Harry's Protection (was Re: Questions)

[arrowsmithbt]

No: HPFGUIDX 119330


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "catimini15" <nadinesaintamour at h...> wrote:
> 
> snip>
> Today, I have decided to try to explain myself thoroughly on The Boy
> Who Lived. I can't help but think of all the similarities between
> Harry and Tom/Voldy. Like you said, there are «too many parallels
> between the two». I know that Voldy was an elderly man in G'sH but he
> once was a boy. A boy named Tom Riddle who grew up to be Voldemort.
> JKR once said that we should ask ourselves why didn't Voldemort die in
> G'sH ? Could it be because Tom - when a baby - also received some sort
> of protection ? Given by his dying mother maybe ? Just like Lily did
> for Harry ? This is what I meant by Voldy being a boy, or maybe THE
> boy who lived ! Voldy seems to think that it is his work on
> immortality** that saved him... Wouldn't it be ironic if it was the
> love of Tom's mother, trapped in Voldy's body when the AK backfired in
> G'sH, that permitted him (Vapor!mort) to survive, to live, or merely
> exist ? After all, DD did call Voldy Tom in the MoM (OotP). There has
> always been something, or someone there (in Voldy) still alive. Merely
> existing. Could it have been (could it be ?) Briefly-But-Just-Enough-
> Loved-By-His-Mother-Tom ? This idea could almost be in sync with your
> possession theory ! Yes ? No ? Anyway... Tom's mum was the second to
> last descendant of Slytherin (a very powerful wizard). She died giving
> birth but maybe she was herself a powerful enough witch to cast a
> protection spell on her soon-to-be orphaned son.
> 


Ca va, Nadine!

"The Boy Who Lived" - that would indeed be a neat, not to say sneaky 
way of hiding a clue in plain sight if the concept of Life or some variation
thereon turned out to be the force in  the Locked Room. 

But Voldy (or rather Tom) - the problem so far as I'm  concerned is that
we know so little about his early life and hard times. His mother died
giving birth to him - or almost immediately afterwards, and then he's
off to a Muggle orphanage. Otherwise it's a complete blank. Yet some-
how Tom knows he's descended from S. Slytherin, knows who his father
is, knows his father rejected his mother and so on.

A pertinent question is *how* does he know? And perhaps linked to that 
- what happened to the rest of his mother's family? More information will
appear, I  think - mostly because of overlapping timelines. DD, some 
other members of the staff (Binns?) or even the portraits of past Head-
masters on DD's walls, could have known his mother as a student at 
Hogwarts; McGonagall is roughly the same age as Tom - they could have
been at school together.

The parallels between Tom and Harry *are* intruiging and no accident 
IMO. There are hints of some sort of repetition of life events, and when
you start to add in 'coincidences' such as the wands made with Fawkes'
feathers, their physical similarities and how they each think the other is
'familiar' then we can be pretty damn certain that JKR is up to something.
Is Tom a failed DD project and Harry his second  attempt? Or was DD 
afraid that if he didn't intervene then Harry may have become another 
Voldy? (I keep remembering that the Prophecy says "will be his equal" -
it says nothing about Harry being his opposite.)

Protective maternal spells from Tom's mum have been suggested 
before, though with my blood-thirsty tastes I'd think it more appropriate
if it was a curse - making Tom her agent of revenge on uncaring Muggles,
maybe even placing a compulsion on Tom to seek out the Chamber so
that he could use whatever Ancestor!Salazar left there to further his
crusade. (The implication ("..it took me 5 years..) is that he started
searching for the Chamber almost as soon as he started at Hogwarts.
Coincidence?)

It's no secret that I consider Tom finally entering that Chamber to be
his defining moment. From then on he thinks of himself as Voldemort, 
not Tom. Something happened in that Chamber when Salazar's heir
came to collect his inheritance - I think of possession by a malign spirit;
others may have different ideas - but he inherits because his mothers
blood flows in his veins. If it hadn't it's highly likely he would have died.
He's half Muggle and the Basilisk is hot stuff on folks like that. That in
itself is a 'protective spell' of sorts.

In a similar way GH is Harry's defining moment. It's what turns him into
what he is; protective spells, the Voldy fragment -  everything that makes
Harry Potter different from every other wizard child.

Yet once again we're mugged by JKR - lack of information again. We know
the results of GH but not why it turned out that way. Frustrating. Yet JKR
tells us this is important -  the answer to "why didn't Voldy die?" I think 
his *physical* body  did die - but not his guiding spirit, essence, call it
what you will. Most of this is summarised in "Shared Thoughts" 108664.

Now if you really want to be devious, cunning or indulge in thinking the
unthinkable - maybe it was that transferred Voldy bit that kept Harry alive.
There's a thought. If Voldy couldn't die and part of Voldy was in Harry,
then Harry couldn't die either. The possible repercussions of that
scenario make me hum with pleasure.

> Nadine:
> I am not too keen on mushy mushy love resolution of the series but I
> suspect «les bons sentiments», like we say in french, will play a key
> part at the end of book seven.
> 
> ** Am I the only one to be bothered by the fact that Nicolas Flamel
> (and his wife) postponed their deaths by six hundred years and nobody
> complains while it seems a terrible crime for Voldemort to have tried
> to achieve immortality ? He is an evil lord, a cruel assassin, an
> outlaw, but why is his work on immortality so reprehensible ?

Kneasy:
That makes two of us. As a mere insensitive brute, romance holds no
attractions. Still, if I don't like it I have to read book 7 only once. I can
then pretend it ended differently.

The Flamels - yes. I can't help  but feel that they're important somehow.
We still haven't had confirmation that they're actually dead. I did once
suggest that DD was Nicholas Flamel's partner and had much more to
do with the Stone than being its guardian - he might even have used it.
But really I don't think that Voldy grasping for immortality is so terrible
in itself -  it's just what he'd do with his life if he was unkillable.