Dumbledore's Motives

[Liz Muir]

No: HPFGUIDX 40934

I wrote:
>>I doubt Snape told Dumbledore about Quirrell, though it is possible.
Otherwise, why would he have to sneak away on his own to stop Quirrell
when the troll came in? Wouldn't Dumbledore have realized? Snape could
have gotten help keeping Quirrell from the stone. No, Snape seems
pretty loner-ish. I think he would try to handle this on his own.<<

Dante replied:
>>No, this doesn't seem right to me. Snape is on his second chance with
Dumbledore. He was spying against Voldemort for him in the last war.
When Harry overhears Snape talking to Quirrell, Snape says something to
the effect of "We'll have another little chat soon, when you've had
time to think things over and decided where you loyalties lie." If he's
questioning Quirrell's loylaties, then he must know he's in league with
Voldemort and probably knows why he wants to stone. As much of a loner
that Snape is, it seems unbelieveable to me that he wouldn't go to
Dumbledore. The stone is at Hogwarts. The idea is to keep it safe. If
Quirrell 'helped' safe guard the stone, then it was very much at risk.
No, I think Dumbledore had to know. He's supposed to be this all-seeing
kind of guy, esp. where Hogwarts is concerned. How could a trio of nosy
first years figure something out that he wasn't aware of? Seems
unlikely.<<

My response:
I dunno, but I'm still seeing Snape as a loner/vigilante kind of guy.
He does seem to like keeping things an "inside" job. Why didn't the
trio go to authorities? (besides Hagrid, who is not so reliable) First,
Dumbledore taking over would ruin the plot. Second, they wanted to do
it on their own. There's a lot of times when it seems logical to go to
the authorities in hindsight, but you just don't do it when you are in
the situation.

I wrote:
>>How could he have known about Quirrell's "second face"? Quirrell wore
the turban for a reason and Voldemort didn't exactally go around being
obvious.<<

Dante replied:
>>He takes that little interest in the welfare of his faculty? Even
Snape picked up on something off about the man. Who knows how long
Quirrell had been working at Hogwarts - we don't know if the high
turnover rate of DADA teachers occurred before Harry's time. Even if
Dumbledore didn't know Voldie was actually on Quirrell's head, he
should have suspected something, don't you think?<<

I think there was a high turn-over rate of DADA teachers before the
first book. In CoS, Dumbledore says in the
"resolution-of-all-plot-lines" scene in his office that he must draft
an ad for a new DADA teacher. Then he says, "My, we do seem to run
through them, don't we?" Depending on how you take this, running
through two DADA teachers hardly seems like anything worth notice,
especially if the first one had been there for a few years.

Despite the fact that Dumbledore is "a genius," I really don't think he
suspected anything. Quirrell fooled everyone else at the school. We
know that the trio didn't suspect Quirrell and I think if McGonagall
had noticed something, she would have told Dumbledore. It just isn't
very likely that Dumbledore noticed something and didn't do anything
about it. We have no "cannons" pointing that way.

Maybe Dumbledore does have his own reasons for letting this go on, but
I'm seriously doubting he's planning total domination. If he wanted to
take over, he could easily. Remember that his powers "rival
You-Know-Who's at the height of his power." If he is all Slytherin-y
and wanted to take over, he could have done it long ago.

Another Dumbledore related mystery which I'd like to bring up: If he
suspected Tom Riddle back when he was a transfiguration teacher, why
didn't he do something about that? Seems to fit into this discussion,
but I have no real ideas on the subject.



=====
Rowen Avalon (Liz Muir)

"We will not examine how grainy the frosting is. It's a cake. That's all we need to know."
"Everyone keeps learn more and more about less and less until finally they know everything about nothing. It's called specializing."
"The guilty taketh the truth to be hard, for it cutteth then to the very center."
"I have nothing but contempt for a man who can spell a word only one way."

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