Quirrell's Tenure (Again)/Stone+Chamber connections

[jodel at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 44111

Elouise writes;

>>There's another interesting thing about what Hagrid says: he was all right 
while he was *studying out of books*, but then he went off for a year to get 
practical experience. You could read this to mean that he went staight from 
studying, to practical research (perhaps in preparation for his appointment 
at Hogwarts?) to his first teaching job. But we're still left with the 
'frightened of the students' problem and the fact that Percy recognises 
Quirrell.<<

Unless you read it that Quirrell is even younger than we've suspected and 
that Percy (already a 5th year) remembers Quirrel from when Quirrell was a 
student. From all we have deffinitely been told about Quirrell, he would have 
been just the sort of academic high achiever that Percy might have admired.

Yet another suggestion;
Quirrell's DADA position may have been aranged quite a while in advance. Up 
to a year's worth.  Suppose for a minute that the DADA teacher before 
Quirrell had already announced his intention to retire in a year or two. 
(We've heard nothing about the position being jinxed at any point before 
Harry and Co. showed up, after all.) Top DADA student Quirrell was one of the 
people aware of this. In fact, the old teacher regarded young Quirrell as a 
protege, may have even been grooming him as his replacement. The concensus is 
that Quirrell might make a fine DADA teacher, but needs practical experience 
in the field. 

Or, conversely, Quirrell finishes Hogwarts, does a year of scholarly research 
on the subject, keeps in contact with his old professor who tells him that he 
intends to retire in a year or so, and suggests applying for the position, 
says that he will put in a word for him and suggests taking a year to get 
some practical experience. 

In either case Quirrell goes off and performs quite well in the field. So 
well that he is distinctly over-confident when he gets to Albania and decides 
to investigate the tales of a forested area where, over the past decade, 
there have been reports of animals, particularly snakes, which behave in an 
omniously unnatural manner.

The vampires and the hag are a cover story, and Voldemort didn't let Quirrell 
get anywhere near his old instructor, who would probably have tried to do 
something about the problem. 

And, no, Voldemort apparantly did not take physical possession of Quirrell 
before the attempt on Gringotts. Wizards evidently are not like beasts. It 
seems to be possible to take psychic control them without establishing 
physical possession. Voldemort avoided taking physical possession for as long 
as he could because he knew from experience that it burned out the host. 
However the Gringotts affair tipped the scales. (Quirrel may have made an 
attempt to break contact once inside the heavily warded tunnel complex.)

I've half a conviction that at some point late in the school year, when the 
mutual body was failing and had to be kept alive by applications of unicorn 
blood Quirrelmort owled Lucius Malfoy and told him to deploy the Riddle 
diary. Once he had the Stone, if the diary revenant could be released from 
the book, Quirrel and his patched-together body could be dispensed with in 
favor of a willing host body into which he would probably be able to meld 
completely with the original owner.

In fact, I suspect that owling Lucius was his last act before entering the 
labrynth of challenges. He knew the place was a trap, and while he might not 
have known exactly how it was set, he strongly suspected that he was unlikely 
to be able to get the Stone out of the labrynth without alerting Dumbledore. 
Which means that he knew there was a good chance that he wasn't going to be 
able to brazen it out afterwards, and was going to have to make a break for 
it.

Which means that he knew he wasn't going to have the time to kill Harry 
Potter.

This year.

So he told Lucius to give Potter the Riddle diary. 

And THAT is what Dobby heard Lucius talking about. (To Narcissia? Telling her 
he had to make a trip Gringotts, did she need anything out of storage?) It 
was *Harry Potter* who was supposed to have openened that Chamber, set the 
basilisk on the school and traded his life for that of the diary's revenant. 
I mean, really. Would Dobby have gone gibbering in terror to *Harry Potter* 
over a threat to the life of Ginny Weasley? Does he even know Ginny Weasley? 

And we sat and watched it go awry before our very eyes when Muggle-loving 
Arthur Weasley, instead of going for his wand when taunted -- like any 
self-respecting wizard -- threw a punch instead, dragged Lucius into a 
fistfight in public (in a bookstore which was packed for a media event, just 
to add insult to injury) and so enraged him that he planted the diary on 
Arthur's daughter (and the aple of his eye, I suspect) instead. 

And that may have something to do with that ambiguous "Lucius, my slippery 
friend" remark in Goblet, and the fact that Voldemort is so conspicuosly is 
"not speaking" about  Lucius's part in setting up the Chamber of Secrets 
debacle, resulting in the loss of Salizar's basilisk. 

(For the record, I do NOT believe that Voldemort is in the habit of casually 
Crucioing just ANY of his followers. There are some that he knows are much 
too valuable to give any cause to reconsider their alliance. But he will 
certainly torture OTHER of their fellows in their presence as a reminder that 
he COULD. Draco has a point. Lucius Malfoy is EVERY bit as important as he 
thinks he is.)

Chamber and Stone are not two separate adventures, they are two parts of a 
single campaign to restore Voldemort. 

-JOdel