"Life-Debt" Gripe

[Jesta Hijinx]

No: HPFGUIDX 59275

While at work today, I thought of something I've been meaning to post to 
this list for a while:

I see relatively frequent, almost casual references to "life debts" between 
characters.  (It's okay - just to save some typing, I know what the concept 
means - I tend to leave out lengthy expository trains of thought like that 
in e-mail when I assume everyone has the same knowledge base I do - so 
please, nobody post a long discussion of the meaning of "life debt" and the 
cultures in which it crops up.  ;-))

Yet nowhere does the phrase actually appear in canon that I know of.  Anyone 
got a cite they care to share?

I ask because while a nice idea, I think that it's a tacit assumption that 
might not really hold in the WW on the part of fandom that any of these 
characters owe or feel they owe a life debt to another.  Just because it's 
common among world cultures and in literature (the most recent media 
reference *I* can recall is Qui-Gon Jinn speaking to Boss Nass about Jar-Jar 
Binks in "Phantom Menace") doesn't mean that's how JKR is writing in the 
Potterverse.

Any thoughts?

Felinia Beauclerc

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