Dumbledores lack of surprise + my point !

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 93983

-Inge wrote:
> Ah, so stupid of me ... I totally forgot to put my main point about 
> Dumbledore's lack of surprise (knowledge) in my previous post.
> To continue from where I left:
>> Dumbledore: "But she (Petunia) took you <snip> and in doing so, she
sealed the charm I placed upon you. Your mother's sacrifice made the
bond of blood the strongest shield I could give you."
> 
> Ok - so how DID Dumbledore know anything about Lily's sacrifice at 
> that time? Harry was a little more than a year old and the only 
> person to tell what had happened at his home that night. Not a
chance. Alas! Someone else must have been in the house to witness what 
> happened and told Dumbledore that Lily actually gave her life for 
> Harry. Who? 
> And so, Dumbledore must have lied to Minerva when he told her that
he didn't know how Harry had survived the attack.

Carol:
I'm not sure about this, but I think DD still doesn't know exactly how
Harry survived (it couldn't be the self-sacrifice alone or dozens of
other people could have been saved from AKs by similar sacrifices).
What he's referring to in the passage you quote is how Lily's
self-sacrifice enabled *him* to protect Harry at the Dursleys'. Note
his words: "Your mother's sacrifice made the bond of blood the
strongest shield *I* could give you." That shield also protected Harry
from Quirrell. But it *didn't* protect him from the AK in the first
place because it was placed on Harry *after* his mother's death.
Something other than DD's blood charm must have deflected the AK.

I've already argued that the AK was deflected by a charm that Lily
herself put on Harry, which DD doesn't yet know about but will somehow
discover in Book 7, when we're supposed to learn something very
important about Lily. If that's the case, DD wasn't lying to
McGonagall. He really didn't--and still doesn't--know exactly how
Harry survived.

As for someone else being in the house, I'm not sure. I still don't
understand how DD or anyone else deduced that LV wasn't dead if his
body was found (he says that he left it). Wouldn't whoever found it
have thought he was just dead, immortality spells or not? And if it
wasn't there, how did anyone know for certain that he was the
murderer? *We* know because of Harry's Dementor encounters and the
graveyard scene, and DD was anticipating an attack because of the
Prophecy and tried to prevent it with the Secret Keeper suggestion,
but how could he prove it was LV without a body (or, if there was a
body, how could he convince others that LV wasn't dead?)

But I'm getting off topic. I just wanted to state that it *is*
possible, even probable, given JKR's view of DD, that he isn't lying.
I think that he, like us, is putting together bits of information
together as he finds them, just as he's still deducing the properties
of the scar. And JKR, in her sneaky way, will keep the full knowledge
of what really happened from Dumbledore and from us until the end of
Book 7.

Carol