Hey Lexicon Steve! was: Protection for EVERYONE at Hogwarts

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 89973

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "elfundeb2" <elfundeb at c...> wrote:
> 
> > Carol wrote:
> > See the Timelines at the Lexicon:
> >  
> > There is no place in this time frame for a romantic relationship 
> with 
> > McGonagall.
> > 
> > 
> > Erin:
> > In other words, the Lexicon timeline is not set in stone, and 
> there's 
> > no reason that McGonagall couldn't have been as little as two 
> years 
> > ahead of Tom Riddle.  Maybe liking slightly older girls is one of 
> > the "strange likenesses" Tom and Harry have in common. :-)
> > 
> 
> Debbie:
> 
> While I think the Lexicon is wonderful, and have nothing but 
> admiration for its keeper, I have to agree with Erin on this one.  
> We really have no idea what JKR meant when she said McGonagall 
> was "a sprightly 70".  As Erin pointed out, this could have been 
> intended to be her age at the end of GoF as easily as the beginning 
> of the first book.
> 
> Perhaps even more importantly, this is not something she wrote in 
> the books. Interview statements, IMO, are not as reliable as what 
> she wrote into the books.  With the written word, she has time to 
> reread, rethink, rewrite, and have it reviewed before it is 
> published.  In an interview, OTOH, there is no time for any of these 
> things.  She is asked a question, and it is answered.  I doubt she 
> had time to think through her answer first.  Even if she did, 
> numbers and dates don't seem to be her strong point.
> 
> Seventy is the kind of round number that gets tossed out in an off-
> the-cuff response (as is Dumbledore's stated age of 150, which she 
> offered in the same breath), and I don't think we should necessarily 
> interpret the statement as her being *exactly* seventy at a 
> particular date she was thinking of.  To me, it's a ballpark number 
> meaning she was 70 at some point in the series - and so was Tom 
> Riddle.
> 
> The possibility of a past McGonagall-Riddle SHIP is not a new 
> theory, and it's my favorite explanation for a number of apparent 
> oddities in McGonagall's portrayal, starting with her refusal to 
> celebrate Voldemort's downfall in the very first chapter of PS/SS 
> and including the odd fact that she began teaching at Hogwarts in 
> mid-term, in December of 1956, which definitely suggests that she 
> may have arrived at Hogwarts in need of protection.
> 
> Debbie


Debbie, I know that the Lexicon states that she began teaching in
December 1956, but do we have that in the books themselves? I thought
she told Umbridge in OoP that she had been teaching for thirty(?)
years, but I don't think that means thirty(?) years *exactly*, any
more than Snape's fourteen years means that he's been teaching
fourteen years to the day. I don't see any reason to think that either
of them began teaching at any time other than the normal beginning of
the term (September 1).

Also, is the interview in which she gives Dumbledore's and
McGonagall's ages the same one in which she says that Snape is 36 or
37 (meaning, I assume, 36 at the beginning of the term and 37 at the
end)? We've been taking his age as fact and using it to calculate the
ages of MWPP and Lily. If his age is more or less canonical, why
wouldn't McGonagall's and Dumbledore's be?

Carol, who apologizes for not having time to look all this up