enigmatic Bill,"that book", Trelawney, the missing Weasley child

[pigwidgeon37 at yahoo.it]

No: HPFGUIDX 21331

Scott wrote:
"After Arthur makes the above statement there was silence for a 
moment, and then Bill says "Well, it didn't help us tonight, whoever 
conjured it." (This sentence confuses me the more I read it. Is he 
saying that they "didn't help" by scaring away the DEs? How *could* 
the Dark Mark "help" them?) He goes on to say "It scared the Death 
Eaters away the moment they saw it. They all Disapparated before we'd 
got near enough to unmask any of them. We caught the Robertses before 
they hit the ground though."

You're not te only one to be confused about this sentence. I tried 
the old trick reading it aloud, putting the emphasis on different 
words (it *didn't* help us tonight, it didn't *help* us tonight, it 
didn't help *us* tonight, it didn't help us *tonight*), but didn't 
get much more sense out of it. Because who has ever been *helped* by 
the Dark Mark? It would be clear if he said something like "It made 
our work even more difficult tonight" which would be the "it didn't 
*help* us tonight" version.

Edjbroker wrote
"Yes, it's amazing how HP is about Good over Evil and sticking up for 
your friends can be put forth as "the Devil's work". Of course as 
early as 150 years ago, we burned mostly women because they were 
witches!"

I really dislike commenting on books I haven't read, but as the HP 
vs. religion discussion seems to be going on everywhere (an Austrian 
bishop went as far as saying HP books were the work of the devil), I 
would like to say that probably none of those who make similar 
statements, has read the books. Which would be sufficient to get them 
off their (to me, very strange and medieval) opinions: Just think of 
Dumbledore's speech to the students at the end of GoF where he says 
that the time has come to decide between what is right and what is 
easy. This is practically a quotation from the New Testament where 
Jesus says that you have to choose the stony path to arrive in 
paradise.
The books certainly do not encourage neither to lie nor to break 
rules. In fact, they strongly encourage to develop a conscience, to 
mature and not to hide behind rules and double-faced morals.

jenny from ravenclaw wrote:
"Trelawney strikes me as someone who is caught up with the idea of 
being a Seer - the way she dresses and speaks in that misty voices 
are indications of that.  She also has something in common with 
Snape, as she likes to intimidate her students by predicting their 
deaths or threatening them to not disclose final exam answers or 
terrible things would happen.

The fact that Trelawney can make real predictions occasionally 
doesn't really mean all that much to me. She clearly does not have 
any real control over her abilities and does not even appear to know 
that she can See at all - "I wouldn't presume to predict something as 
far fetched as that!" (or some such similar comment).  Because she 
doesn't know that she can predict things, I don't think she is the 
real deal.  I absolutely believe that there are people who have 
psychic abilities (and I believe that people can definitely see 
ghosts), but she is not one of them.  She's too caught up in her 
image to control and perfect her talent if indeed she really has one."

Dear Jenny, not only do I like everything you say about teaching, I 
also agree with you in my profound dislike of Sibyl Trelawney. IMO, 
it's not only her predicitions that are made up (but for the one in 
PoA), but what makes her extremely scary to me, is that her whole 
personality is made up: Sometimes the facade gets a little crack, 
when she's too annoyed whith her pupils, and then her voice 
becomes "more like professor McGonagall's" and she is "not her usual 
airy fairy self". I don't know whether I'd like to know what's really 
under that mask!!
The "old fraud" theory, IMHO, is corroborated by the fact that she 
really "laps up" the predictions invented by Harry and Ron, because, 
even if the predicted *facts* might pass closer examination, the 
planetar constellations they refer to certainly wouldn't. 
This does nothing to diminish my fear of her real character. On the 
contrary: Just imagine *you* were a teacher( if you really are, 
that's even better) and two students hand you in a piece of homework 
which is so obviously and insultingly made up you can't just look 
past it. Would *you* "read out great portions" of it 
and "congratulate your students"???
If you were a Snape-type, you would completely destroy them before 
the whole class and give two weeks of detention.
If you were a teacher with a pedagogic conscience, you would speak to 
those two in private and have a serious word with them about their 
behaviour in class and their lousy technique of making up predictions.
But WHY would you react as Trelawney did?
I still have to think aout this (feeling still more uneasy) and would 
like to hear what everybody thinks of it!

Danette wrote:
"Actually that is a very plausable theory.  I can see
if happening especially if you compare Bill's age to
Charlie's, Charlie's age to Percy's, Percy's age to
the Twins, the Twins' age to Ron, and Ron's age to
Ginny.  There is a rather large gap between Charlie
and Percy and compared to the gap between any of the
other siblings so it is very easy to see there being
another child in there that died one way or another"

I don't think that's a really  stringent argument for another Weasley 
child died or gone lost. There may be lots of reasons not to have a 
child every year, even if there is the biological possibility to do 
so. Just think of he Weasleys' financial situation! When they had had 
both Bill and Charlie, they were still very young and,as we all know, 
juniors in ministries don't get overlarge salaries.
How did this whole discussion about the dead weasley come up? I 
think, it was by way of what Arthur said about the Dark Mark, giving 
some of us the impression that he might have had a personal 
experience with it.
Now, may I just tell you one thing: My mother is born in 1929, and of 
course she remembers WWII very well (she lived in Vienna). When we 
went to the cinema lots of years ago to see "The Battle of Midway"; 
which was one of the first films to use the sensorround tecnique, I 
still remember her coming out of the cinema all white and shaking, 
because the fim had brought back the memory of the bombs faling on 
Vienna, the houses trembling by their impacts, hiding in the cellar 
etc.etc. She reacted that way, even if she had never lost a family 
member by a bombardment and their house had never been actually hit.
And by the time we saw the film, the war had been over for 35 years! 
Arthur speaks of terrible things that happened only 15 years ago and 
we know him to be a very sensitive person (remember what Gred or 
Forge says in PoA, telling Harry about Arthur's visit to Azkaban!).
To come to a conclusion, I'm not at all convinced that arthur had an 
immediate personal experience with the Dark Mark hovering over The 
Burrows.

Susanna