SYMBOLISM, MUGGLES AGAINST VOLDEMORT, PROPHECIES, BOGGARTS, ERISED

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

No: HPFGUIDX 43760

SYMBOLISM 

JOdel wrote:

<<  Those boats not only cross the lake, they enter a tunnel and 
emerge in an underground cavern all of which are motifs which can 
carry heavy symbolic baggage. >>

Now that you mention it, the school-leavers (if Hogwarts is like a 
British secondary school) or graduates (if Hogwarts, being the 
terminal level of schooling, is like a British university) must LEAVE 
via the underground cavern, tunnel, and boat to their new adult lives.

MUGGLES AGAINST VOLDEMORT

Carol wrote:

<< I'm just not too sure what a Muggle could do against a dark wizard 
as powerful as Voldemort, not to mention his followers. After all, 
even most wizards didn't have much of a chance against him. >>

Muggles could do some things to help the struggle. They don't need 
magic to do library research. They can do logic puzzles (as Hermione 
pointed out when faced with the Potion bottles logic puzzle), and 
they can figure out complicated plots from scattered clues. They 
could carry a magical artifact or a bottle of potion that someone 
else had made, and throw it at the Death Eaters. JKR has a better 
imagination than me and could think of more things.

PROPHECIES

Swimsalone wrote:

<< that James' son would be his downfall, and therefore had to kill 
Harry and James. Lily didn't have to die if James was killed, >>

Unless Lily happened to be pregnant with another son at the time. 
That is just a nitpick and not a plot suggestion.

Roo Mahoney replied to Doffy99:

<<  there is no irony I love more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. >>

Naama wrote:

<< do you think this could be *the* prophecy Dumbledore talks about? 
(snip) could Voldemort have known the Potters' son is the appointed 
one, and the "go reproduce" order was set against Harry in the first 
place? >>

It *could* be, but I prefer to believe that there were multiple 
predictions. Voldemort got the one about the boy born near Lammas 
1980 and ordered his followers to go out and spawn BECAUSE he didn't 
know which boy was the appointed one. If he had known it was the 
Potters' son, he wouldn't have bothered with anyone else's son. 
Voldemort's followers obeyed him, but the Potters had a son at the 
same time without having heard of Voldemort's prediction. 

Someone on the Light Side got the one about Harry (according to me, 
AFTER Harry had already been born), the one that MIGHT be "the last 
of the Potters will destroy Voldemort", and Voldemort heard about it, 
so he tried to protect himself by killing Harry and James (and maybe 
James's father) as Swimsalone and others have said. 

I believe that Harry's unique ability to destroy Voldemort is due 
to Voldemort's attack on baby Harry, so it was a self-fulfilling 
prophecy as Roo said. I believe that Harry and Voldie got their lives 
tangled up together, not just Harry getting Parselmouth, so that 
neither can die while the other is alive. So Harry will have to die 
in the act of killing Voldie in the final battle in book 7 -- he 
will, by that time, know the price he'll pay, and choose to pay it 
for the sake of protecting others; just as the self-fulfilling 
prophecies are a motif from Classical Greek myth, so dying to save 
others is a motif from Christian theology.

I am not committed to the notion that the Potter prophecy was 
Trelawney's previous true prophecy. As someone has pointed out, 
Dumbledore wouldn't know that Trelawney's prophecy was true until it 
had happened, and not yet has the last of the Potters (or James 
Potter's son) destoyed the Dark Lord. 

Btw, some people argue that Tom Riddle (before becoming an immortal 
snake-man) begat James Potter on Mr Grandpa Potter's wife, thus 
explaining the physical resemblance and fitting in the popular 
grandfather versus grandson motif. (It's in the story of Danae: her 
father, whose name I forget, locked her in a tower because of a 
prophecy that her son would kill him. Stone walls and iron bars 
didn't prevent Zeus from seducing her (in the form of a shower of 
gold, said by some to be a reference to bribing the jailors) and her 
son was Perseus, who killed Medusa and used Medusa's head to turn his 
grandfather to stone.) In that case, James and Harry are not true 
Potters and someone else is the last of the Potters -- maybe James's 
hypthetical sister's son, who has a different surname? Maybe 
Longbottom?

BOGGARTS

Hollydaze! wrote

<< if the boggart were to turn into a real moon then it would partly 
destroy the planet (rather worrying idea) >>

I *love* the way you phrased that. Btw, I don't know if you saw that 
I referenced your post # 32380 in my post # 42888.

There'snothingto it wrote:

<< What I want to know about boggarts is what would happen if you 
faced one and your greatest fear was not something physical. What if 
you had a fear of closed spaces or of being alone? What if your 
greatest fear was someone finding out you were gay? Or perhaps Ron 
Weaslys fear of spiders will be replaced with the fear of Hermione 
and the rest of the school finding out how he feels about her? >>

As someone already mentioned, we have already seen that when 
Hermione's fear was the abstract fear of doing badly in school, her 
Boggart took the form of McGonagall telling her that she had failed 
all her exams. I imagine that fear of closed spaces would inspire a 
Boggart to take the form of a not-too-large Armoire and come after 
you with its door open to capture you inside. Fear of someone finding 
out that you were gay, or in love with Hermione, or any other secret, 
could induce the Boggart to turn into an issue of DAILY PROPHET or 
WITCH WEEKLY with your secret in a Big Headline over a Rita Skeeter 
article. Fear of being alone is a little harder: maybe a big mirror 
showing you yourself locked in a solitary confinement cell or an 
isolation ward with QUARRANTINE signs all over? 

SPEAKING OF BIG MIRRORS

Emma_look_alike wrote:

<< predictions about what Dumbledore saw in the Mirror of Erised. He 
saw himself holding socks. Perhaps he wants the House Elves to be 
free, maybe to help fight Voldemort. (snip) Another thing is that 
Dumbledore couldn't have known that Harry would free Dobby with a 
sock (it happened in CoS, and the Mirror of Erised was in SS/PS) >>

Maybe Dumbledore's Erised could depict socks for freeing House 
Elves because, even tho' Harry has not yet freed Dobby with a 
sock, Dumbledore has a premonition about it, or has heard of 
someone else freeing a House Elf with a sock. He might want to free 
the Hogwarts House Elves and be unable to do so because they won't 
accept it.

On another tentacle, one of my friends believes that Dumbledore is a 
big Transfigured or disguised House Elf, and sees the socks because 
he yearns for his own freedom. She says that he is such a great 
wizard because he has House Elf magic, which is very strong: no human 
can Apparate at Hogwarts, but Dobby can Pop! without difficulty. She 
says Nicholas Flamel is his master, a good master as masters go.

Myself, I don't believe those socks have anything to do with House 
Elves. I believe they are a new pair of the extremely ugly and 
uncomfortable hand-knit socks his beloved late wife or mother used to 
give him for Christmas *every* year, and his true heart's desire is 
not the socks themselves, but having the late beloved around to give 
them to him. I'm inclined to think it was his wife and she died in 
the fight against Grindelwald...