If there is a chess metaphor in operation, by this time we could probably put names to some of those captured pieces on the black side. Cedric, probably James and Lily were all pawns. If they were ever even on the board at all. You can make a good argument for Sirius Black being the “other Knight” whose capture so shocked and frightened the trio and convinced them all of the seriousness of their danger. The only one of the towering, faceless white pieces who opposed them whose actions we were ever told about was the Queen, who was all over the board, violent and deadly.

But, to be truthful, I cannot see that a chess metaphor works at all if one attempts to apply it literally, it’s far too labored. Nor can I really see any way to viably postulate a separate identity for the “King” and “Queen”, in the progress of this series to date. Particularly given the shortage of active female characters, and the subordinate positions of the ones we do have. I can only conflate the two into “Ruler”, whereupon we are no longer dealing with chess. And, in that context, by this time, with Dumbledore's removal from the board you would expect the game to be over, which it clearly is not.

Unless, of course, Dumbledore was not the Ruler, but the player. In which case, what was he doing on the board in the first place?

Besides, it is only a pawn that survives to the 8th square which is transfigured into a Ruler. And Harry does not really seem to be a pawn.

And I don't really think that what happened in the match of the live chess game in the Labyrinth was intended as a prediction or a reflection for what will eventually happen in the “endgame” of the series, either. So we should probably all be vigorously trying to divest ourselves of any underlying expectations we may be harboring that are based upon it.

The endgame of a chess match is the final phase of the game, when there are few pieces left on the board. Some define this as the part of the game when the King comes out and fights. For others the main objective of this phase is to promote your pawns. It's real purpose is to narrow the focus and bend all of your attention to capturing the enemy King.

HRH stepped into the positions of three of the pieces in McGonagall’s game of living chess. Named pieces, with set roles. They were not pawns.

They also played the black side. We have to ignore the usual symbolism of our cultural associations regarding black vs. white here. This is chess. In chess it is the white side that always initiates the conflict.

I think that the relevant metaphor here, if any, does not concern the characters “fates” so much as their assigned roles in which they brought the conclusion about.

And just what were those roles?

Hermione = Rook. One of the “major” pieces. After the Queen, the most versatile, and visibly powerful piece on the board. It can travel any number of squares in one move, occupy light or dark squares, shift forward, back, or sideways in either direction. But it is constrained to move only one direction per move and to move only in a straight line, to follow the grid, to cross from one square to the next across the straight lines. A Rook may move up or down rank or file, but only one or the other in any move. This is a piece with considerable power but little subtlety. You always see it coming. If we have to put a face on the “other Rook”, that face could well be Hagrid’s. He has a part yet to play.

I might have said that the other Rook was Minerva herself, but this whole “challenge” was hers. She was the player of that game, not one of the pieces. And she was playing the other side; the opposition. Indeed, if Minerva was a piece on that board, she was the terrifying white Queen!

Ron = Knight. A “minor” piece. The piece that leaps around corners. The Knight's move appears erratic, impulsive and unpredictable, and you don't necessarily see it coming. It is the only piece that can leap over other pieces with impunity; but for all of its apparent eccentricity it is tightly constrained by its traditions. Two squares forward or back, plus one over, in either direction, or, two squares over to either side and one square forward or back. From the Knight's starting point there is a maximum of only 8 squares that it can land, the path to each as crooked as a spider's leg.

Harry = Bishop. The other “minor” piece. The piece that always starts the game positioned closest to the Ruler. Able to travel an unlimited number of squares in every move. Constrained always to follow an oblique path crossing squares only at the corners. The piece that “walks through walls”. Easily overlooked. The Bishop is further constrained to travel forever only on the same color of square from which it begins the game. Each side has both a “white Bishop” and a “black Bishop”. Between them they rule the whole board.

If Harry is Albus’s “white Bishop” (“No Unforgivable Curses from you, Potter!”) I don't think that we need to ask who is the black one.

And while we are directing our attention to chess, it is far from impossible to reflect that we may have been dealing with various bits of chess metaphor in the series all along. Which we, from our position in the middle of the board have not been able to recognize, and that Rowling has not chosen to call to our attention.

It’s a bit of a stretch. But it’s possible.

So. We have arrived at the end of an era. The final action of the adventure will take place off Dumbledore’s watch. At least officially.

I belatedly jumped on the bandwagon that Dumbledore wasn’t dead just before the Spring update of the collection in 2006. So, along with a good many other fans, I found myself sprawled in the road with the wind knocked out of me after Rowling up-ended that movement in August.

Having adopted it so late, I hadn’t a great deal invested in it, but it has entailed a general revision of a number of the articles in the collection. Since the collection is likely to get its upload in stages, I may not have rooted the references all out yet, but I will get to them eventually.

However, given the way that Rowling set up her world, striking a pose and declaiming that “dead is dead” is really more a bit of slight-of-hand than a definitive guideline. For the plain truth of the matter is that dead is NOT necessarily dead, in a universe which allows for the active presence and participation of ghosts.

So for all that Dumbledore is dead, I find it very hard to believe that he is gone. I really do think he will linger on to the last page and depart peacefully after the crisis is resolved.

But we won’t necessarily see him much before that. After all. If Albus decides to stick around and haunt somebody, it would hardly be Harry, would it?

A MAJOR issue that I think is going to occupy the emotional payoff of Book 7 involves the fallout attendant upon Harry finally discovering, or figuring out, what was really going on concerning the death of Albus Dumbledore.

Because things were simply not as they seemed related to that death, even if he is dead. And, after the last round of dodging toppling dominoes, I think that she is saving it up for the grand finale. Possibly only to be revealed after the problem of Voldemort is settled.

Rowling has been dropping anvil-sized hints for the past few years that there are some real horrors in store for Harry Potter. Claiming that she would not want to be him, since she knows what is going to happen to him. I do not think she was tossing out red herrings in those statements.

The fans, of course, have taken the statements and run with them, proposing all sorts of gaudy, but ultimately rather unimaginative scenarios involving Crucio, or disfigurement, or of having to see more people that matter to him die.

I do not say that none of these things will happen in Book 7. There is a better than average chance that Harry will catch another round of Crucio over the course of book 7. And a much better than average chance that he will have to see someone else (apart from Lord Voldemort) die in it.

But I really don’t think that those are the horrors that Rowling has in mind.

And I think Albus’s death is intimately connected with the ones she does mean.

And Albus’s past life, and past actions, are even more to the point.

But, when you stop and think about it, there is sure one hell of an agenda that needs to be met in the final book of this series. Because by this time there have been so many questions and issues raised that merely to hunt down the Horcruxes, bring Lord Voldemort to bay and destroy him would probably leave the reader curiously unsatisfied. I wouldn’t be astonished to find that Book 7 turns out to be the longest book in the series, after all.

For example:

We all need to know what was going on with Albus’s death. At least to the point of knowing whether Albus had deliberately chosen to die at that time in that manner.

We need to know why he trusted Snape.

We need to know just what part in the overall story arc Snape has played.

We want to know about that triumphant gleam Harry thought he saw in Albus’s eye when he first told Albus about Voldemort using his blood to create the simulacrum. According to Rowling that gleam is still “significant”.

Actually, I have an idea regarding that gleam. I am beginning to suspect that the gleam may be related to the way that Voldemort attempted to possess Harry during the battle of the Atrium and couldn’t, or not without agonizing pain to both of them. He certainly didn't expect that, and it wasn't anything he had planned.

And it was also pretty damned odd.

When you stop and consider it; Harry and Voldemort had spent the whole of year 5 flitting in and out of each other’s heads without sustaining anything more than confusion over whose emotions were whose. What is more, there were a few occasions over the year when it read as if Harry was responding to something other than his own conscious prompting. It is difficult to believe that these occasions were prompted by Voldemort, since they were universally to Harry’s benefit, but nothing related to any of this was causing Harry any appreciable physical pain, and it isn’t likely that Voldemort was feeling negative effects from the connection either.

But as soon as Voldemort attempted to psychically and physically possess Harry — as he had possessed Quirrell — the attempt threw them both into agony until Harry managed to heave Voldemort out of his mind with the thought of seeing Sirius again. (Or more probably with the fact that he started welcoming the prospect of death. Voldemort has a horror of death.)

Something protected Harry from being vulnerable to possession by Lord Voldemort.

Was this due to the fact that Harry is probably harboring one of Tom Riddle’s missing soul fragments?

Or is this the effect of their physically sharing blood?

Or is it a combination of the two?

Among the minor clangers and awkwardnesses peppered throughout the series, the climax of OotP was particularly confusingly handled. This is probably due to the original authorial decision to tell the story as completely as possible from Harry's point of view. In the climax of GoF Harry may not have known all of what was going on, but the only part of the action that he completely missed due to a Voldemort-induced headache was the murder of Cedric Diggory. (And it isn't clear why he should have, since it was Pettigrew who did the killing. There was no headache in play when Snape presumably killed Dumbledore.) The reader was able to get a direct line-of-sight on the rest of the proceedings.

With OotP, it seems that for the most significant part of the showdown we have to take Dumbledore's word and interpretation on everything. At face value, too, since Harry was far too incapacitated to be aware of anything but the pain, the statements that Voldemort made through him and his own reasoning processes.

But, what appears to have been going on there is that by possessing the boy, Voldemort was trying to get Dumbledore to kill Harry rather than to do it himself.

Why not do it himself? Had he failed at it so often as to have become gun-shy? I'm not sure that this really “reads”.

But we have only Dumbledore's word for it that the attempt caused Voldemort agonizing pain. And, while I can't see any reason for him to be shaving the truth in this matter, I'm really not so inclined to accept Dumbledore's word for everything unquestioned any more.

From Harry's point of view, it was only the reflection that if he died NOW he will see Sirius again that threw Voldemort out of his head and made the pain stop. So was it the attachment to Sirius or the willing embracing of death that actually repelled Voldemort?

And, if the attempt at possession hurt so much, why didn't Voldemort withdraw, so he would at least have control of his own wand? If he was immobilized with the pain from trying to possess Harry, why didn't Dumbledore or somebody attack the (now undefended) simulacrum? For that matter, what happens to the simulacrum when Voldemort is off in someone else’s head? Was Dumbledore afraid that if the simulacrum was destroyed Voldemort wouldn't withdraw from Harry at all? Did Voldemort not withdraw from Harry because he was stuck? Is this due to Harry and the simulacrum sharing the same blood?

After all; on a computer you cannot replace a folder with a file. Or vice-versa. Or give them the same name.

Or was the gleam due to Dumbledore’s realization that Voldemort had now introduced a paradox into the equation, in that by the protection that Albus had layered on top of Lily’s, in which so long as Harry was a minor in company with persons related by blood to Lily Potter he was protected from Lord Voldemort, and that by using Harry’s blood to create his simulacrum Lord Voldemort was now among such persons and, consequently, so long as Harry was a minor and in Lord Voldemort’s company, Lord Voldemort would be unable to kill him?

But we are clearly going to have to wait a while before we know whether any of this is anywhere near the right track.

But, to continue with the shopping list:

We also still want to hear the full story of what went down in the werewolf caper. WHY did Sirius Black set Severus Snape up? And how did he do it?

And what happened afterwards?

*sigh* And, all right, all right, did Severus Snape have a crush on Lily Evans? Or she on him?

And just what part does Peter Pettigrew have to play in the solution? He’s got to be significant somehow, but how does he relate to the problem of the Horcruxes?

Speaking of which: what the hey is up with the fake one? What purpose did that serve?

And what is with the Dementors? They’ve got to be even more significant than Pettigrew! Particularly if I’m right about Book 7 reflecting Book 3.

And where’s Malfoy gotten to? Are we going to have to be dodging him through the last book as well as the Death Eaters?

How long is it going to take the kids to realize that the 6th Horcrux isn’t the snake?

And while we’re at it: just how are you supposed to destroy a Horcrux without getting blasted by it? Or DO you just pitch it through the Veil? (More on this question below.)

Speaking of which: are we ever going to be filled in on why Sirius Black “had to” be killed just when he was? That is what Rowling told us.

And that’s just for starters.

Of a rather more deeply thematic importance, there is also the question of taking responsibility for one’s own actions.

Harry has been allowed to skate through the first 6 books of the series without ever having to take full responsibility for the effects of any of his own actions. There have been a lot of other people who have been all too willing to share the responsibility with him, if not to take the responsibility for him. Eventually he is going to be unable to dodge that particular bullet. And Albus is no longer around to take that bullet for him. Even Harry realizes this by now.

He is also probably going to end up learning a great many of Albus’s secrets in the course of the final book. He is going to need to.

Including just why Albus trusted Severus Snape.

And that is not likely to be a painless lesson, either.

(I also suspect that Harry may have to decide whether the wizarding world is worth saving. But that suspicion may just be me being characteristically pessimistic, so don’t place any great dependence on Rowling investing much in it.)

And, of course, we will get will be a fine, old-fashioned, extended wrap-up at the end of the story to let us all know how everything (and everyone) turned out.

By the way, this wrap-up is the famous “last chapter” that Rowling has already claimed to have written as a promise to herself that she will eventually get there. Consequently, it will be the previous couple of hundred pages which will contain the run-up to the climax and the showdown with Lord Voldemort. The wrap-up isn't actually a part of the active story.

Regarding which: Rowling set off a little flurry of controversy with statements made in June of 2006 that she was going to have to rewrite this chapter a bit. One of the characters who she had originally intended to kill off got a reprieve. Two who had been expected to survive haven’t.

And, for all the storm of speculation this statement set running, I rather suspect that “haven’t” may really be the correct term. That chapter was written before she started on the body of the work of writing the series, and it consequently reflects her master “plan” of over a decade ago. There has been a lot of water under the bridge in the last 10-12 years.

For that matter, there has been a lot of water under the bridge in the last 7 years. We’ve forgotten how quickly the first four books came out. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Four books in four years. And with the fourth one she hit a snag. She has stated in interviews since GoF came out that she fell into a major plot hole that opened up in the middle of the story, requiring her to rewrite nearly a third of the book to plug it.

She also tells us that after taking a year or so off to recoup from a case of incipient burnout, after turning GoF in to the publishers, she subjected her master Plan to three months of intensive review to make sure that there were no more such pitfalls lurking for her in the rest of it.

I can’t answer for anyone else, but I certainly felt a distinct shift in OotP from the books that had preceded it. And, for that matter, HBP appears to have soundly ignored or dismissed just about every new issue that was raised over the course of OotP.

I very much doubt that Rowling has only just made her decision regarding the deaths of those two characters who now won’t be making it since she started writing Book 7. Those eventual deaths may already have been telegraphed over the course of the last two books that we’ve already got. They may have even already taken place. And we may have already watched the person who now does make it get that reprieve.

Another rather fun speculation which has cropped up since this last Spring, proposes that since we never had a birthday notice on Rowling’s site for Albus, or for Sirius (or James, or Lily), because, presumably, they are all dead by now, then, consequently, anyone who has gotten a birthday notice on the official website is sure to be alive at the end of the series. That’s a cheerful thought.

An additional escape clause is that some of the persons not on the birthday list are regarded as simply not being significant enough to rate a birthday notice from the author.

For that matter, we can see for ourselves that with the exception of Dobby, who didn’t show up until Cos, and Remus Lupin, who didn’t make his entrance until PoA, everyone who does seem to be on the birthday list either showed up, or was mentioned by name in Book 1. Nobody who showed up in the story after Book 3 is on the birthday list. I would certainly like to believe that this is the reason we’ve never seen a birthday notice for Luna Lovegood, anyway.

But then we already know that poor Luna tends to get left out of things.

Which reminds me:

Draco Malfoy.

Who is on the birthday list.

I have never really intended to write an essay concerning Draco Malfoy because I never have been able to see that Malfoy really mattered.

Apparently I was wrong about that. But until HBP I thought that I had fair reason to dismiss him.

Malfoy, like Snape, was a required character for this series. You cannot have a series of “school stories” without including the Malfoy character. Otherwise it just doesn’t play. He was the strictly local problem. The hero’s rival at school.

Ho-hum. This hero’s real problems are clearly not at school.

And, unlike Snape, Malfoy never seemed to rise above his obligatory role.

Ergo: Malfoy was boooring.

You evidently “have to” have the Nasty Teacher character in a series of school stories, as well. But Severus Snape had never been content to settle down and be no more than the Nasty Teacher of the piece.

As such, from the beginning of the series, he has stood there as gatekeeper to the reader’s understanding that there is more going on in this story than what our viewpoint character can see on the surface, or than what gets explained to him at the end of each adventure. Snape has never consented to step back and be no more than what Harry has tried to make of him. And by this time it is clear that Rowling at least, agrees with this perception. Snape, whatever else he is, is not boring.

And, downstream of HBP this fact probably has finally even penetrated the skulls of that brigade of fans who have spent the past 5 years sniffily informing us that the growing attention paid to Snape was far in excess of the requirements, because he was “only a secondary character” and that the story was all about the kids. That particular faction now has a nice helping of fricasse of crow to put themselves outside of.

And, for the record: the story is not about the kids.

The story is about Harry. Ron and Hermione are not Harry.

By this time it ought to be clear to any attentive reader that there are four “cardinal” characters in this story arc. Albus, Tom, Severus and Harry.

Everyone else is a secondary character.

But, regarding Malfoy: Malfoy never appeared to have anything like the substance of a Severus Snape, and by the time Umbridge had set up her Inquisitorial Squad he seemed to be careening off into the literary fate worse than death (i.e., total irrelevancy).

Well, as I say above, it appears that I have my own helping of fricasse of crow to scarf down. I was wrong about that. In OotP we got the “new Ginny”. In HBP we got the “new Malfoy”. And in both cases I have a great deal of trouble not demanding; “Who the hell are you, and where did you come from?” For, in my humble opinion, as far as writing technique goes, in neither case did Rowling really manage to adequately prepare us for the substitution.

That said; while I still think that the “new Ginny” appears to have been assembled from items off a checklist with a personality transplant that’s been pasted on, I do think the new Malfoy is just about sufficiently plausible. And he’s certainly an improvement.

It would be difficult not to be an improvement, at least. Anything beats boring. About the best you could say in favor of the original model is that a few of his comments were legitimately funny, and he could write verse that scanned.

And, in keeping with most of the frauds and poseurs in this series, he ultimately found himself in a position where he is forced to have to do what he has been shooting his mouth off about for yonks, and finds he hasn’t the stomach for it. Harry and Ron listened to him spouting off about wanting to help the Dark Lord while they were playing at Polyjuice espionage back in Year 2, and it looks like Malfoy finally got his wish.

And his gradual realization of just what he has gotten himself into shows through in glimmers around the edges of even our solidly Harry-centric viewpoint.

And, rather to my surprise, Malfoy, unlike Harry, seems to actually (rather than just rhetorically) grasp that there is a distinction to be drawn between the priorities of school and those of the outside world. And that if one is forced to choose between them, school is not the one that is paramount. His moment of payback on the Hogwarts Express was a squirmingly uncomfortable passage to plow through, but any reader of halfway fair mind has to admit that after seeing Harry and his friends hexing Malfoy into unconsciousness on that train two years running, Harry had earned that payback, and that Malfoy’s revenge was far less vindictive than we might have expected it to be. Malfoy, contrary to all expectations, was clearly in the process of “moving on”.

It took most of the year for Harry to catch up to him.

Maybe what Malfoy always needed was to be given a bit of responsibility.

At any rate Malfoy acquitted himself well enough over the year to finally make me agree that, yes, I really did need to take notice of him.

And I’m still not convinced that Voldemort has actually inducted him into the Death Eaters. Voldemort’s the type to know that he would get better performance out of an untested youngster by the application of the carrot as well as the stick. I think that assassinating Dumbledore and setting up a way for Death Eaters to infiltrate the Castle may have been presented as the “test” for whether he was “worthy” of being accepted as a Death Eater It was his initiation ordeal. He may not actually be one of them yet.

For that matter, it is obvious that Voldemort fully intended to send Lucius the message that his only son was a failure and that He and his followers had done the world a favor by removing him from it. That so-called back-up team was in fact a team of executioners who would have taken out Dumbledore, if it were to prove necessary, yes. But their real orders were to kill Malfoy and make it look as if he had failed. The mission was a double-cross. Only Snape’s Unbreakable Vow derailed it. Snape was sworn to protect Malfoy, and Voldemort wasn’t quite ready to dispense with Snape yet.

Malfoy’s twitching away when touched by shopkeeper could reflect no more than a disinclination for being handled by one’s “inferiors” and Malfoy may have had some other item with him that might intimidate Borgin (or inspire his greed).

And, for that matter, I am not sure just where Malfoy now fits into the question of the last book in this series. Our nice familiar little series of formula school stories has been abruptly shot out from under us.

I cannot shake the feeling that if we see Malfoy at all in Book 7 it is likely to be only in glimpses. He is not going to suddenly join Harry in fighting the Powers of Darkness™. He did manage to smuggle Death Eaters into Hogwarts. He put Madam Rosmerta under Imperius. The Ministry probably want to get hold of him for that, even if he didn’t succeed in murdering anyone. And since the Death Eaters who were sent to serve as his back-up team will be able to tell Voldemort that he did not manage to finish off Dumbledore, he may be dodging them too now, all the way to the end of the story.

Possibly his smartest bet would be to talk his mother into going into hiding and to turn himself in to the Ministry and sit the rest of this conflict out with his father in the safety of Azkaban. Especially now that the Dementors are gone.

But I doubt that that will happen.

And in the meantime, that 2nd clause of Snape’s Unbreakable Vow, that he will, to the best of his ability, protect the boy from harm, isn't really worded in a manner that gives it any kind of a definite time limit.

Which Voldemort may already be aware of. Bellatrix was the Bonder of that Unbreakable Vow, and Narcissa, for all her tears and hysterics was very cagey about the wording of that Vow (she had reason to be, her life was on the line as well). Serve the kid as lookout, protect him, finish the task if he can’t. Bellatrix was expected to carry tales to the DEs who were grumbling about the authenticity of Snape’s commitment to the cause.

And if she didn’t Pettigrew certainly would. And Snape may have amplified the matter by reporting his side of the matter as well. When Voldemort learned of the business he might even have questioned Bellatrix. Which would have put her in a bad light already for having tagged along after Narcissa, rather than reporting what amounted to an illegal meeting between two of his followers. And her agreeing to be the Bonder for an unauthorized Unbreakable Vow between two of his followers will not help her position either. And she would have also caught cold at it if the Dark Lord confirmed that Snape had known of the mission to assassinate Dumbledore.

Which I am sure he did. That was originally his mission, and Voldemort had to have just called him off it and told him to step aside in Malfoy’s favor, so he wouldn’t inadvertently get in the way.

When closely examined all the Vow boiled down to was to agree to serve as part of the kid’s back-up team. And, if Snape was questioned, by Christmas he would have reported that the kid was refusing to cooperate with him.

But Voldemort might have noted that the 2nd clause of that Vow didn’t have a stated time limit. So he can either keep the kid under Snape’s authority in order to exploit them both, or he can separate them, largely neutralizing the “to the best of your ability” rider to that clause.

Or he can demand that Bellatrix release Snape from the Vow altogether.

Which is the most likely scenario of all.

Why would a Vow have a Bonder unless the Bonder has the authority to release you from the Bond? You cannot break the damned thing. So there’s got to be an escape clause built into it, somewhere. The mission appears to be complete. No more mission, no more reason for a Bond. So unbind him.

Which brings us to:

Lord Voldemort.

Ever since HBP came out there has been an amazing amount of uproar regarding the official Riddle backstory. And I will have to say that I don’t think that was a particularly sound move, myself. It would be hard to have come up with anything more contradictory to the message that she has presumably been harping on, regarding the importance of our choices, since the beginning of the series than the layout she has now given us.

The sly, cruel, manipulative and personable young Tom Riddle we met in the orphanage presents us no real problems. We’ve all rather expected him to have been that kind of kid all along. And all of his subsequent actions read according to our expectations as well.

But why did she have to depict Tom Riddle’s particular brand of evil as being both effectively hereditary, and inevitable? (Or pretend to depict it so.)

“Bad seed” hypotheses effectively trump any issue of choices. “He’s evil because he was born evil” isn’t an illustration of any kind of choice.

We also got reasonably solid evidence that it certainly wasn’t being raised in an orphanage that made him what he was, either. Harry admitted to himself that Tom Riddle’s orphanage would have been a grim place to have grown up, but I suspect that he might have chosen it over life with the Dursleys, if he had been offered a choice. Harry would have probably managed to be at least modestly happy in that orphanage. He would at least have had friends.

But Mrs Cole assures that Tom was “a funny boy” from infancy; seldom cried, and as he got older was ...odd.

In short, he was already on the sociopath’s road, only needing a little personal motivation to spur him along the way; the first time one of the older children tried to bully him he would have developed that. His “choices” had probably all been made by the time he was three.

And that just doesn’t fit with what Rowling claims is her message.

So; either she is falsifying her message, she doesn’t understand it herself, or there is some additional factor that she hasn’t told us yet, because, for all of his efforts, Albus didn’t really have the whole picture.

Albus admits that he makes mistakes.

In fact claims that his mistakes are likely to be huge ones.

And he doesn’t tell anyone everything he knows.

Given that Rowling is already laying new trails of gunpowder to blow us all up with regarding no shortage of other issues raised in HBP, it really doesn’t feel like it is beyond reach of imagination that Albus might have missed something.

Tom Riddle has a lot of secrets. It is very unlikely that we’ve managed to discover them all. Particularly not in only one book.

I'll concede that this reading of the matter does have a strong feeling of admiring the “Martian canals” and it may turn out to be just as much of an optical illusion as they did. But if it does, then there isn’t a lot of likelihood that I am going to much enjoy the enshrinement of the escalating hypocrisies of all Rowling’s “Warriors for the Light” that seems scheduled for the 7th book. So, I am pinning my own current hopes upon the reading that we are not going to have the whole story, until we have the whole story.

But I’ve been wrong before.

I took Rowling’s hints on there being a Christian theme to the resolution of the series at face value last spring when I applied my understanding of Christianity to spinning out the original iteration of the Premature Prediction article, above (now reposted in the 7th Son essay on abandoned/exploded theories). In that I postulated a “redemption pattern” which allowed for the salvation of Harry, Tom, and the wizarding world itself. The pieces were all there; there wasn't anything to absolutely contradict it; I thought it worked.

But Rowling does not seem to intend to go there. There will probably be no 11th-hour redemption for Tom Riddle. Which, given that he seems never to have been equipped to make proper choices, even from birth, at this stage of the proceedings comes across as shoddy theology to match the apparently shoddy morality and situational ethics so conspicuously on display through the Harry filter. But I do not yet have the “whole story” so I will follow that line of reasoning no further here.

But, it does certainly look as though we ought to have taken her at her word when she first started harping on the “he's not really human” string all the way back in the first book.

And that is a Really Bad Sign on the order of poor little Billy Stubbs’s strangled rabbit for the final play-out of this particular series. Because if, after deliberately raising the issue of the complexities pertaining to a face-off between good vs. evil that she has been at such pains to raise, her final message boils down to simply; “he’s evil. Kill him”, and this is her real intention, then it is hard not to read the decision as both a cop-out and an example of blatant and pervasive moral cowardice.

Because “heroes” need to face up to the results of their own actions.

And killing somebody, even an evil somebody, is not a minor action.

For that matter; heroes do NOT exist to have the way always smoothed for them by everybody else, and to be catered to, and be absolved of all responsibility for the things that they are going to be forced to do in order to fulfill the Hero’s part, before they have even done it.

In the wizarding world, Harry Potter has been acclaimed as a hero from babyhood on the strength of his mother’s actions. He realizes this, but he has accepted the preferential treatment of an acclaimed hero because, if nothing else, he hasn't properly known how not to. But the fact remains that being treated as a hero, does not make him one.

He had a battle thrust upon him at the end of GoF, and he acquitted himself well. But to escape from a trap does not necessarily make him a hero. In PoA the main actors of a positively Jacobean revenge tragedy threw him into the Hero's role, and let him make the final decision. He went through the proper motions. And everyone appeared to be agreeing to play their appointed parts. But the minute they were out on the main grounds Pettigrew tossed the script back in their faces and dodged out, and nobody seemed to have been prepared for that, despite Pettigrew’s past history. The awareness of being regarded as a hero has contributed to Harry’s leaping into ill-considered and unnecessary action at the end of both PS/SS and OotP. Both of which ended with somebody's death. In both cases, he would have done better to keep out of the matter. In HBP he finally learned to follow orders. Only in CoS can Harry be legitimately said to have truly acted as a hero.

“Hero’s business” tends to be a throughly nasty, dirty, dangerous, and sometimes thankless (and/or embarrassing) piece of work that you just have to go in and get done. And you cannot depend on being honored for it. But you do have to Take Responsibility for your actions.

Harry has a monumental problem with facing up to the consequences of his actions.

In GoF he inadvertently led Cedric Diggory into a death trap.

Seems to have managed to get over that fairly quickly by distracting himself with paranoia over Voldemort’s anticipated future actions. None of which materialized for a year following.

His foolhardiness (and forgetfulness over the fact that he HAD that 2-way mirror) in OotP got Sirius Black killed.

Before the day was out, he was in the process of deflecting the blame for that death onto Severus Snape, over some utterly predictable spiteful comments that Snape had made months earlier. And onto Dumbledore for telling Sirius to stay in the house where he was safe.

The following year in HBP he nearly killed another student by his own hand through rashly using an unknown spell in an impromptu duel.

It shocks and horrifies him, yes. But once he gets over the shock (which happens as soon as he hitches up with a new girlfriend) he sullenly resents the detentions that nearly committing manslaughter earned him, because it takes up his Saturdays and keeps him out of a Quidditch game.

Harry Potter needs to learn a BIG lesson in personal responsibility.

Even if he IS a “hero”.

The function of a hero, in the kind of a story that Rowling seems to be trying to convince us that this series is, is to remove the threat posed by the villain. This is not supposed to be glamorous. It is supposed to be necessary.

And we have met the villain. And, yes, he has to be stopped. Even if he could be absolved for his choices on the grounds that he was not ever equipped to make proper choices, he has to be stopped, much in the same way that a rabid dog has to be stopped. And everything Rowling has done with the character has served to dehumanize him.

And it is beginning to look as if the point of this exercise is so that when Harry finally vanquishes the Dark Lord at the climax of the 7th book, he will be destroying a Horcrux rather than killing a man.

Or maybe not.

We could certainly be forgiven for anticipating that it will come to that. Everything to this point certainly has led us to believe that in the end it will be Harry who has to personally destroy Voldemort. And this could certainly be the way Rowling intends to take it.

But there is no denying that it makes for a very mixed message if on one hand killing another person is presented as the ultimate evil, one which may split your immortal soul, and then to turn around and set it up that to kill Voldemort is somehow wholesome, glorious and noble. It simply doesn't add up, even if Voldemort “isn't really human”. In the cosmic balance I suspect it would still read as killing a man.

Ergo: even if she doesn't take it here, I feel obligated to point out that when the matter is more closely examined, it turns out that she has given us enough winks and nudges, and strewn around a large enough bunch of hints for us to see that she's really given herself an astonishing amount of unexpected wiggle-room, and a couple of viable “chicken-outs” which would keep Harry's soul intact to the last page, but still take Voldemort out of the equation.

(I knew that it would happen. Within a couple of weeks after posting the updated collection last April, I knew that somebody would be bound to ask me a question, and I would be forced to push something a few yards further down the track to the point that something else would click into place. It always has.)

So, ask yourself:

Given everything that Dumbledore has ever had to say on the subject throughout the series, and in particular what he had to say on the issue in HBP, he could hardly WANT to see Harry Potter, charter member of the “Pure Hearts Club,” compromise the integrity of his soul by killing Lord Voldemort, could he?

(Assuming that killing somebody in an open fight would do that anyway. Which upon reflection is looking less and less likely.)

But even Dumbledore appears to believe that it must inevitably come to that. He admits to Harry that he realizes that Harry will never rest until he at least makes the attempt to kill his enemy.

And therein lies a possible, very muddy, detour on the bumpy road to redemption; for Albus must know that to be able to cast an effective killing curse, one has to be capable of the bitterest sort of hatred. Mere righteous anger will not sustain a killing curse any more than it will sustain Crucio.

Which may go some way towards explaining the totally bizarre game of good-cop/bad-cop that he and Severus Snape have been playing with Harry ever since Harry first showed up at the school. For it is clear to the reader that for some as yet unexplained purpose, it appears to be vitally necessary for Harry Potter to hate Severus Snape.

Snape has gone out of his way to teach the boy to hate him. He has never eased up on this extra credit course of study for a minute. And; for all that Dumbledore has always insisted that Harry scrupulously maintain all of the outward forms of respect and good manners in his form of address concerning Professor Snape, he has done little to deflect this process; only steadfastly defending his own choice to trust the man. This cannot be accidental.

And by this time, it does not seem to be merely necessary on the “meta” level, for Rowling's purposes, either. I do not think that she is throwing Harry-hates-Snape into the pot as a pinch of instant conflict, the way so many fanfic authors tossed in Voldemort-suspects-Snape by the handfuls over the course of the 3-year summer. The characters and the storyline genuinely seem to need this. And at this point we can still only feebly try to determine why. And, in common with just about everything else to do with Severus Snape, I suspect the true reason comes lumbered with a considerable backstory.

Most recently, I have come to the conclusion that for Harry to hate Snape, and to be known to hate Snape is a source of protection for Snape.

Snape and Albus must have always known that if Voldemort was not dead, their work was not done. There was always the possibility that he might manage to return and that Snape was going to have to work his way inside the DEs in order to bring about a final defeat.

Consequently, their purposes would be best served by keeping Harry away from him.

Of course the whole issue got further complicated by Voldemort’s attempted return in Harry’s first year. With Tom actually in the school and monitoring everyone’s actions there was no way that Snape could afford to take anything but an adversarial stance against Harry Potter. And Quirrell shoved his oar in at the end of the year with the whole “he hated your father too” thread, which just kept the cauldron brewing.

But the fact that Snape took the opportunity to immediately re-open hostilities as soon as Harry and Ron finally managed to land the Ford Anglia in the Willow suggests that to keep these two characters from ever finding common ground was very much, and very deliberately in somebody’s best interests.

Sirius Black set Severus Snape up when they were schoolboys. Set him up in a situation which could all-too-easily have gotten him killed. Or at the very least afflicted with a horrible and incurable curse. As a result, Severus Snape ended up alive, and intact and quite possibly owing a wizard’s debt to James Potter. The same kind of life debt that Pettigrew owes Harry.

One which he failed to repay. In fact, circumstances intervened wherein rather than repaying that debt, Severus Snape ended up compounding it by betraying James Potter to his death. Yes, I do believe that Severus Snape may have felt deep, and utterly sincere remorse when he ultimately discovered that the hypothetical family that his report of the partial Prophecy to Lord Voldemort endangered turned out to be James Potter and his wife.

Because Severus Snape was wizarding-raised, and he knows that such a debt bears consequences.

Heavy consequences.

Particularly if you default on it.

And he did. He did it unintentionally, but he did.

Severus Snape owed James Potter his life.

I think that by the laws of balance that govern such matters, James’s son may have the right to collect it.

Personally.

If he chooses.

And, given the situation that James Potter’s son has been thrust into (and that was thanks to Severus’s actions as well) to give the child the weapon that he needs in order to kill him most effectively, should circumstances demand it, may, in Severus’s and Albus’s, reckoning, count as a just repayment of this still outstanding debt.

And, if this is the answer, I think that the matter may not have been unrelated to the argument that Hagrid overheard. Or to Albus’s decision to bring matters to a head by embarking on the adventure of the sea cave. I think it was not only Harry who needed that lesson in following orders. Nor was it only Harry who needed to be shown the way. But I could be misinterpreting the pattern, and, indeed, I rather hope that I am.

But if I'm not, in the end, the final decision is going to be up to Harry. (“Only Potter has the right to decide.”)

Which makes me rather hopeful of the pattern that Rowling appears to have established for the last three books of her series, in which she repeats the themes and actions of the first three books, and the indications that the events of Book 7 might be expected to reflect the events of Book 3. The real question is; how much can we depend upon this. Because it seems to me that the salient point of the conclusion of PoA is that nobody and nothing died of it. In fact, we do not know of a single death that took place during that year.

And the final climax was not about the destroying of things but the saving of them.

Earlier in the book, Scabbers was believed to have been killed. But he wasn't. He faked it.

MUCH earlier in the story, Pettigrew was believed to have been killed. But he wasn't. He faked it.

The Fat Lady really was was attacked, but she got away, unhurt.

Buckbeak was condemned, and scheduled for execution, but he escaped.

And Harry's primary actions at the final show-down were to forgive the traitor and to save the innocent.

He braved the willow and followed the Grim to rescue Ron.

He couldn't force himself to kill Crookshanks, even though that meant sparing Sirius Black. (Who he “hated more than Voldemort” — sound familiar?)

He deliberately and voluntarily spared Pettigrew. Who, by then, he knew had betrayed him and his parents to Lord Voldemort.

He then went on to put considerable effort into saving Buckbeak AND Black.

And, in reward for this, he managed to connect with the one part of James Potter which still lived on within himself — which is the only part that still matters.

So how much of this can we expect to see transposed to Book 7?

(Query: how much did Sirius Black owe the cosmic balance for his part of the werewolf caper? And to whom? For he wronged just about everyone involved in the matter except Pettigrew. Did he ever repay that cosmic debt? Did he repay it by spending 12 years in Azkaban, or did his debt require that additional year immured in the Black family hell and a quick trip through the Veil?)

Still, for all of the weight of significance that this, now fully developed, hatred of Severus Snape may have for Harry, it doesn't really get us a whole lot further toward a satisfactory conclusion regarding the problem presented by Lord Voldemort.

And in this matter, as in the matter of the Prophecy, I think that for all his cleverness and wisdom, Albus Dumbledore may have missed the point.

We need to keep reminding ourselves that Albus Dumbledore is not JK Rowling. His average was better than just about everyone else’s, but he didn't necessarily know everything that was going on. And his reading of the requirements of the situation was not necessarily that of the author.

Because if the Prophecy is a load of old pants, then it is all a load of old pants.

Albus knew, and was able to explain to Harry, that Prophecies usually aren't anything until someone tries to do something about them. Tom Riddle — who for all his brilliance and talent is fundamentally unwise — let himself be tricked into trying to keep this one from coming true. By doing so, he set up the very conditions that the Prophecy describes.

But; it’s a Prophecy, and Prophecies are still a load of old pants, and if Tom and Harry chose to shake hands and go their separate ways nothing whatsoever would happen. The rest of the Prophecy would never play out.

Of course the likelihood of that happening is zilch, so there is no point in dwelling on it. Tom cannot be trusted to leave bad enough alone, and Harry simply cannot agree to live his life perpetually looking over his shoulder for the attack that he knows must surely come. That is no kind of life. Until the issue with the Dark Lord is settled, he doesn’t “have a life”.

But Albus seems to have overlooked the fact that Prophecies are not innocent, and they do not mean well, and that their entire purpose is to deceive the listener into bringing about his own ruin.

And it did. Albus Dumbledore trapped himself every bit as throughly as he trapped Tom Riddle by turning that Prophecy loose. The gamble appears to be paying off. But the price is astronomically high, and it wasn’t necessary.

Despite the fact that Harry will not rest until he has made the attempt to destroy his enemy, in all probability it is not necessary for Harry to be the one to directly destroy Voldemort. Once the Horcruxes are out of the picture, anyone can take him down. And there is no requirement that whoever does it must do it alone.

In fact, it could be the biggest mistake Harry ever made to try. Right up to and including the possibility that if he fails, prematurely, Voldemort isn't going anywhere without a half-dozen more lives lost, assuming enough people would know about the Horcruxes to know that they have to destroy them. And, at the moment it looks like too many people are determined to protect Tom Riddle’s secrets for that to be likely.

Even Prophecies have to play by their own rules.

However much they may lie about those rules.

Which they do. Or, as near to lying as makes no difference.

Albus did do his best to defuse the “And either must die by the hand of the other” clause. And I think that was smart of him, because that statement strikes me as a piece of deliberate misdirection calculated to goad the hearer into inadvisable action of the sort which is much better ignored.

But eliminate that clause, and what are you left with?

And, no. I am not one of those ingenious sorts who are out doing backbends now, trying to prove that “the other” mentioned in the text of the Prophecy is yet some additional, as yet undetermined third party, who is intrinsic to this mess. There are plenty of other 3rd parties already tied up in this knot, but there is no mysterious “other” that the Prophecy is referring to. The Prophecy is only concerned with the Dark Lord and the child. Or rather; “the One with the Power”.

The power to “vanquish” the Dark Lord.

It doesn't say kill, does it?

In fact, the Prophecy never does say kill, although it does say “die”.

Albus Dumbledore was convinced that the specific power that Harry possesses is nothing less than the power of deep human attachment, which is certainly a power that Tom Riddle knows not; and that it is this is the power that will ultimately bring down Lord Voldemort.

I will not say that he was wrong. I agree that the power of human attachment will almost certainly be a major part of what eventually brings Voldemort down.

After all, it has certainly thwarted him at every confrontation so far.

In 1981 Lily’s love for her child destroyed his body and threw him into over a decade of spectral existence.

In 1992 the residual effects of Lily's sacrifice still kept him from touching Harry, contributed to destroying the body he had taken over, and threw him back into that spectral existence.

In 1993 Harry’s professed loyalty to Dumbledore brought him not only the weapon necessary to kill the Basilisk, but Fawkes, who assisted him in the battle and was able to heal him of the Basilisk’s poison.

In 1995 the echoes of his own victims in support for the child he had abducted, used, and intended to kill impeded Voldemort long enough to allow Harry to escape him.

In 1996 Harry's attachment to Sirius seems to have been sufficient to throw Voldemort out of his head.

So it's not at all unreasonable to suppose that such attachments will contribute to the final outcome of the showdown which is slated for the spring of 1998, too.

But, as I point out in the essay concerning the Prophecy; in the Potterverse the power of human attachment is not exactly thin on the ground. And Harry's possession of this quality is neither broader nor deeper than that of most of the other people we have met there. Despite our expectations, I think that it is not necessarily Harry’s supposedly great power of attachment which is the relevant factor. I think that Harry's true advantage may lie very much elsewhere insofar as finding a final answer to the seven Riddles goes.

In fact; the indications are that Harry's specific power to vanquish the Dark Lord lies in a direction that Albus seems not to have even considered.

Or at least he did not ever admit to it.

As I point out in the essay above regarding the hunt for the missing Horcruxes; we don't really know how to destroy one when we find it, do we? Of course you probably can pitch them through the Veil. But pitching them through the Veil is rather on the order of a trek up Mt Doom. For all that I'm pretty sure we will get back to Hall of the Veil eventually, I'm not convinced that this is how Rowling intends to solve that particular part of the problem. So far as we know to date, the only thing that appears to destroy a Horcrux is to make an opening in the artifact that it was created from to let the soul fragment out.

But to destroy the artifact without killing yourself in the process may be a lot easier said than done. If even Dumbledore allegedly got nearly fatally blasted by the curse which was invoked attempting it (and you know that Albus would not have approached the problem incautiously), it sounds like Riddle did a very good job of protecting his Horcruxes.

Of course it also looks like he did not put the same amount of work into protecting all of them. The locket — if the one we saw at #12 was the Horcrux — was being passed hand to hand without ill-effect. The Diary, as a weapon, was supposedly able to protect itself, and yet it was destroyed by 12-year-old in a bit of a fluke. Harry came to no harm at all by destroying the book. (Yes, the Basilisk nearly killed him, but the Basilisk wasn’t the Horcrux.)

Or is that the point?

Let’s run that all past us again.

Point: Albus Dumbledore, believed by many to be the greatest wizard of modern times, destroyed a Horcrux and allegedly would have died of it, but for his own prodigious skills and the timely intervention of Severus Snape. He still had a blasted wand hand until the end of his life. Which was less than a year in coming.

Point: 12-year-old Harry Potter destroyed a Horcrux and got himself shrieked at and splattered with ink.

Maybe, just maybe, that wasn't the fluke it sounds like.

After all. I suspect that if he chose to, Lord Voldemort could probably destroy any one of the bloody things without taking any additional harm from it. It would read him as a part of itself, and raise no automatic defenses.

Maybe carrying your ID as the 6th Horcrux around on your forehead means you can disarm any of the others without getting blown up by it. (The power to “vanquish” the Dark Lord.) Maybe that’s what the Prophecy’s claim that Voldemort marked him as his equal amounts to. The power to vanquish the Dark Lord is the power to destroy the Horcruxes.

Maybe Harry's job isn't to destroy Voldemort himself at all. Harry's job is just to destroy the Horcruxes. Trying to destroy Voldemort himself is as much of a snare and a delusion as Voldemort’s attempt to protect himself by destroying Harry was.

After all: repeat: once the bloody Horcruxes are out of action, Tom will be mortal again. ANYONE can kill him.

And who's closest to him now?

(What was that again about the two bishops, between them, covering the whole board?)

I really am swinging round to the viewpoint that being the 6th Horcrux may enable Harry to destroy the damned things without being blasted for his trouble. It may even help him recognize one when he finds it.

Although it certainly doesn’t do so as readily as he needs it to, if that locket in Grimmauld Place was one of them. And youth, sheer ignorance and inexperience don’t really explain his not having any particular reaction to the Diary.

Which all means that we may not be getting quite such a mixed message after all. Dumbledore would hardly want Harry Potter to be forced into killing someone directly, even if it is in self defense, or by the way of a necessary execution. It's still killing.

But destroying Horcruxes, evidently isn’t.

It may be Snape who will get the honor of actually killing Voldemort.

Frankly I'm half hoping to see Snape to show up at the climax of the series like the 7th cavalry with Fawkes on his shoulder. That would be one in the eye for Harry. It wasn't just Dumbledore who trusted Snape.

Ah, well.

And for that matter, so long as we are playing around with the bloody Prophecy, one of the boards I hang out on has recently attempted to do a closer analysis of the “And either must die at the hand of the other” clause of the fool thing.

Frankly, given the inherently garbled obstructionism of prophecy-speak I doubt that we are going to arrive at any solid conclusions there. But it made for a couple of reasonably interesting exchanges. The following was my own contribution:

What have we actually got here?

“... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives...”

And just what does that boil down to?

Actually the whole statement feels like a change of subject taken with the rest of the comments and statements in that Prophecy.

Frankly, from where I'm standing, it still sounds like a gaudy lure to unwise action. Tom Riddle was tempted into unwise action merely by the statement that the one with the power to vanquish him would be born as the 7th month dies. I get the feeling that the "And either must die at the hand of the other" line is the lure to tempt Harry into doing something stupid as well.

But it does still have to mean something.

So, what’s the catch? It stands to reason that there is a catch.

Well, right off the top; the “at” clanks, and I don't think that it is there by accident. Wouldn’t you expect the thing to say that either must die “by” the hand of the other if it meant one of them was supposed to kill the other? In normal usage something that is “at” hand, is merely something in proximity.

Which it would certainly chime in tune with the drum that was being banged on all through book 6 that killing other people is wrong, and it can damage your own soul to do it. That being the case, you hardly get the message that either Albus or the author actively want Harry to kill Voldemort directly.

Do you know; I am now wondering whether that was the point of Albus hauling Harry off to the sea cave and ordering Harry to poison him. Because I am half convinced that if Albus is dead, he died of the poison, not Snape's AK. And yet although Albus technically died by Harry's hand (or was that “at”?), his death was, if anything, assisted suicide not murder. I seriously doubt that Harry's soul took any kind of damage from it. No more than it was split by inadvertently leading Cedric into a death trap.

So does “at” in Prophecy-speak mean, cause a death, but not kill him oneself? Knock him through the Veil, rather than AK him?

Or does it just mean that the task requires proximity? If the final showdown takes place in the death chamber of the DoM, proximity could matter. It could matter a lot.

If the “vanquished” soul fragments pass through the Veil when they are forced out of the Horcruxes, they might exert some sort of magnetic pull on their owner (or Harry) if you can get him close enough to the Veil to be subject to it.

After all, if the soul is in 7 parts, having five of them on the other side could constitute a risk for the other two if they get too close. Last time Harry was there, there was only one of those fragments on the other side to draw him, but he did seem to feel a pull, didn't he?

(Let's have a wrestling match on the footpath above the Richenbach falls, why don't we? Somebody died there, but nobody murdered anybody.)

We probably ought in fairness to remember that it wasn’t just Harry who felt that pull. Luna, Neville, and Ginny were also drawn to the Veil. Ron was completely unaffected by it, Hermione seems to have been repulsed, and actively frightened by it. Also, Harry, Ginny, and Neville all seem to have needed to be physically pulled away from it, while somehow Luna either managed to pull herself back on her own, or was not so deeply affected (possibly due to having been able to detach herself and analyse what the Veil was, and what she was hearing?). This might be a clue that while they were all four affected, they did not necessarily all experience the same thing.

And, once there are six parts of Tom Riddle’s soul on the other side of the Veil, would that pull the final one out of Harry? Particularly if he had the presence of mind to take a penknife to the scar?

Especially if Ron and Hermione grab hold of him to keep him from going through it physically. (Friendship; the power the Dark Lord knows not. I doubt, even if LV does show up with minions that they would do squat to save him. Although Bellatrix might just follow him in.)

And then there is the “for neither can live while the other survives” bit: in the opaque language of Prophecies, evidently neither of them is “living” now. Harry certainly doesn't “have a life”. And Voldemort is in some weird sort of half, or three-quarters life, housed in a body cobbled together to simulate his previous one. But he is quite literally, “not all there”.

When you stop to think about it, even the Lord Voldemort identity was created by screwing about with his true name and leaving inconvenient — and potentially the most significant — parts out of it. (I,A,M, Lord Voldemort) This certainly reflects his spiritual state ever since he created the Diary. Lord Voldemort is an artificial construct in every fundamental way; physically, spiritually, and even his identity as “Lord Voldemort”. The only thing left of Tom Riddle that is intact is his memory.

And essentially, he hasn't really been “all there” since he was Harry's age

Maybe one should just zap him with Obliviate and steer him through the Veil.

But what I'm now puzzling over is the “and neither can live” statement when viewed from a quasi-metaphysical standpoint. The two “real” people involved here are/were Harry and Tom. The “Lord Voldemort” construction is as bogus as its (Muggle-style) title, although it seems to have taken on a life of its own. And what this problem all appears to hinge upon is what in prophecy-speak defines the verb “to live”?

Both Harry and Tom are currently “alive,” at least in a technical sense. But it is Voldemort who merely survives.

JKR was hinting about the importance of souls in this series as early as the wrap-up of PS/SS when she had Dumbledore state that the late Professor Quirrell had been sharing his soul with Lord Voldemort. In Rowling’s Potterverse, souls matter.

With PoA the hints became so broad as to not qualify as hints at all. And with GoF we got a horrifying example of just what kind of thing was at stake.

Now that I consider it: this progression finally puts Nearly-Headless Nick's information at the end of OotP into some sort of context. It is the flip side of the Kissing of Barty Crouch. Only wizards (and witches) apparently have souls so resilient as to be able to survive in the material world without the grounding of a physical body, since only witches and wizards can manifest as ghosts.

And in the Potterverse, evidently witches and wizards get a choice whether or not to become ghosts.

With HBP we got the (final?) piece of the continuum with the Inferi, which are animate corpse-puppets from which both the life and the soul have departed.

In HBP we also finally got handed the concept that the soul is vulnerable to more than just theft by Dementors, and that your own actions can damage it irreparably.

But we are still missing a couple of points, here.

For one thing, I am still being distracted by the question of what becomes of those powerful, resilient wizarding souls that do pass through the veil? Do they integrate their “life lessons” and eventually return?

Can they be healed of their damage once they pass beyond?

Could these be questions that Rowling intends to answer in book 7?

Because there is certainly no question of Tom truly “living” so long as his soul is in pieces, and the pieces are scattered to the four winds and distributed on both sides of the Veil, regardless of whether Harry survives or not. Tom will only be able to “live” once the seven parts are reintegrated. And I do not think that that will be possible this side of the Veil.

And, as for Harry, for all that he has derived some advantages from carrying around a piece of somebody else's soul as well as his own, it is not exactly doing him any day-to-day good. And I am not convinced that it will prove any advantage in a face-to-face duel with its original owner. Once he has disarmed the other (two?) (three?) remaining Horcruxes, he needs to get rid of it ASAP. Which will probably best be accomplished in the chamber with the Veil.

Which brings us back to the “...and either must die...” statement as a whole. I've run into some amazing backbends being performed by determined fans who fight the good fight insisting that "the other" mentioned in the Prophecy has to be some as yet undetermined 3rd party. I flatly don't buy it. The Prophecy speaks of the One, and the Dark Lord and I don't think that it is concerned with 3rd-parties.

But how does it read if you solidly identify “the other” as the “Lord Voldemort” construction?

“... and either (Tom or Harry) must die at the hand of (the artificial)Lord Voldemort, because neither can live while “Lord Voldemort” survives...”

It really doesn’t come across as complete nonsense, does it?

It sounds rather like one needs to maneuver Voldemort into destroying himself.

Well; it’s not as if it hasn’t been done before.

Twice, in fact.

Albus tricked him into targeting the child of Prophecy, and Lily tricked him into killing her instead of Harry. We all know what that led to.

Perhaps Harry can maneuver him into charging through the Veiled archway, on his own. Remember that trick of dodging around the tombstones in little Hangleton?

For that matter; now that I’ve had even more time to think about the matter, if I were in charge of this — which I am not — HRH would find the Ravenclaw relic (assuming there is one) in the ruins at Godric’s Hollow, and Harry would destroy it and nothing whatsoever would happen. It wasn't a Horcrux. This throws them into an in-depth discussion about the relics and someone would finally remember the Locket at Grimmauld place.

Next stop Grimmauld Place.

Rowling’s answer to the most recent FAQ poll that the death of the Secret Keeper “freezes” the status of the secret at the point it was when that death occurs, denies us the dramatic possibilities of Harry returning to Grimmauld Place to find that he has uninvited guests. Always spoiling our fun, she is...

Ah, well, let us move on.

The Locket will eventually turn up, but it will probably lead us all a merry dance until it does. It will finally surface, however. I’m no longer convinced that it will do so in Kreacher’s nest. I suspect that will be just altogether too easy.

Harry may remember having seen Mundungus Fletcher and the silver goblets with the barman of the Hog's Head in Hogsmeade.

Next stop Hogsmeade. (Unless Harry insists on questioning Mundungus in Azkaban.)

We’ll have another round of discussion on where things stand, this time possibly including Aberforth, who may by now have been outed as Albus’s brother, and partner in espionage, at least to HRH. Someone brings up the subject of Godric's sword. Someone else finally remembers that the Hat was also Godric's originally.

Off to Hogwarts to question the Hat about where it got the sword.

Something during the interview with the Hat wakes the portraits of the ex-Headmasters/Headmistresses. Revelations ensue. Not enough of them, however. In any event Harry will learn something related to the founders via the Hat. Actually I think this or something like this will happen in Book 7. It could be significant, but probably not as much as the fans would like.

In the meantime the Locket continues to evade us. We may even trip over the Cup unexpectedly before we catch up to the Locket.

In any case, once they do get hold of it, the Locket will turn out to be the real McCoy, and Harry will finally manage to get it open (probably by telling it to open up in Parseltongue. It was Slytherin’s, after all) and let the soul fragment out, without coming to any harm by it. That's three down that we know of.

Keeping the Book 7 = Book 3 parallels in mind, somewhere in the middle of the book the Cup may turn up à la the Firebolt. Which should be a considerable relief, even if it does throw everyone for a bit of a loop. Or what turns up may not be the Cup, but some other item of importance.

Somewhere in the stretch between Godric’s Hollow and Hogwarts they may get the clues they need to finally guess the identity of Horcrux #5, but the information won’t sink in for a while.

Conversely; #5 may only turn up in the final confrontation. I'm beginning to suspect that Harry will be forced into the final face-off long before he is ready for it.

And it might play well if at the showdown Harry should turn out to have one of the last two Horcruxes and Voldemort the other.

At the moment, we have no idea what #5 may be, although Dr John Granger’s hypothesis that it is Voldemort’s wand is awfully tempting. Rowling has saved any real information on this one for Book 7.

Unless you want to make an argument for that extravagantly cursed silver-and-opal necklace that keeps crossing our path. You probably could. It's got a history attached to it. It's got a fair degree of grandeur. We don’t know how long it was sitting in a display case at Borgin & Burke. One could make a case for Tom having turned it into a Horcrux just before he escaped, and given the curses on it nobody is likely to have wanted to get close enough to it to have subjected it to much examination. But I can’t really see him leaving one in a display case where it might be sold and he would lose track of it. Same objection goes for the wand in Ollivander’s window.

In any case, if #5 isn’t the wand, it will turn out to be somewhere in Great Britain, and HRH will be able to track it down, and Harry will disarm it as well.

Or IT will be the item to play Firebolt. That’s a possibility, too.

And if it is the wand, we may get some kind of information related to it from Mr Ollivander who has been living in hiding for the past year.

By that point they are now either 4 or 5 down, with only 1 (or 2) to go. And, in trying to figure out how they are supposed to get at the Snake, they FINALLY start asking themselves why Harry was able to destroy the rest of them without taking any hurt when even Dumbledore couldn't manage that. And eventually they figure out that the last one isn't the snake.

And there really is no plausible explanation for Harry's being a Parselmouth, for or his connection to Voldemort without factoring in the probability of Harry being the unintended repository for one of Voldemort’s soul fragments.

So how do they get the last soul fragment out of Harry?

Back to Hogwarts to interview the ghosts as to where the soul resides in a living person. Does it permeate the whole body, or reside in the heart, or the head, or where? The fragment is lodged in Harry’s forehead. (Probably embedded in his skull, right under the scar.)

Because the real “crux” of the matter is how do you disarm the 6th Horcrux if you are carrying the fragment around in your forehead.

And, one of the disadvantages of making a Horcrux from a living creature, is that living creatures die.

Technically, the 6th Horcrux is Harry’s skull.

Sacrificing himself by walking through the Veil, to bring his enemy down is certainly one way to neutralize it.

Or, we are led to believe, standing there and letting Voldemort kill him. And this is the script that carries the biggest *bang* factor to most of the fans. But the problem with that solution is that it wouldn’t accomplish it.

Unless wizards routinely practice cremation — as was suggested by Dumbledore’s funeral pyre — Harry’s skull would still be left, safely buried, on this side of the Veil, so killing Harry wouldn’t solve the problem.

And I'm not convinced that Rowling has the guts to pull this one, anyway.

On the other hand, the fact that Voldemort didn’t intend for Harry to be a Horcrux means that there are probably no protective curses laid on that one. All it might take to get the soul fragment out of Harry would be to cut the scar open and let it out.

Or banish it with an exorcism.

(Which we do know exists in the Potterverse. It was being discussed in relation to Peeves all the way back in Book 1.)

But, like I say, she’s given herself a couple of other chicken-outs for getting rid of this one. Neither of these is completely satisfactory, but either one might work.

The less satisfactory version being that by questioning the Hogwarts ghosts they discover that the soul resides in the heart and not the head, which sends them to the DoM for Harry to slice the scar open, and possibly to carefully stick his forehead through one of the holes in the Veil. There's all kinds of interesting ways that could go wrong.

This might make a good jumping off point for a final 3-4 chapters of the book and the departure point for that spirit quest that seemed so likely at the end of OotP. (It seems a good deal less so now, but it is still not completely out of the picture as a possibility.)

A somewhat more satisfactory, but far less probable direction would be to discover that the Dementors aren’t as black as they’re painted, either.

Which would either leave Harry forced to face his worst fear — which is the Dementors — not Voldemort, if you recall, and to have to permit one to approach him and *kiss* it off him, hoping that he can manage to drive it away before it goes for his own soul, or, worse, having to trust it to take no more than what he is offering and to withdraw when it has it.

That could be highly dramatic, but it’s not a good jumping-off place for the last leg of any extended journeys. There is no spirit quest in this scenario. This version would be the point at which all hell breaks loose in the final face-off.

Even if I am overestimating Voldemort's wits and he hasn't figured out that Harry has possession of his final soul fragment, he would still be perfectly capable of rolling up to the final showdown with a Dementor in tow, since by now he must have been told that the kid is particularly vulnerable to them.

So the resulting scene plays out:

HRH are at the showdown. Which I still think is likely to be at the DoM. Perhaps Harry is preparing to stick his forehead through the Veil after all.

Voldemort shows up with Snape, and probably Pettigrew. Bellatrix will have gotten hers earlier in the book. Or, maybe she’ll be there instead of Peter, although he is more likely to have made it to this point. Peter is a survivor, at least to that point. Whichever of the two it is, they will bite it.

Voldemort sets the Dementor on Harry, who by now knows he is carrying the last soul fragment, so he stands firm to let it take him.

The Dementor swoops down and Kisses the scar off of Harry's forehead and either withdraws voluntarily, or is driven off — either by by Hermione & Ron, or (my preference) by a phoenix Patronus (invoked nonverbally) that various members of the Order have been seeing at key points of the book. And have been entertaining the hope that Dumbledore is not dead upon the strength of it, for Albus’s Patronus had always taken the form of a phoenix. (But then, we have also been informed that after a period of emotional upheaval, a wizard’s Patronus can change.)

Harry has collapsed from the Dementor’s proximity, Ron and Hermione close in to guard him with their lives, when Fawkes himself suddenly appears, singing his head off, which distracts Voldemort from whatever he is doing. (Trying to find Pettigrew’s wand, probably.) Snape, seeing that the scar is now gone, turns on Voldemort and sends him through the Veil. Fawkes finishes his song and lands on Snape's shoulder.

By the time Harry wakes up, Snape is reinstated with the Order and with Aberforth to vouch for him and some Pensieve evidence left by Albus, has been granted a full pardon. There is even some kind of a half convincing reason for why Dumbledore thought it would be necessary for Harry to hate Snape, because even allowing for the fact that in Year 1 Snape knew he was under observation by QuirrellMort, Snape certainly went out of his way to go on making sure that Harry would do it.

And Harry is left just having to deal.

Do I seriously think it's going to go this way? No, not really. But it hits all the high points.

And I still think that the final showdown may be in the room of the Veil.

We may get another Priori Incantatem situation at some point. Although to be frank, another Priori Incantatem probably wouldn't be much help with anything, the first one was a splashy device, but the replay skipped right over the curse that rebounded, so we got no actual information towards solving the underlying problem, from it. Although the distraction served to delay matters long enough for Harry to get some other information at the time.

But the whole device really made very little sense. Those weren't ghosts, they were echoes, they weren't the “real” people. And there is no satisfactory explanation as to how they would have known about the round-trip portkey. I'd say Rowling was being completely muzzy-minded on that one. Even the order that the echoes of Harry’s parents showed up was backwards, and several editions had been printed before JKR corrected it. In all, it was a showy, clumsy, confusing piece of business which I don't think had been thoroughly thought through to begin with. I would be just as glad not to see it return.

My earliest solution to the problem of getting rid of Voldemort without killing him would have been to hit him with an Obliviate and then steer him through the Veil under his own power. If this is the way it goes, once the Dementor takes off the scar, Snape (and Pettigrew?) could Obliviate Voldemort and hustle him through the Veil that way. That would work, too. But even I'll admit that it's a bit thin on the *bang* factor.

None of this offers much opportunity for the spirit quest I originally thought was on the menu, but Rowling has removed a lot of the reason I was expecting it in the first place.

But we've still got close to another year to kick ideas around. I'm sure we can come up with something.

Even though it probably won’t be the same thing that Rowling comes up with.

So, okay let’s give that final confrontation scenario a bit more examination, shall we? New improved version. Part of this and the following segment have been repeated in the Exeunt Albus essay below, but not all of it.

Here's a possibility, from what we've got to work with right now. Keep in mind that Rowling is going to throw us another whole book worth of possibilities, so don’t get your hopes up that we’ve solved it already. We haven’t.

This one takes the Wand Horcrux option, and concentrates on the Book 3 = Book 7 parallel. It may turn out to be pretty far off-base, but it is still my current favorite.

After Harry has settled the Locket and the Cup, and may have figured out the scar, he and his friends are going to wind up under attack by Voldemort long before they are ready for it.

Pettigrew will be a part of the ambush. Snape will be as well. The more I consider it, the more certain I am that we can count on Snape being in at the death however the final confrontation plays out.

I'm no longer convinced of the location. It could even be at Hogwarts. But that locked door in the DoM is still nagging at me, as is the Hall of the Veil, although I’m beginning to suspect that Rowling may have a different purpose for that.

Perhaps the trio have taken a sidetrack to the DoM in a desperate mission to get the Locked Door open (or convince whoever has keeping of the key to use it) and vanquish the wall-to-wall Dementors.

They've either got two more of the Horcruxes down, and no idea where to look for the last two. Or, they may have no idea where to look for #5 and no idea what to do about #6, which they have figured out. But the Dementor situation has reached a point that unless it can be addressed, they aren't going to be able to continue to hunt out and/or deal with the last two Horcruxes.

I’d prefer that they get the door open first, Thereby taking out the worst of Voldemort’s current allies. By that point the Giants may already have been bought off or fought off and the werewolves may have been neutralized as well. There are only about 3 dozen DEs by the end of HBP anyway. And no telling who — apart from Voldemort and Harry — know where they stash the Inferi.

Anyhow, Voldemort ambushes them.

Somewhere in the “Yo Mama!” stage of the confrontation, Pettigrew will be goaded into grabbing Voldemort's wand and crushing it, to get back at the way he has been used, and (as an afterthought) to pay off his debt to Harry. This is Pettigrew’s little blaze of glory. A protective curse on the wand Horcrux will zap him right out of the picture, giving him a default hero's death for real.

However, Voldemort, disarmed, is not all that much less dangerous than Voldemort armed. His nastiest abilities don't require a wand. And he's already learned that trying to possess Harry doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

This time he goes for for Ron.

To force another hostage situation.

And Ron has no defense against it.

We don't know what becomes of Voldemort’s current body when he has taken possession of somebody else’s. Harry was in no condition to observe when Voldemort tried it with him, and Dumbledore didn't trouble to explain it.

It is possible that the trio will have already discovered an “exorcism” spell in the course of dealing with the Horcruxes and have held back from turning it on Harry because they have figured out that it is only his harboring a soul fragment that makes it possible for him to deal with the other Horcruxes, and, until this point, they’ve known that there is still another one of them out there to have to deal with.

And, like I say above; we do know that the general principle of exorcism exists in the Potterverse. We heard the matter being discussed in relation to Peeves all the way back in PS/SS.

And Hermione could certainly throw the spell at Ron. For that matter, she could throw it at Harry and finally get him clear of fragment #6. But she may only be given one shot at either. This is the kind of nightmare choice which might cause her to freeze.

Plus, of course, Voldemort/Ron is armed and exceedingly dangerous. And Harry is half disabled from the usual Voldemort-proximity headache. Hermione may have all she can do just to defend herself.

But, as we know now, the story isn’t just about the kids. Somewhere in the altercation somebody (can you say “Snape”? There, I was sure you could) will throw a well-aimed slicing hex or, more likely, a nicely calibrated Sectumsempra at Harry's scar, releasing the soul fragment embedded in his skull beneath it. This would carry the advantage of — right up to the final moment — concealing the fact that Snape is not really on Voldemort’s side. To everyone present, it would look like an attack on Harry.

But if Harry — who is already going to be half-disabled by the usual headache — manages to retain consciousness, (and getting the fragment out of his skull may clear his mind, even if his he does have his forehead sliced open and blood running down his face) he may be the one to destroy the (vacant?) simulacrum designed to house the 7th fragment, and which his blood helped to create. If the rest of the fragments have now all been canceled, this may drag the 7th through the veil after the others, which would release Ron.

And, if not, he and/or Hermione may finally get the chance to use the exorcism spell, which finally does the trick.

And this could be the case even if the confrontation doesn’t take place in the room of the Veil.

Leaving only the trio and Snape. Harry isn't finished with Snape.

Even if Snape’s actions did contribute to saving Ron.

Snape threw the hex that sliced open his forehead, and released the 6th fragment. But Harry thinks that was an accident, and that Snape was trying to kill him.

The official climax of PoA was the race back through time to save Sirius Black and Buckbeak. In the course of that we got the mass Dementor attack in which Harry discovers his true “Patron,” his protector, and it turns out to be himself.

But the thing that really connects with the reader, the part of the book that sticks in the mind long after finishing it, isn't so much the epiphany by the lake, but the confrontation and revelations in the Shrieking Shack. The whole course of action of PoA led up to that confrontation in the Shack. Pettigrew’s escape and the rescue of Sirius Black (and Buckbeak) feel almost like an afterthought.

If Book 7 is a reflection of PoA there is no way that she is not going to give us a replay of the confrontation in the Shrieking Shack. It’s just too major an element to omit.

But this time I think she may hold it back to the very end of the book, after the threat of Voldemort has been settled.

I think that all through HBP she was moving furniture to get the stage set to throw us back into the same frame of mind that we were in at the opening of PoA.

She had a much easier job of setting the scene in PoA. She could arbitrarily introduce Sirius Black, who we'd only heard mentioned once in the whole series, as the enemy without a jot of background. Absolutely nobody questioned the implication that Sirius Black was Harry's enemy from page 1. All of the background she gave us later, in the course of the book.

He was the enemy; the first time he saw Sirius’s picture, Harry thought that he looked just like a vampire; he was Voldemort's second-in-command, he betrayed Harry and his parents, he murdered Peter Pettigrew (the Potters’ true friend) — along with a dozen Muggles in front of a whole street of witnesses, and now he was stalking Harry. And by the time the two came face to face Harry hated him more than he hated Voldemort.

Sound familiar, much?

If this is what she is up to — and I am confident that it is — it's a much more tricky balancing act than she had back in PoA.

Back in PoA we hadn't anything but the apparent flip-flop of Sirius Black having gone from being James Potter's “inseparable” best friend to the official Ministry viewpoint of his being Voldemort's 2nd-in-command without anyone ever having suspected a change in allegiance to make us suspicious. I mean, really, looked at logically, this made absolutely no sense, and not everyone in the wizarding world bought the story, either. But none of us ever questioned it over the course of the book. We were nowhere near as aware of just how tricky Rowling is back then.

But this time she has built up six whole books of apparent familiarity with the character that she is now shoving into the Sirius Black role, and while she might misdirect us all over the place she cannot altogether make us forget that we've been watching Snape for several years now. She has hedged her bets by holding back information about him, and not really giving us much to work from in trying to interpret him. But we know even less about Remus Lupin, and yet have far fewer suspicions of there being any mystery about him to solve.

If we are building towards another Shrieking Shack revelation/reversal, then what she did over the course of HBP was to deliberately weight the scales in the opposite direction in order to tear down the confidence that the reader had built up in the character over the previous 5 books. By this time, we are supposed to hate Snape as much as Harry does.

And I suspect that over the course of Book 7 we will be given even more apparent reason to do so.

We will learn more of Snape's history through the lens of a number of 3rd-parties’ current biases — now that they believe him to be a traitor, and a murderer, and a supporter of Lord Voldemort — and the surface reading of this information will not show in Snape’s favor. We will almost certainly get some sort of equivalent to the Three Broomsticks eavesdropping scene with information that will sound very bad indeed, but like the discussion in the Three Broomsticks, will ultimately prove nothing but that people are determined to interpret what they see according to their biases. I suspect that whatever interaction Snape may have had with Lily Evans (if any) could come out during this sequence. It will not do Snape any credit.

But, just to make a tentative prediction: I think that despite Voldemort (who I suspect may be flitting in an out of sight as much as the Grim did in PoA — with entirely different motivations) and the hunt for the Horcruxes, and the probability that the story is going to be wall-to-wall with Dementors, I am pretty much convinced that Snape's role as a fugitive in Book 7 is going to take a central position. Book 7 is going to be as much about Snape as PoA was about Sirius Black

And just what did we finally learn in the Shrieking Shack the first time?

We learned that the enemy we’ve been dodging all through the book isn’t the enemy. He isn’t the traitor. He wasn’t the one who betrayed Harry’s parents. Or certainly not intentionally, although his actions contributed to that betrayal. And he has been trying to protect Harry, not kill him.

The real traitor had been someone else entirely, someone whom everyone had trusted. Someone everyone believed to have been foully murdered by Sirius — before multiple witnesses — long ago. And it was that murder which has made him a fugitive.

Sound familiar?

It should.

Which means that those of us older fans who for some years have been convinced that somehow Peter Pettigrew was going to prove to be monumentally significant to the resolution of the series may have been a bit off-target.

Oh, Peter will no doubt be awarded his little Gryffindor moment, and probably will go out in a teeny blaze of glory. In any event, he’s toast. But it isn’t Peter Pettigrew himself which is significant, it is his role.

And in the final reckoning, Albus Dumbledore will be playing that role.

I am trying to project the final conclusion of the story arc according to what I interpret as an underlying pattern to the series as it has already played out to this point. And Snape being “Dumbledore’s man” fits that pattern better than any other possible interpretation.

Indeed this is a major component of the pattern. If he is not on Dumbledore’s side, it all falls apart. If Snape is not Dumbledore’s man, then I have misinterpreted the whole pattern of the entire series.

So I have a good deal invested in this interpretation, and to this point I simply do not see anything to significantly contradict it.

I may turn out to have been taking a scenic cruise down the Martian canals, but I am discerning a pattern here. And I see too many indications that the pattern really is there to be able to dismiss the “Snape is Dumbledore’s man” component any more than I can dismiss all of the indications that Harry is the 6th Horcrux.

The most prominent indication of this pattern that I am seeing at the moment is that — based upon the last two books and their echoes and reflections of the first two books — I AM CONVINCED that we are being set up to watch Book 7 echo and reflect major elements, and indeed the primary thrust of PoA. And events over the the course of HBP have conspired to put Snape into the position of stepping directly into the role previously portrayed by Sirius Black. I mean, really, can anyone claim that Snape’s position right now in the story arc, is significantly different from Black’s position at the opening of PoA?

The “great revelation” of PoA was that — all indications notwithstanding — Sirius Black was NOT the traitor. He was NOT the enemy. He was trying to PROTECT Harry, not to kill him. The “traitor” was someone whom everyone had trusted and who was believed to have died at Black’s hand, long before.

I am confident that this pattern will repeat in Book 7.

Ergo: Snape is Dumbledore’s man.

Dumbledore is not gone.

Dumbledore deliberately enabled the partial Prophecy to escape.

So, just for fun, let's literally bring back the Shack.

Snape disapparates from the scene of Voldemort’s defeat, the trio follow, they find themselves in the Shack, which is outside the Apparition barriers of Hogwarts. Snape basically lets them corner and disarm him, they have him down.

Harry of course is throwing accusations of everything Snape ever did to fit up his parents. Snape hears him out, agreeing with every point, very much playing the Sirius Black part. Harry is working himself up to kill him, as he had prepared to kill Sirius, when Fawkes shows up and sits on Snape's chest and won't budge.

And then Snape tells them that everything he did—

"Was done on my orders." Says ghostly!Albus, from behind the trio.

Following this bombshell comes the big explanation that to deploy the Prophecy seemed the only way that they could trick Voldemort into setting up the conditions of his own destruction.

Because when the final reversal comes, I am convinced that Albus will be there to share in it. It will not be all about Snape, alone. That is about the only way that Rowling will be able to keep Snape from walking away with the whole book. And it will be Harry's choice as to how to take this information that finally “reveals” to us what he is.

Oh, yeah, Harry forgives them. Even if the decision to turn the Prophecy loose was wrong, and unworthy and Albus and Severus admit that it was wrong and unworthy. By that time Harry will realize that the stakes were much higher than just himself and his parents. And that Sirius Black managed to bollocks up everyone's careful plans.

I’ve also had a bit more time to think through my reactions to the death of Dumbledore and a couple of other side issues have occurred to me up regarding the established traditions pertaining to the deaths of great wizards in literature and folklore.

Merlin, Gandalf, whoever (although those two are the ones most built to the established tradition, Tolkien was following a template far older than he was). Their official “deaths” all seem to have something in common.

They don't leave bodies.

Usually nobody actually sees them die. Or, not and have them stay dead, anyway.

And they definitely don't leave tombs where, over the next couple of hundred years, somebody’s bound to get the bright idea to break into it and steal the bones.

Instead, they usually just disappear.

Generally in some manner shrouded in Mystery.

Which makes Dumbledore's death — and his funeral — very unusual.

And even more convinces me that Albus just isn't in there.

What strikes me as being more in character for the end, or perhaps I ought to say the departure, of a Great Wizard, would be for him to reappear briefly *after* the hero has completed his great task, and to take a highly visible part in mopping up the stray odds and ends and seeing to it that justice is done to all of the active participants —

[Which in this case is an absolutely necessary function if any kind of justice is to be done. If Snape and Albus have been in cahoots ever since before Harry was born, then Snape has never acted independently, and he has nothing really to atone for, and yet he has always been required to play the villain. Things cannot help but to look very black indeed for him without Albus to Explain It All. And it would also be nice for Harry to be able to actually make use of Sirius’s house without having to bring all new friends in blindfolded every time they visit, since they cannot see the place, and for his kids to be able to find their way home unassisted.]

— and then to slip away quietly without fanfare. Typically in some mysterious manner leaving people to make up their own explanations and probably spin some goofy legend that if the need were ever great enough he might be back.

What Dumbledore got was a Hero's send-off. You can about justify it on the grounds that he was allegedly one of “yesterday's heroes”. But he wasn't serving the function of a “hero” in the story. He was serving the function of the “wise old wizard”.

So for all that his funeral was very moving, I'm not sure it really fit.

I mean, wouldn’t you say that it was a bit overdone?

What would fit the traditional template (and Rowling's established pattern) would be for Harry and his allies to settle Voldemort, and THEN Albus would make his reappearance, do his usual debriefing, make sure that no one is going to suffer for their actions in the war who doesn't deserve to, and then quietly slip away from the celebration and step through the Veil.

Indeed, what would fit very well indeed, would be for Albus to make his rather subtle personal farewells to individuals, in the course of circulating at some crowded, overblown Ministry wrap-up, and for Harry to notice that he is gone, suddenly realize what Albus has done and race down into the Department of Mysteries too late to see anything but the Veil still fluttering in the wind of his passing.

And if the pattern remains, it will be Snape who keeps him from following. And Hagrid who reminds him that he has friends to grieve if he should run off before his time.

And I am about 70% certain that this last may happen.

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Bloody Hell, that is longshockyes

Originally posted by Demonic Phoenix
Bloody Hell, that is longshockyes

hmm interesting.

Originally posted by Depressed Girl

You quoted me, that's a $5 fine, my quotes are patented😛.

I'm not sure if that much speculation is worth reading.

hmm I stopped reading it on the 2nd post.