Naming Voldemort (Chapter 24: Occlumency)
Maria Holub
sopraniste at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 5 20:36:20 UTC 2004
No: HPFGUIDX 109072
Melanie said:
6) Snape tells Harry many times in this chapter not to
say the name "Voldemort." Why is it that even
Voldemort's own followers cannot say his name? Is
their significance in calling him the Dark Lord?
(this is just something that I have always been
curious about..love to know what you guys think about
it). <<
I say:
This has already been touched on a bit by a few
people, but I wanted to add my two cents to the "speak
of the devil" angle. I am very into comparative
literature, so even if JKR has NOT been influenced by
the books I'm going to refer to, there's a rather
interesting thing that crops up in a couple of fantasy
series that I can think of off the top of my head.
There is often a hesitation to name extreme Evil
Overlord-types, and similar to "speak of the devil" it
often seems to involve the fear of attracting said
Evil Overlord's attention. In Robert Jordan's The
Wheel of Time, you don't name The Dark One, because it
attracts his attention and bad things happen. In David
Eddings' Belgariad, you don't name the God of Angarak,
because he's listening for it. But Eddings' heroes
manage to get around this, and I THINK this may be
what Dumbledore is trying to do by encouraging people
to use Voldemort's name. Because, if EVERYBODY used
Voldemort's name, it would be being used so often that
he couldn't possibly pay attention to it all, and he
may even start ignoring it completely.
That is my theory.
Flop
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