Secret Keepers & Sirius Black

[Grey Wolf <greywolf1@jazzfree.com>]

No: HPFGUIDX 51676

Rona:
> 1.)I decided to post a quetion on why Siruis Black changed his mind
> on being the secert keeper. 

Sirius was the obvious choice as secret keeper. Thus, he would be the 
prime target from Voldemort once he discovered that the Potters were 
secretly kept. He was, as can be found in canon, planning to go into 
hidding, but that would still be a danger, since he could still be 
found. However, by transfering in the last possible moment the secret 
keeper job to Peter, the least probable selection, they were probably 
hoping that no DE would ever think about the change, thus adding 
confussion and missinformation to the defenses of the Potters. It 
would've worked, too, if Peter hadn't been the spy to begin with.

> I also have been trying to find out what
> house he belonged to.  I've looked everywhere and there is no sure
> anwser.  I was assuming that he belonged to Gryffindor. Any help
> would be great.

Since the famous quote "all wizards that went bad are from Slytherin" 
created quite a bit of confussion about Sirius house, that question was 
put to JKR during an interview. You might want to look for it, but IIRC 
the answer was "Gryffindor, of course".

Torsten wrote: 
> I think the obvious question is: Why didn't they use each other? James as secret keeper 
> for Lily and Harry, and Lily as secret keeper for James. But the answer's the same, 
> anyway.
> 
> -Torsten

Could you put a box inside another, and then the outer one inside the 
inner one? Obviously not. By the same reasoning, the secret keeper 
cannot have as secret keeper the person he's secretly keeping (notice 
the wording: hides a group of people *inside* a single soul).

Scott Northrup wrote:

> 
> I think the obvious question is, why didn't they use Dumbledore?
> To which of course, the answer is "Then there wouldn't be a basis for
> the series."

I dislike that sort of answers intensively. Those are the worst form of 
sloppy witting, and I refuse to think that JKR is that bad. There are 
many possible reasons for not choosing Dumbledore, the first and 
foremost is that he would be an even more obvious choice as secret 
keeper than Sirius could be, and thus the Potters might have decided 
against it. Then again, a spell this powerful might cause some sort of 
strain in the individual working as secret keeper, a strain that 
Dumbledore (at that point loosing the war against voldemort) might not 
have been able to sustain (even if he might have selflessly thought he 
could), especially at a time when Dumbledore needed all his powers 
intact in case of a possible confrontation with Voldemort.

The bottom line is that we don't really know how the Fidelius Charm 
works. It might require total dedication from the secret keeper. It 
might tie both keeper and kept to specific locations. It might not work 
within Hogwarts, etc. And of course, the fact that only Peter and 
Sirius knew of the change means that, if Peter hadn't been the spy, 
no-one would've known for a long time, which is a good strategy in 
itself.
 
> Rona again:
> 2.)Why did Lily and James use a Fidelius Charm instead of a
> Unplottable spell.  It seems to me that if its possible to hide an
> entire school then it would be good enough to hide a house or a small
> village(ie Godrics Hollow).  It could just be me.

Unplottability simply prevents a place from showing up on maps. Since 
Godric's Hollow isa muggle village, people would've been suspicious if 
the entire place had suddenly dissapeared from the maps, thus alerting 
Voldemort. And of course, just because it doesn't come up in a map it 
doesn't mean that any DE passing through the place couldn't have 
spotted James going out for some eggs or something. The Fidelius, 
however, hides the people in such a way that they are impossible to 
find - invisible, for all purposes. Assuming it had worked, Voldemort 
wouldn't have way to know were to look for them, and only general 
destruction of wide ares might work against them (in the level of 
burning down the house to kill a wasp - but since wizards don't seem to 
posses atomic bombs nor equivalents, that option wouldn't be available 
to Voldemort).

Hope that helps,

Grey Wolf