Ron's 'sight'

[abigailnus]

No: HPFGUIDX 36618

Replying to a slightly stale post here - an occupational hazard when you don't check the group for over 24 hours and 
over 100 (!) messages accumulate.  Hope somebody's still interested.

Katze offered additional proofs for Ron's alleged prescience:

> Another interesting one that I just found...Ron mentions an animal, and
> then Trelawney takes the tea cup away. Trelawney see a Grim:
>  "The Grim, my dear, the Grim!" ... "The giant, spectral dog that haunts
> churchyards! My dear boy, it is an omen - ..."
> 
> Now...a few pages later...while at lunch, Ron says: "Harry," ... "you
> haven't seen a great black dog anywhere, have you?"
> 
> The interesting thing is that Ron says _black_ dog, where Trelawney
> never mentions a color.

But only a few paragraphs later, I believe, Ron mentions that his uncle (?) Bilious saw a Grim and died soon after, so 
presumably Ron has heard about the Grim and knows that it's supposed to be a black dog.
> 
> Also, I believe Ron was the first to suggest that Lockhart had not
> performed the exploits chronicled in his books. (CoS, Ch. 6, last line)

Now that's just common sense, frankly, and I was surprised that no-one except Ron seriously considered this as a 
possibility until Lockhart confirmed it himself.  I assumed Lockhart was a fake almost immediately, and certainly took it 
for granted after the pixie incident.  The scene in the teachers' room after Ginny is taken certainly suggests that the 
other teachers have no faith in his abilities and haven't for quite a while.
> 
> He also made some statements regarding Percy and his job becoming more
> important than his family, but I don't remember which book it was in.

Again, this statement (if it is indeed a true prediction which we have yet to discover) probably stems more from Ron's 
knowledge of Percy's character as his brother than some occult insight, in much the same way that he tells Harry in 
GoF that the twins are obsessed with making money.  It's not prescience to evaluate your knowledge of a person's 
character and past actions and draw conclusion on what they might do in the future.

In general my feelings on Ron's supposed Sight are very ambivalent.  There's no denying that he does occasionally hit 
the bullseye - suggesting that Riddle killed Myrtle, and the infamous Divinations homework scene in which he predicts 
his fall-out with Harry and his own drowning.  That very same scene, however, contains many other predictions which 
never came true - Ron was never trampled by a rampaging Hippogriff, or lost a fight or a bet (I forget which one was 
supposed to happen to him and which to Harry).  He certainly didn't drown twice.

So, while I'm not denying that Ron occasionally gets to make those neat foreshadowning comments that JKR likes so 
much, I'm really not sure if we're supposed to infer something from them about his abilities, or whether JKR is using 
him as a mouthpiece for a neat joke that makes rereading the books fun.  I imagine time will tell.

Abigail