NoxiousGas!Voldemort - Stoppering Death - Quirrell's Tenure

[Amy Z]

No: HPFGUIDX 39779

Datalaur (welcome!) wrote:

>What if any is the significance of Voldemort's spirit passing
thru
>Harry and knocking him out, in HPSS?  Or was that just the
movie?

Yeah, it's just the movie.  It *could* have happened in canon--no way to 
know since Harry was unconscious by the time Voldemort departed Quirrell's 
body.  So by the same token, Voldemort *could* have donned tap shoes and 
sung "Singin' in the Rain," which perhaps they also should have added to the 
movie.  One of these days I'll write a rant about that scene and post it to 
the Movie list.  <Amy is bowled over by stampede of people rushing to My 
Groups to unsubscribe from -Movie>

Amanda wrote:

>To "stopper death" is to put death in a bottle; it's a poetic way of saying
>"to put death in a bottle and put the stopper in." Stopper = the cork, the
>thing on top of the bottle.

>So everything else in your argument aside (which I haven't been following
>too closely), Snape is not saying he knows (or can teach) how to *stop
>death*, he is saying he knows (and can teach) how to make deadly poisons.
>Even if he knows anything about immortality potions, he's not talking about
>them here.

>Okay?

You are absolutely right . . . and yet . . . and yet . . .

This phrase *suggests* the meaning "stop death" even if it does not say so 
explicitly.  What gets stoppered?  A bottle.  So the bottle is death, i.e. 
it's a bottle labeled "death," i.e. it has a skull and crossbones on it 
(=contains poison) OR it is a bottle containing death.  In my imagination 
that leads to the thought of death as a power that can be forced, 
genie-like, into a bottle and forced to stay there by a stopper.  In that 
interpretation, the contents of the bottle are some kind of potion that 
postpones death.  It might even grant immortality, but that is a further 
step and even Voldemort doesn't claim straight out to have achieved it.

Ali wrote:

>although I admit that canon is confusing.
>Quirrell is not introduced as a new teacher, which he probably would
>have been had he just taken up the post. Also, when Harry first meets
>Quirrell in the Leaky Cauldron Hagrid tells him that Quirrell *is* a
>teacher at Hogwarts, rather than he is going to be a teacher at
>Hogwarts. Finally, when Harry asks Percy who the teacher sitting next
>to Quirrell is, during the banquet, Percy says (memory here not
>verbatim), so you already know Professor Quirrell. This implies to me
>that Percy already knows Quirrell, which he probably wouldn't if
>Quirrell was just starting.

Ooh, never thought of that one.  The other line that hints most strongly 
that Quirrell's been there at least a year is Hagrid's comment that he is 
now (post-travels) scared of his subject and (the kicker:) his students.  
How would Hagrid know this if Quirrell hadn't had at least one term since 
returning from Albania?

In contrast, it never does say in canon that no recent DADA teacher has 
lasted more than a year.  It says in GF that *Harry* has never had one last 
more than three terms, but that could easily fit with his being around for 
Quirrell's final year.

Amy Z

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