[HPforGrownups] Re: Lupin & Lockhart

[Becky Walkden]

No: HPFGUIDX 58475



Phyllis <erisedstraeh2002 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Becky Walkden wrote:

> Lupin is a warewolf and there is no cure.  <snip>  BUT, in the book 
> before, Lockhart describes performing an extremely complicated and 
> difficult spell that turned a warewolf back into a man and freed 
> the village of this terror.  Now, of course Lockhart was a fraud 
> and a liar.  But he merely borrowed valid stories of other people's 
> daring do.  Which means that SOMEBODY cast this spell and it 
> works!  If the spell itself was a fraud, he wouldn't have dared 
> describe it in a book of course.  

Now me:

I think that if Lockhart was bold enough to attribute the fantastic 
deeds of others to himself, he was probably bold enough to fabricate 
the deeds in the first place.  So, IMO, he probably made this up in 
its entirety.  Which should have been a red flag to his readers (or 
at least to Dumbledore) that he was a fraud.  Which, to me, is the 
more perplexing issue - why did Dumbledore hire him if he was so 
obviously a fraud?

Another possibility is that the "cure" he was referring to in his 
book was the Wolfsbane Potion.  Lupin refers to the Potion as 
a "cure" - in the Shrieking Shack, he says: "My parents tried 
everything, but in those days there was no cure.  The Potion that 
Professor Snape has been making for me is a very recent discovery" 
(PoA, Ch. 18).  So perhaps Lockhart was just taking a bit of 
editorial license in calling the "cure" a "charm" rather than 
a "potion," and in saying that the "cure" turned the werewolf back 
into a man (instead of saying that the "cure" turned the werewolf 
into a harmless wolf).  But I think this is a stretch - more likely, 
Lockhart made it all up (the "Wagga Wagga werewolf" and 
the "Homorphus Charm" both sound pretty bogus to me).

~Phyllis

ME:  I can't buy that because he would have been certainly caught if he was making up none-existant charms and such.  There are too many very knowledgable witches and wizards reading books (these were big sellers-he was famous and respected) for him to get away with a complete fabrication.  The only thing he could really fabricate was in placing himself in the heart of the action.  Not the act itself.  People would DEFINATELY have known and blown his cover a long time ago.  

As far as why Dumbeldore hired him,  maybe Hagrid's explanation rang true.  He was the ONLY person who wanted it!  Huggs Becky





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