The Chamber Entrance, the Wolvesbane Potion, Hogwarts Tuition, and Blame

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

No: HPFGUIDX 33809

At 3:31 PM +0000 1/15/02, lucky_kari wrote:
>
>I feel pretty sure that Salazar
>Slytherin built the Chamber of Secrets,

Apolgies for replying to old posts - I spent ten days offline and am 
only starting to catch up - but:  Salazar _can't_ have built the 
current entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, as indoor plumbing didn't 
exist in his day.  (I don't doubt that he built the chamber itself.)

So: either someone, at some point along the way, knew about the 
passage when Hogwarts was being refitted for indoor plumbing, or the 
castle refit the passage itself when it went through a "revision" in 
the sanitary system.  (I prefer the second theory - originally the 
entrance was a stone slide under a heavy stone basin in one of the 
chamber pot rooms, and the castle shifted it to its current 
ignominious position under a sink . . .)

Either way, the pipes must be a new way for the basilisk to travel - 
presumably Riddle taught it to do that the first time around?


At 7:01 PM +0000 1/16/02, cindysphynx wrote:
>How interesting!  Boy, this is a tough one.  I can't imagine Snape
>setting out to discover a werewolf potion given his apparent dislike
>of werewolves.  Perhaps he discovered it accidently?  If so, how
>would he test it?  Would he ask Lupin to volunteer?  I can't imagine
>one could make a great deal of money off of such a potion, as the
>target market consists of werewolves who can't find paid work.

Well, if I were the Potions Master at Hogwarts, and I'd once almost 
been killed by a werewolf, I might well have a motive to research a 
cure for lycanthropy - not for the werewolves' sake, but for my own 
future safety.


At 8:27 PM +0000 1/16/02, Hollydaze wrote:
>This is an edited copy of two posts I sent to another HP site about 
>why I feel that Hogwarts does not require tuition and is a public 
>school:
>
>(During this post I refer to Public and Private schools as Americans 
>would -even though I'm British- to avoid confusion)

I think it's actually roughly equivalent to the Governor's Academies 
here in the US - funded by the government, but at a higher level than 
the local school districts, you pay for supplies and some of your 
board but not tuition or rooming, you live at the school except for 
holidays.  I suspect that most of its funding comes from an initial 
endowment by the Founders, well-managed by the Board of Directors.


At 1:03 PM +0000 1/17/02, sing2wine wrote:
>It is possible that we are too philosophical in our desire to
>assign blame. I also didn't understand why McGonagall could not act -
>even 3rd year Harry was able to temporarily hold off a dementor.  
>One would have thought - listening to McGonagall shout at Fudge about
>bringing "that thing in here" - that she had no magical powers at
>all!

The only people other than Harry we see casting the Patronum spell 
are Lupin and Dumbledore.  Lupin explicitly tells Harry that the 
spell is "ridiculously advanced," which suggests to me that it might 
not be in every wizard's repertoire.  If the dementor moved fast 
enough, and Minerva and Snape were rusty enough (how often would you 
use it if there weren't dementors around?), they might not have had a 
happy enough memory in mind fast enough to stop it.  (Heck, Snape 
might not have a sufficiently happy memory at all.)

-- 
  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles at earthlink.net
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